Homosexual Rights Go to School

Conservatives across America resist efforts in public schools to promote tolerance of the gay lifestyle.

A governor’s commission in Massachusetts is advancing a broad new program to encourage acceptance of homosexuality among public-school students in the state.

The National Education Association is training teachers how to offer “equal opportunities” to gay and lesbian students.

Lesbian couples are reading politically charged children’s books to San Francisco kindergartners during story time.

In fact, around the United States, homosexual activists—seasoned by their political successes over AIDS, abetted by the educational and social-work establishments, and strengthened by the support of the Clinton administration—are pushing harder than ever for schools to promote their sexual orientation as being on the same moral plane with heterosexuality.

Defining tolerance

Moral conservatives have been encouraged by the outcome of the highly publicized, dramatic battle in Queens, New York. Parents and a persistent local school board in the New York City borough earlier this year stymied a curriculum proposal to teach first-graders that homosexuality is normal and acceptable. Their protests also contributed to the ouster of New York City Schools Chancellor Joseph Fernandez, a supporter of homosexual activists who had tried to force the Queens board to adopt the Children of the Rainbow curriculum.

But as the Queens controversy unfolds, homosexuals elsewhere have been advancing their cause in other local and state jurisdictions. Wrapping themselves in popular ideas about mutual tolerance, homosexual activists are widening the sex-education door that schools originally opened largely because of the dangers of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS:

• In Massachusetts, Gov. William Weld’s advisory Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, in a report released in February, called for teachers to be trained in dealing with homosexual youths before teachers are certified or their schools accredited. The 27-member panel, many of whom are homosexual teachers and students, also recommended that high-school libraries stock books and films promoting acceptance of homosexuality.

“We want to normalize people’s perceptions of what it means to be gay, that it shouldn’t be seen as this frightening or odd thing,” said David LaFontaine, commission chairman. “We can’t underestimate some of the right-wing attitudes that have come to the surface in the last few months.”

While Weld has said he will leave it up to each school whether to adopt the recommendations, several schools already are considering doing so. And top state education officials have embraced the recommendations of the panel, which the governor convened after homosexual activists convinced him of the size of the problem of homosexual teen suicide.

• In San Francisco, a new curriculum adopted last summer requires formal lessons about same-sex families and homosexuality from seventh grade on and allows—but does not require—elementary-school teachers to talk about homosexuality.

If a classroom has students with homosexual parents, these issues are addressed as early as kindergarten. In December, for instance, according to the New York Times, a lesbian couple shared their experiences as a family with their daughter’s kindergarten classmates, even reading aloud Gloria Goes to Gay Pride.

“Here, in San Francisco, we need to address family units as they are,” says Beverly Bradley, supervisor of school health programs for the San Francisco Unified District. “ ‘Heather’ is in our classroom. We don’t need to have a book about her,” referring to Heather Has Two Mommies, one of the books recommended in New York City.

• In Fairfax County, Virginia, schools for three years have been teaching about homosexuality in ninth grade, though about 1.5 percent of students accept the option of excluding themselves from that part of the curriculum.

Instruction includes showing the 29-minute film What If I’m Gay? that suggests a high suicide risk among homosexual teens and how it is related to “physical and verbal abuse.” The film notes that homosexuality is common among animals, according to Jerald Newberry, coordinator of family-life education in the Fairfax schools.

Sexual orientation “is something that comes to us,” says Newberry. “Programs designed to change orientation never change orientation.”

Teaching about homosexuals

The American School Health Association found in a recent survey of its members that “homosexuality was the number one topic they weren’t equipped to discuss,” says Diane Allensworth, associate executive director for programs for the Kent, Ohio-based organization of health teachers, school nurses, and related professionals.

So now the group offers workshops that discuss “homosexuality and bisexuality and lifestyles,” she says, and has commissioned the group’s president to write a monograph on homosexuality and how to teach about it.

At the same time, the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has begun offering “Affording Equal Opportunity to Gay and Lesbian Students”—training with the goal of equipping members to teach similar sessions in their own states.

A slippery slope

“These advances certainly play a role in breaking down students’ ideas of what is normal and proper behavior,” says William Kilpatrick, a professor of education at Boston College and author of the recent book, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong: Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education. “It’s a very slippery slope.”

Parents’ victory over the Rainbow curriculum demonstrates that they can influence sex education in the public schools. Christians led by the Traditional Values Coalition of Anaheim, California, succeeded in striking from a proposed statewide health-education framework measures that “went way beyond fair discussion of homosexuality into promotion,” according to Lance Fortin, legislative director for the national organization.

The final framework for kindergartners through high-school seniors, adopted in December, now has only three references to homosexuality compared with sixteen in the proposed document, Fortin says. It eliminates the draft’s statement that “gay and lesbian youth often experience serious difficulty in coming to terms with their sexual identity.” It backs away from a proposed definition of “family” that included households headed by members of the same sex.

“Everything else being equal,” the final framework says, “children develop best when they live in a stable environment with their mother and father who provide consistent love, support and direction. However, children from nontraditional families can also develop successfully, given the variety of nontraditional families in contemporary society.”

The final guidelines eliminated the draft’s specific link between homosexual youth and suicide frequency, saying certain students may be at higher risk, including homosexuals and “perfectionists, loners, previous attempters, the severely depressed, [youth who have been] abused or molested.”

The framework, which is only advisory to local school districts, “really respects roles of parents in children’s lives and in no way says that parents aren’t the most important people to them,” says Nancy Sullivan, a consultant on curricula and textbook development for the California Department of Education. “It also really calls for schools to work with parents in the community in implementing and developing sex education.”

In Pennsylvania, Christian parents, working with Gov. Robert Casey, have succeeded in neutralizing some of the most troublesome principles that had been incorporated into a new health and sex education curriculum that is being developed by the state board of education. The original proposal had recommended that local school districts teach students how and when to use “appropriate community health resources”—interpretable, some Christians worried, as health clinics—and give them comprehensive instruction about families and culture.

A Battle For The High Ground

Homosexual activists have used several tactics to try to occupy the high ground in the battle over schools.

One is to try to tie acceptance of their sexual orientation to “multiculturalism”—the appreciation of diverse cultural and ethnic experiences.

“We’re looking at the whole realm of prejudice,” says James Price, president-elect of the National Health Educators’ Association. “Prejudice is prejudice, if it’s race, religion, or simple body size.”

To advance the acceptance of homosexuality, activists urge teaching about famous gays, such as poet Walt Whitman, in the same way that blacks have won mainstream instruction about heroes such as Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Rita Adessa, a lesbian activist in Philadelphia, says, “We want it to be inclusive, central to curricula, just like the history of Afro-Americans, of Jews, and of women in this country.”

Homosexual activists also frequently cite numbers to try to achieve mainstream respectability. For example, they often assert that homosexuals account for one-tenth of the American populace. But that number was long ago debunked.

In April, the national news media questioned the 10 percent figure after the Allan Gutmacher Institute, which is affiliated with Planned Parenthood, reported the results of a nationwide survey in which only 1.3 percent of men reported that they are homosexual.

Similarly, advocates frequently cite a 1989 federal Department of Health and Human Services analysis that says gays and lesbians account for up to 30 percent of teenage suicides—even though Louis Sullivan, who was department secretary under President Bush, eventually disowned that conclusion.

“The question is, how do you define kids’ sexual orientation?” says Lance Fortin, legislative advocate for Traditional Values Coalition. “Did the suicides say that in their [suicide] notes?”

Concern about disease

The argument over homosexuality and curricula actually began several years ago. But children are learning so much more about the practice now than before, and so much faster, because the incidence of teenage AIDS has prompted health educators to inform students about the disease, to warn them about high-risk behaviors, and to explain about the origins of the disease.

Some homosexuals are willing to admit that they are out to encourage homosexual behavior. At a hearing last year in Sacramento, California, over the new state health-education guidelines, a group of homosexuals showed up with T-shirts saying, “Promote Homosexuality,” and booed and hissed Christians in attendance.

But the most prominent item on the gay agenda is promoting “tolerance” and “understanding.” For instance, Jessica Byers, a lesbian 17-year-old member of the governor’s commission in Massachusetts, has crisscrossed the state promoting the panel’s recommendations and touting Project 10, which is a network of “support groups” for teen homosexuals.

“We’ll be attacked by a lot of people, but we can’t sacrifice what we want to do by making it something that everyone’s going to be happy with right away,” Byers says. “It takes a while for this stuff to sink in.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District started Project 10 to “keep gay and lesbian students in school” and “to develop awareness on the part of the school staff on gay and lesbian issues,” according to Project 10 founder Virginia Uribe. She says Project 10 has received more than 3,000 requests for school staff handbooks.

James Price, professor of health education at Toledo University and the president-elect of the health educators’ association, says, “There’s no evidence at all that exploring homosexuality [as a classroom topic] is even a remote possibility as the cause of someone becoming gay.”

But, Kilpatrick says, “There’s a difference between teaching tolerance of people and the dignity of other people, and asking kids to accept certain behavior. Schools shouldn’t be in the business of forcing children to accept lifestyles that the majority don’t respect.”

By Dale Buss.

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