Issues@Hand
AFA initiatives, Christian activism, news briefs
March 2000 – This fall marked a change in the way already “gay”-friendly AT&T promotes the homosexual agenda. For the first time, the communications giant was directly targeting school children with the message that “gay is O.K.”
According to the company’s website, AT&T Broadband & Internet Services (BIS) partnered with the National Middle School Association (NMSA), the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education, and liberal groups like the Anti-Defamation League to distribute a diversity program to middle schools nationwide.
Entitled Opening the Door to Diversity: Voices from the Middle School, the combination video and discussion guide program was created by AT&T BIS, and is intended to instruct teachers how they can teach diversity in the classroom. AT&T’s website said every middle school in the U.S. received five free copies of the lesson plans.
In the wake of the murder of homosexual college student Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, AT&T decided that “it should respond to the bigotry that gave rise to Shepard’s death,” according to the company’s website.
While Opening the Door focuses on a number of different minority groups, it presents the politically correct view of homosexuality as well. For example, resources recommended to teachers include materials produced by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, which has worked tirelessly to pry open the doors of the nation’s public schools to homosexual activists. Not a single resource espousing a different view on the subject of homosexuality is included in the resource list.
Teachers are encouraged to post such slogans as “Celebrate Diversity,” “Diversity is our Strength,” and “It is not our Differences that Divide Us, It is our Inability to Recognize and Celebrate those Differences.”
Leo J. Hindery, Jr., President and CEO of AT&T BIS, said, “We have undertaken a number of initiatives in the last several years to foster diversity within our company. But addressing the issues internally, we believe, is not enough. We need to help our communities do likewise.”
AFA President Donald E. Wildmon said, “If AT&T wants to promote homosexuality within its company ranks, that’s one thing. But to insist that now schools and communities need to ‘do likewise’ is insulting. Mr. Hindery might just as well have said that America’s parents are doing a lousy job teaching their children good values, and so AT&T has to stoop down and help us all figure it out.”
Opening the Door claims to help students “sift fact from opinion,” and attempts to challenge what it calls “ignorance,” which, if left unchecked, “can grow into intolerance, harden into hatred, and explode into violence.”
What exactly, would such “violence” include? Listed as a keyword about which educators are to teach students, “violence” is defined as “actions that mentally or physically harm individuals or communities.” (Emphasis added.)
Wildmon said homosexual activists frequently accuse Christians of “mental” or even “spiritual” violence when they state that the Bible calls homosexuality a sin. “Will teachers be telling students that their parents, priests or pastors have committed an act of violence when they make such statements?” he asked. “What business does AT&T have jamming such a wedge between parents and children?”
In fact, AT&T and its cohorts in the Opening the Door project seem to unashamedly target children in school as a way to circumvent parents.
NMSA Executive Director Sue Swaim, for example, said middle school was the perfect time to reach children with the message of diversity. At that age, she said, teens are “sometimes questioning the behavior of adults…. We see young adolescence as the best time to reach this vulnerable, sensitive, questioning population with a positive learning experience.”
“What organizations like NMSA mean by a ‘positive learning experience’ is that kids are taught that homosexuality is normal and moral,” said Wildmon. “And they purposefully target kids this age because they are ‘vulnerable’ to a slick presentation that basically says your parents are bigots if they believe homosexuality is immoral or not normal.”
Hindery, however, said AT&T had “an ethical and moral obligation” to deal with such issues. He said AT&T hoped that by targeting middle school children now, those kids "will make a real, substantive change in American society" later on in life. 
