Issues@Hand

AFA initiatives, Christian activism, news briefs

November-December 2000 – Homosexual activists promised that their agenda isn’t about promoting a lifestyle, and it certainly isn’t about sex. In schools across the country, however, reality is beginning to make a mockery out of their rhetoric.

Since the early 1990s, activists have been arguing vehemently for access to public schools in order to make them a safer place for “gay” and lesbian students. Leading the charge is the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), the nation’s largest homosexual activist group that targets the public school system. Established as a national force in 1994, GLSEN now has over 85 chapters pushing the organization’s agenda in communities across the country.

GLSEN’s activities are predicated upon a simple claim: homosexual kids are not safe in public schools because of the ignorance, prejudice, and hatred of heterosexual classmates. The only answer, it says, is to teach everyone in the K-12 school system – administrators, teachers, and students – that homosexuality is normal, natural, and healthy. Those in public schools should be tolerant of the diversity among its members, activists insist.

From tolerance to sex?
Due in large part to GLSEN’s tireless efforts, many of the nation’s schoolchildren – as young as kindergarten age – are being taught to accept homosexuality as a wonderful variation within that lovely mosaic that is human sexuality. Many states have absorbed the organization’s message of “safety” as the justification for preaching tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality.

Homosexual teachers themselves are told that they must begin the process of teaching their students to accept “gay” and lesbian sexual orientation. For example, at GLSEN’s annual national conference in Chicago this October, teachers were taught how to deftly incorporate their own homosexuality into their daily class time with children.

Teachers in Massachusetts have already been doing just that. In Acushnet, lesbian middle school teacher Christine Hoyle was so proud of her efforts in instructing her students to accept homosexuality that she videotaped her classroom methods and showed them at a state conference at Tufts University, sponsored in part by GLSEN.

In Newton, parents complained when they discovered that first-grade teacher David Gaita had “come out” to his students and told them he was homosexual, and loved men “the way your mom and dad love each other.” School Superintendent Jeffrey Young, however, defended Gaita. “Had the teacher at that point said, ‘I’m married and have two kids,’ no one would have blinked an eye,” he said. “There should not be a double standard for heterosexual and homosexual teachers.”

While getting a mouthful of meal about tolerance, parents of public school children in Massachusetts were horrified to discover last Spring that the GLSEN conference at Tufts, which was also funded by the Massachusetts Department of Education, used state tax dollars to present explicit homosexual sex lessons to kids as young as 14.

GLSEN has always insisted that it merely wants “gay” teens to feel safe in schools, and that its agenda does not include talking about sex to impressionable youth. Yet organization representatives were unable to explain the graphic sex talk when tapes of the conference sessions became public. On the tapes, “gay” adult panelists could be heard discussing and even demonstrating hardcore homosexual sex practices to teens.

Sex at state expense
Due north of the Massachusetts state line, a group called Outright Vermont has also been allowed to push the homosexual agenda in schools in the Green Mountain State – also at taxpayer expense.

With a three-year grant worth $121,575 from the Vermont Department of Health, Outright targets middle and high school kids. Kathy Hoyt, Vermont Secretary of Administration, proudly asserted that Outright Vermont “developed a training program for public schools that was designed to support diversity and safe schools for Vermont’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth.”

As in Massachusetts, however, “safety” has begun to bleed into “sex.” That’s the serious charge leveled by Nancy Sheltra, a six-term state representative and founder of Vermont’s pro-family organization, Standing Together And Reclaiming the State (STARS). According to documents provided to AFA by STARS, Outright Vermont has gone lightyears beyond the simple purpose espoused by Hoyt.

For example, Outright used taxpayer money to provide “safer sex activities” and “parties” for teens. These events included, according to Outright’s own documents, “demonstrations, guided practice & skill evaluation” for the use of prophylactics, and the distribution of free condoms, lubricants for sexual intercourse between males, “dental dams” for oral sex between lesbians, and latex gloves for mutual masturbation.

The number of such items requested by Outright Vermont for distribution to teens was mind-boggling: 5,000 condoms, 750 dental dams, 750 latex gloves, and 2,000 packets of lubricant.

Outright also spent monies on youth retreats, including the “recruitment of youth participants,” which utilized mailing lists and youth-related meetings to stir interest in the gatherings. Kids who expressed an interest in attending were transported – again using state money – to the retreat site, where youth and adult staff again taught kids how to engage in homosexual sex practices. Outright’s own quarterly report said, “All retreat participants practiced and were evaluated on their (prophylactic) barrier use skills and were given a variety of barriers to take home. Participants joined in role plays.”

Other social events for lesbian, “gay,” and transgendered youth were paid for by Outright, and included dances, movie nights, bowling, picnics, etc. At one such event, the Emerald City Ball, Outright says it distributed prophylactics and lubricants to participants “at the door and in the bathroom.” The ball was attended by 60 teens and 80 adults.

Tarnishing the buckle of the Bible Belt
Fresh off its success in New England schools and elsewhere, GLSEN has decided that the nation’s Bible Belt is far too straight for its own good. The organization is preparing to send trained activists south of the Mason-Dixon line to repeat its achievements in Massachusetts and Vermont.

In a press statement released this summer, GLSEN said it had trained 15 “Southern activists” from its fifth annual Leadership Training Institute held in College Park, Maryland. The training of representatives from six Southern states – Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas – was aimed at “increasing the ability of chapter leaders to organize effectively in hometown schools and communities.”

Brenda Barron, who holds the title of Assistant Director for Southern Organizing, said it was necessary for GLSEN to “create strong chapters with a strategic and highly localized approach” in order to combat what she called “anti-gay bias” in Southern schools. GLSEN’s press release said schools throughout the South scored well below the “national failure rate” in “protecting and serving” homosexual, bisexual and transgendered students.

What protect and serve means to GLSEN, however, and what it means to parents, are evidently two
different things.