Hate Laws Fuel Homosexual School Agenda -- 05/12/1999

Hate Laws Fuel Homosexual School Agenda

12 May, 1999

By Justin Torres
CNS Senior Staff Writer

(Editor's Note: This article is the third in a series of reports on hate crime and efforts underway to pass new hate crime laws and institute "tolerance" programs in schools around the nation. You can also read Part One and Part Two.)

(CNS) – As hate crime legislation winds its way through the Congress, conservative and family activists have begun to accuse those pushing the bills of having a non-traditional family, pro-homosexual agenda that they wish to ensconce in public schools–using public money to pay for the effort.

To date, the effort has yielded public school curricula and programs that teach grade school students about homosexuality and encourage high school students to lobby lawmakers on a variety of homosexual issues. The selectivity of the material also neglects thousands of years of religious conviction by every major denomination on Earth–and overlooks the statistics on hate crime, which account for a minute percentage of total crime in America–describing homosexuality as "normal."

Most, if not all of these efforts, are couched in terms of preventing hate and crime. But many critics say the argument is both flawed and politically manipulated. "All crime is hateful," said Michael Uhlmann, a constitutional attorney and professor of government at Claremont Graduate School in California, in an interview with CNS. "What drives this ideology is the opportunity for politicians to stand up and say, 'We did something after Littleton.'"

In fact, both the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1999, which expands federal hate crime legislation to include sexual orientation, and the Juvenile Crime Prevention Act of 1999 write huge blank checks to community organizations and school-based hate crime prevention, tolerance, and diversity programs.

Many of these types of programs are already in place in public schools across the nation, and they could become the model for programs nationwide if federal money is disbursed under the Hate Crime Prevention Act. Most also display strong pro-homosexuality bents, and despite their ostensible "non-partisan" position on political issues, have strong ties to the liberal activist wing of the homosexual movement.

The most prominent of these programs is in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which has more than 900,000 students in more than 750 schools and education centers spread across 700 square miles, making it the second largest school district in the America.

LAUSD's diversity program, "Educating for Diversity," is in place in all grades across the entire district, according to Dr. Stu Bernstein, director of intergroup relations for LAUSD, who said that anti-hate programs "are interwoven at all levels," of the school system.

The program takes its character from its mission statement, which reads in part, "We visualize a new era in which long-held discriminatory traditions and practices that hinder student academic and social success are rooted out, and parents, students, and educators, and the community work together to ensure educational equality and a secure future for all youth."

Subsequent school board resolutions have reaffirmed that this statement applies to discrimination "on the basis of race, language spoken, color, sex, religion, handicap, national origin, immigration status, age, sexual orientation, or political belief."

According to Bernstein, LAUSD "does a lot" with homosexual issues.

"Even from an early age, we stress that families come in different ways. Some families have a mom and dad, some have just a mom or dad, some have two moms or two dads," Bernstein told CNS. "We don't single it out and call it gay and lesbian at the early ages, but we do talk about [homosexual issues] in terms of hate and bias and name-calling."

At the upper elementary and secondary levels, said Bernstein, LAUSD's diversity programs "stress that people are diverse and have the right to their self-identification, and that we don't cast aspersions on that. This is very important at the middle school level, because that's where a lot of the gay biases get entrenched."

Other homosexual themes taken up at the secondary school level include a program on non-Jewish Holocaust victims, a focus on homosexual writers and political figures in language arts and history programs, and a hate crimes awareness program for use in 11th and 12th grade government programs.

LAUSD's gay and lesbian activities are coordinated by the district's Gay and Lesbian Education Commission (GLEC), headed by director Kathy Gill.

GLEC's activities include coordinating the district-wide "Gay and Lesbian Awareness Month," the district's Gay Prom, National Coming Out Day activities, the annual "Models of Pride" conference for homosexual youth held at Occidental College in LA, and "Lobby Day," where students are bussed to the state capital to speak to legislators about the need "to empower gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth . . . [and] educate the law makers about the issues affecting the lives of gay and lesbian students."

The GLEC web site also includes a list of terms, where it defines homosexuality as "normal." While precise data on homosexuality is difficult if not impossible to gather, it's generally estimated that as much as 10 percent of the U.S. population may be homosexual.

While Los Angeles' school programs on homosexuals and homosexual themes are the largest in the nation, it is not the only program in the nation with extensive homosexual content.

Some are more strictly "awareness" programs, such as New Jersey's "New Jersey PRIDE," which seek to make students "aware of gay and lesbians students in state schools," according to its acting director, Darlene Mincy. But some take a more explicit "advocacy" approach toward normalization of homosexuality in the minds of students.

Seattle, Washington, is the home of the federally-funded "Safe Schools Program," which recently completed a five-year analysis of hate crimes and incidents in Seattle schools called "They Don't Even Know Me: Understanding Anti-Gay Harassment and Violence in Schools."

According to its mission statement, the program seeks to make Seattle schools "safe places where every family can belong, where every educator can teach, and where every child can learn, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation."

The program documented 111 "anti-gay" incidents in Washington state schools, ranging from "one-time, climate-setting incidents" to rape of homosexual students, presumably by other homosexuals.

The program also developed a homosexual curriculum for use in all grades of Washington's public schools. Lesson plans include statements such as:

* A "Gay" man is someone who loves another man best of all. A "Lesbian" woman is someone who loves another woman best of all. . . . People are "Bisexual" if they sometimes fall in love with a man and sometimes with a man and sometimes with a woman. People who have always felt as if they were in the body of the wrong sex are called "Transsexual." Some transsexual kids grow up and get sex change operations and some don't.

* Families come in all different shapes and sizes, including, among many others, two mommy and two daddy families. . . . Some people are born into their family and some are adopted or fostered or just "loved into their family. . . . What makes then a family is that they love and take care of one another.

* Most Gay and Lesbian people do not molest children. That's a stereotype. And most do not "recruit" or "come on" to heterosexual people. That would be stupid; you'd be setting yourself up for rejection or worse if you flirted with someone who clearly wasn't interested.

* We don't know why some people are born gay or lesbian or bisexual and others are heterosexual. It may have something to do with your genes or your mom's hormones before you were born and it might be partly developed after birth. . . .

The Safe Schools Program also includes community outreach, such as "Safe Schools Vigils" like the one held May 11 in Kitsap County, Wash., which was billed as "a time to come together to honor the brave individuals who have shared their difficult and sometimes brutally painful experiences" with the program. The vigil included readings from hate incidents reported to the program.

Federal "hate prevention" programs, such as the "Healing the Hate" curriculum developed by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Education Development Center of Newton, Mass., and the "Preventing Hate Crime" manual published by the U.S. Department of Education also include extensive homosexual content.

Healing the Hate includes a testimonial from a student who went through the program. The student, identified as Erin, remarked, "The gay hate crimes bothered me the most. I used to want things like this to happen to gay people because I thought they were so dirty and stuff. But now I'm aware of the things that do happen, I feel bad - like it's all my fault for even thinking that."

Most advocates for these programs justify them in terms of creating "a safe school environment," pointing to studies that show high rates of suicide, school dropout, alcoholism and drug abuse, and low self-esteem among homosexual high school students.

Many also frequently claim a connection between "homophobia," and violence against homosexuals, sometimes creating new meanings for old terms.

While Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines homophobia as a "fear of homosexuality," the Los Angeles School District defines it as "intolerance of homosexuality, bisexuality, lesbian, and gay men."

Attempts to define religious disdain for homosexuality as "hate incidents" have prompted some critics to fear that the rush to offer legal protections for homosexuals will jeopardize the constitutional right to freely exercise religion by attempting to effectively criminalize certain opinions rooted in theology.

That concern is mirrored to a degree by the statement of a spokesperson for LAUSD, who told CNS, "hate incidents, if they aren't corralled and corrected, can become hate crimes."

NEXT: The connections between school "hate prevention" programs, government funding, and homosexual advocacy groups.

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