Posted on 11/21/2003 9:50:23 AM PST by scripter
Here's some information about the other APA - The American Psychological Association:
Former APA President Condemns APA for Barring Research
"The APA is too goddamn politically correct...and too goddamn obeisant to special interests!" said Robert Perloff, 1985 President of the American Psychological Association.
Dr. Perloff delivered those uncensored remarks during a rousing speech to psychologists at the 2001 APA Annual Convention.
In an expression of public anger and frustration, Dr. Perloff condemned the APA's one-sided political activism. Of reorientation therapy with homosexuals, he said: "It is considered unethical...That's all wrong. First, the data are not fully in yet. Second, if the client wants a change, listen to the client. Third, you're barring research." (1)
Dr. Perloff is a recipient of the American Psychological Foundation's Gold Medal Award for Lifetime Achievement in Psychology in the Public Interest. In bestowing the award, the Psychological Foundation recognized Perloff for his noted "love of social justice" and his career-long struggle to champion "the rights and dignity of women, minorities, and homosexuals."
But, Perloff asked, "How can you do research on change if therapists involved in this work are threatened with being branded as unethical?"
Contacted by NARTH, Dr. Perloff added the following comment in an interview:
"I believe that APA is flat out wrong, undemocratic, and shamefully unprofessional in denying NARTH the opportunity to express its views and programs in the APA Monitor and otherwise under APA's purview." (2)
"APA past presidents sounded off about what they think the field, and APA, ought to value in psychology's second century at APA's 2001 Annual Convention.
They advocated wildly divergent--sometimes controversial--goals for psychology, from dismantling organized religion to lifting the stricture on conversion therapy...
Robert Perloff, PhD (APA's 1985 president), of the University of Pittsburgh, unabashedly charged that APA is "too politically correct, too bureaucratic, too obeisant to special interests." He called on APA to ease strictures against:
Conversion therapy. "It is considered unethical....That's all wrong. First, the data are not fully in yet. Second, if the client wants a change, listen to the client. Third, you're barring research."
APA Monitor Online - Letters, VOLUME 30 , NUMBER 8 September 1999:
"IN HIS JUNE 9 LETTER TO REP. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) discussing an article by Rind, Tromovitch and Bauserman (1998), Dr. Raymond Fowler, speaking for APA, asserts:
"We acknowledge our social responsibility...to take into account not only the scientific merit of articles but also their implication for public policy....Clearly the article included opinions of the authors that are inconsistent with APA's stated and deeply held position on child welfare...issues....Three inconsistencies between the conclusions the authors suggest and positions of the association should have caused us to evaluate the article based on its potential for misinforming the public policy process. This is something we failed to do, but will do in the future....We are strengthening procedures within the association to assure that journal editors will fully consider the social policy implications of articles on controversial topics."
This new editorial policy effectively transforms APA's "stated and deeply held positions" into religious dogma, immune from empirical or logical refutation. Any scientifically sound paper presenting empirical data or reasoned argument contrary to APA public policy positions will be rejected by the 37 journals published by APA on the grounds of its "potential for misinforming the public policy process." APA's public policies will reign unchallenged.
Fowler has it backwards. Scientific findings should help determine public policies, not the reverse. The flap over this article demonstrates yet again that the social policy stands of APA are dictated more by the ideology of its leadership than by science.
Gerald E. Zuriff, Ph.D
Cambridge, Mass.
And here's an excerpt from the letter that follows Dr. Zuriff's:
"... Such statements point to a political agenda that we are seeing all too frequently in APA journals..."
A. Dean Byrd, PhD
American Fork, UtahS. Brent Scharman, PhD
Salt Lake City, UtahEd D. Lauritsen, PhD
Phoenix, Ariz.
Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2001;58:85-91
Background It has been suggested that homosexuality is associated with psychiatric morbidity...
Results Psychiatric disorders were more prevalent among homosexually active people compared with heterosexually active people.
Conclusion The findings support the assumption that people with same-sex sexual behavior are at greater risk for psychiatric disorders.
The reality is that man and woman are made for each other - physically, emotionally, mentally, spirityally. This is obvious, and is seen by most people. Same-sex attraction, therefore, is a contradiction of the natural order; and because marital love of a man and a woman is such a good thing, it follows that the contradiction of it in homosexual relationships is correspondingly bad. Evil is privation of good, so the greater the good, the worse the evil.
Homosexual relations are a parody of marriage with profound effects on those engaging in them. Just as the personal growth of a married couple is fostered by a good marriage, a warping of the personality results from homosexual relations.
Those involved in such relationships will find it hard to acknowledge the objective depravity of what they are doing. They find pleasure in their lifestyle, which easily prompts the delusion that it must be all right. And as time passes, they become more accustomed to that way of living, and more readily deceive themselves with the contention that it is normal.
However, the natural moral law can never be extinguished in a person; it is written in our hearts, as St. Paul points ou (Romans 2:15). It may become obscured; it may be denied; but it is never killed. So, a struggle goes on within the person who lives in a radically unnatural way, a struggle to repress the truth.
It becomes imperative, in the thinking of practicing homosexuals, to convince others that this lifestyle is normal and crush any opposition. But this can’t be done by rational argument, for it is an irrational position. It remains then, to avoid the real issues and appeal to emotion. Monica Hingston does it by talking about sensitivity and beauty and warmth. It can also be done by depicting the homosexual as unfairly discriminated against - as a member of a persecuted minority.
The urge to justify the unjustifiable is a major driving force in the promotion of homosexuality. It is an urge caused by the deep depravity of homosexual activity, a depravity that must be denied if the person is to retain some kind of fragile peace with himself or herself. The state of mind is manifested by irrationality and intolerance of opposition. It can’t stand people like Cardinal Pell who tell the truth.
"The homosexual cause has moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest. As Robert Reilly notes a society can withstand any number of person who try to advance their own moral disorders as public policy. But it cannot survive once it adopts the justifications for whose moral disorders as its own. This is what is at stake in the culture war...
For any individual, moral failure is hard to live with because of the rebuke of conscience. Habitual moral failure, what used to be called vice, can be lived with only by obliterating conscience through rationalization. When we rationalize, we convince ourselves that heretofore forbidden desires are permissible. We advance the reality of the desires over the reality of the moral order to which the desires should be subordinated. In our minds we replace the reality of moral order with something more congenial to the activity we are excusing. In short, we assert that bad is good...
It is often difficult to detect rationalizations when one is living directly under their influence, and so historical examples are useful. One of the clearest was offered at the Nuremberg trials by Dr. Karl Brandt, who had been in charge of the Nazi regime's Aktion T-4 euthanasia program. He said in his defense: “...when I said `yes' to euthanasia I did so with the deepest conviction, just as it is my conviction today, that it was right. Death can mean deliverance. Death is life.”
Unlike Dr. Brandt, most people recover from their rationalizations when remorse and reality set back in. But when morally disordered acts become the defining centerpiece of one's life, vice can permanently pervert reason. Entrenched moral aberrations then impel people to rationalize vice not only to themselves but to others as well. Thus rationalizations become an engine for revolutionary change that will affect society as a whole.
The power of rationalization drives the culture war, gives it its particular revolutionary character, and makes its advocates indefatigable. It may draw its energy from desperation, but it is all the more powerful for that. Since failed rationalization means self-recrimination, it must be avoided at all cost. For this reason, the differences over which the culture war is being fought are not subject to reasoned discourse. Persons protecting themselves by rationalizing are interested not in finding the truth, but in maintaining the illusion that allows them to continue their behavior. For them to succeed in this, everyone must accede to their rationalization. This is why revolutionary change is required. The necessity for self-justification requires the complicity of the whole culture. Holdouts cannot be tolerated because they are potential rebukes. The self-hatred, anger, and guilt that a person possessed of a functioning conscience would normally feel from doing wrong are redirected by the rationalization and projected upon society as a whole (if the society is healthy), or upon those in society who do not accept the rationalization.
The homosexual movement's rationalization is far more widely advanced in its claims. According to Jeffrey Levi, former executive director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, “We (homosexuals)_ are no longer seeking just a right to privacy and a right to protection from wrong. We have a right - as heterosexuals have already - to see government and society affirm our lives.” Since only the act of sodomy differentiates an active homosexual from a heterosexual, homosexuals want “government and society” to affirm that sodomy is morally equivalent to the marital act. “Coming out of the closet” can only mean an assent on the level of moral principle to what would otherwise be considered morally disordered.
And so it must be. If you are going to center your public life on the private act of sodomy, you had better transform sodomy into a highly moral act. If sodomy is a moral disorder, it cannot be legitimately advanced on the legal or civil level. On the other hand, if it is a highly moral act, it should serve as the basis for marriage, family (adoption), and community. As a moral act, sodomy should be normative. If it is normative, it should be taught in our schools as a standard. In fact, homosexuality should be hieratic: active homosexuals should be ordained as priests. All of this is happening. It was predictable. The homosexual cause moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest. How successful that conquest has been can be seen in the poverty of the rhetoric of its opponents. In supporting the Defense of Marriage Act, the best one congressman could do was to say, “America is not yet ready for homosexual marriage,” as if we simply need a decent interval to adjust ourselves to its inevitable arrival.
The homosexual rationalization is so successful that even the campaign against AIDS is part of it, with its message that “everyone is at risk.” If everyone is at risk, the disease cannot be related to specific behavior. Yet homosexual acts are the single greatest risk factor in catching AIDS. This unpleasant fact invites unwelcome attention to the nature of homosexual acts, so it must be ignored."
Black caucus resists comparison of gay 'marriage' to civil rights
This movement to “queer” the public schools, as activists put it, originated with a shift in the elite understanding of homosexuality. During the eighties, when gay activism first became a major cultural force, homosexual leaders launched a campaign that mirrored the civil rights movement. To claim their rights, homosexuals argued (without scientific evidence) that their orientation was a genetic inheritance, like race, and thus deserved the same kind of civil protections the nation had guaranteed to blacks. An inborn, unchangeable fact, after all, could not be subject to moral disapproval. There ensued a successful effort to normalize homosexuality throughout the culture, including a strong push for homosexual marriage, gays in the military, and other signs of civic equality...
Underlying this militant stance was a radical new academic ideology called “queer theory.” A mixture of the neo-Freudianism of counterculture gurus Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse and French deconstruction, queer theory takes to its extreme limit the idea that all sexual difference and behavior is a product of social conditioning, not nature. It is, in their jargon, “socially constructed.” For the queer theorist, all unambiguous and permanent notions of a natural sexual or gender identity are coercive impositions on our individual autonomy—our freedom to reinvent our sexual selves whenever we like. Sexuality is androgynous, fluid, polymorphous—and therefore a laudably subversive and even revolutionary force...
It would be tempting to dismiss queer theory as just another intellectual fad, with little influence beyond the campus, if not for gay activists’ aggressive effort to introduce the theory’s radical view of sexuality into the public schools. Leading the effort is the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educational Network (GLSEN, pronounced “glisten”), an advocacy group founded a decade ago to promote homosexual issues in the public schools. It now boasts 85 chapters, four regional offices, and some 1,700 student clubs, called “gay/straight alliances,” that it has helped form in schools across the country.
GLSEN often presents itself as a civil rights organization, saying that it is only after “tolerance” and “understanding” for a victim group. Sometimes, therefore, it still speaks the old gay-rights language of unchangeable homosexual “identity” and “orientation.” But it is, in fact, a radical organization that has clearly embraced the queer-theory worldview. It seeks to transform the culture and instruction of every public school, so that children will learn to equate “heterosexism”—the favoring of heterosexuality as normal—with other evils like racism and sexism and will grow up pondering their sexual orientation and the fluidity of their sexual identity.
That GLSEN embraces queer theory is clear from the addition of transgendered students to the gays and lesbians the group claims to represent. By definition, the transgendered are those who choose to change their gender identity by demeanor, dress, hormones, or surgery. Nothing could be more profoundly opposed to the notion of a natural sexual identity. Consider as evidence of queer theory’s influence, too, the GLSEN teachers’ manual that says that middle-schoolers “should have the freedom to explore [their] sexual orientation and find [their] own unique expression of lesbian, bisexual, gay, straight, or any combination of these.” What is this but Michael Warner’s appeal to pansexual experimentation?
One of the major goals of GLSEN and similar groups is to reform public school curricula and teaching so that Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender—or LGBT—themes are always central and always presented in the approved light. GLSEN holds regular conferences for educators and activists with workshops bearing titles such as “Girls Will Be Boys and Boys Will Be Girls: Creating a Safe, Supportive School Environment for Trans, Intersex, Gender Variant and Gender Questioning Youth” and “Developing and Implementing a Transgender Inclusive Curriculum.” Every course in every public school should focus on LGBT issues, GLSEN believes. A workshop at GLSEN’s annual conference in Chicago in 2000 complained that “most LGBT curricula are in English, history and health” and sought ways of introducing its agenda into math and science classes, as well. (As an example of how to queer geometry, GLSEN recommends using gay symbols such as the pink triangle to study shapes.)
Nor is it ever too early to begin stamping out heterosexism. A 2002 GLSEN conference in Boston held a seminar on “Gender in the Early Childhood Classroom” that examined ways of setting “the tone for nontraditional gender role play” for preschoolers. To help get the LGBT message across to younger children, teachers can turn to an array of educational products, many of them available from GLSEN. Early readers include One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads; King and King; and Asha’s Mums.
As for teaching aids, a 1999 book, Queering Elementary Education, with a foreword by GLSEN executive director Kevin Jennings, offers essays on “Locating a Place for Gay and Lesbian Themes in Elementary Reading, Writing and Talking” and “How to Make ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ in the Classroom”—the scare quotes showing the queer theorist’s ever present belief that categorizing gender is a political act.
For comprehensiveness, nothing beats a GLSEN-recommended resource manual distributed to all K–12 public schools in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The manual presents an educational universe that filters everything through an LGBT lens. Lesson ideas include “role playing” exercises to “counter harassment,” where students pretend, say, to be bisexual and hear hurtful words cast at them; testing students to see where their attitudes lie toward sexual “difference” (mere tolerance is unacceptable; much better is “admiration” and, best of all, “nurturance”); getting students to take a “Sexual Orientation Quiz”; and having heterosexual students learn 37 ways that heterosexuals are privileged in society. In turn, principals should make an “ongoing PA announcement”—once a week, the manual says—telling students about confidential support programs for LGBT students.
Teachers, the manual suggests, should demand that public school students memorize the approved meanings of important LGBT words and terms, from “bigenderist” to “exotophobia.” Sometimes, these approved meanings require Orwellian redefinitions: “Family: Two or more persons who share resources, share responsibility for decisions, share values and goals, and have commitments to one another over a period of time . . . regardless of blood, or adoption, or marriage.”
Two videos come particularly highly rated by gay activists and educators as tools for making primary school queer-friendly. Both films strive to present homosexuality in a favorable light, without saying what it actually is. It’s Elementary, intended for parents, educators, and policymakers, shows how classroom teachers can lead kindergartners through carefully circumscribed discussions of the evils of prejudice, portrayed as visited to an unusual degree on gays and lesbians. In That’s a Family, designed for classroom use, children speak directly into the camera, explaining to other kids how having gay and lesbian parents is no different from, for example, having parents of different national backgrounds.
GLSEN even provides lesson plans for the promotion of cross-dressing in elementary school classes. A school resource book containing such lesson plans, Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry for Kids, Parents, and Teachers, has already been used in second-grade classrooms in California. A children’s play in the book features a little boy singing of the exhilaration of striding about “In Mommy’s High Heels,” in angry defiance of the criticism of his intolerant peers:
They are the swine, I am the pearl. . . .
They’ll be beheaded when I’m queen!
When I rule the world! When I rule the world!
When I rule the world in my mommy’s high heels!Some of the LGBT-friendly curricular material aimed at older children is quite sexually explicit. The GLSEN-recommended reading list for grades 7–12 is dominated by such material, depicting the queer sexuality spectrum. In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth features a 17-year-old who writes, “I identify as bisexual and have since I was about six or seven. . . . I sort of experimented when I was young.” Another GLSEN recommendation, Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, has a 16-year-old contributor who explains, “My sexuality is as fluid, indefinable and ever-changing as the north flowing river.”
Some of the most explicit homosexual material has shown up in classrooms. An Ohio teacher encouraged her freshman students to read Entries From a Hot Pink Notebook, a teen coming-out story that includes a graphic depiction of sex between two 14-year-old boys. In Newton, Massachusetts, a public school teacher assigned his 15-year-old students The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a farrago of sexual confusion, featuring an episode of bestiality as one of its highlights. Such books represent a growth industry for publishers, including mainstream firms.
As part of its effort to make the public schools into an arena of homosexual and transgender advocacy, GLSEN works assiduously to build a wide network of student organizers. It looks for recruits as young as 14, who in turn are to bring on board other students to form gay/straight alliances or other homosexual-themed student clubs at their schools. Glancing over the biographies of 2002’s student organizers reveals a uniform faith among them that experimenting with a range of homosexual behaviors serves the cause of civil rights.
The behavior in question involves some practices that the Marquis de Sade would welcome. A GLSEN-sponsored, taxpayer-funded “teach out” for activists, educators, and students to brainstorm ways of creating schools and communities that “are truly inclusive and safe,” held at Tufts University a while back, is a case in point. The daylong conference, with Massachusetts Department of Education and other state employees as workshop leaders and drawing many high school students and teachers (who received professional development credits for attending), featured a “youth only, ages 14–21” session that offered a lesson in “fisting”—the potentially dangerous act, called by some the first new sexual invention in 1,000 years, of inserting one’s fist into a partner’s anus or vagina.
Thanks to two members of the local Parents’ Rights Coalition, who secretly taped the session, we know that the fisting lesson did not arouse universal enthusiasm among the teens present. A boy asks why anyone would want to do such a thing. Other teens reportedly winced. But the self-identified gay and lesbian state employees turned aside doubts. One—a woman—explained that, though fisting “often gets a really bad rap,” it usually isn’t about the pain—“not that we’re putting that down.” Rather, she assured, it is “an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be close and intimate with.”
And so the workshop proceeded, marketing the polymorphously perverse to the sexually naive and emotionally immature. The etiquette of swallowing versus spitting after oral sex came up, as did the question of whether a tongue ring makes oral sex more pleasurable. Other topics included: how to use dildos, the mechanics of lesbian sexual gratification, and whether celery makes semen taste sweeter. The workshop leaders were sophisticated, yet breezy and colloquial, using street language and referring quite openly to their own sexual experiences—a Department of Public Health worker making his homosexual promiscuity obvious. The workshop initiated adolescents into a forbidden world that their parents likely knew nothing about.
In the winter of 2001, Tufts hosted another GLSEN-sponsored conference, entitled “Creating Safety—Teaching Respect.” This time, most of the 650 people present were teenagers, rounded up by gay activists or coming on their own to receive instruction in queer sexuality. Planned Parenthood representatives handed out special kits, containing latex gloves and lubricants, for “safe” fisting.
GLSEN and other activist homosexual groups have effectively used “safe school” campaigns to further their agenda. The federal Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program—Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—provides millions of dollars to state education departments to combat drugs and violence in the public schools. Using some of these funds, gay activists have helped design and promote public school “tolerance” programs. One of the mildest of such programs, “Healing the Hate,” released in 1997 under Department of Justice sposorship, implicitly likens disapproval of homosexual behavior with the prejudices that in the past have led to lynchings, church burnings, and the Holocaust. Gay groups contend—dubiously—that such programs are necessary because homosexual students must endure bullying and hatred every day in schools across the country.
GLSEN is quite explicit about using the safety issue to silence opponents. As GLSEN chief Kevin Jennings puts it, “We knew that, confronted with the real-life stories of youth who had suffered from homophobia, our opponents would automatically be on the defensive. . . . This allowed us to set the terms of the debate.”
At the urging of gay/straight alliances, schools across the U.S. have also created “safe” rooms for homosexual or sexually confused students, as if they might not be safe from “hate” and “intolerance” elsewhere in the school. In these rooms, identified by inverted pink triangles, students can discuss same-sex attraction or anxiety about sexual orientation with teachers or counselors, who promise a nonjudgmental and sympathetic hearing. Students who drop by for private discussion about their sexual confusion will often be referred—without parental knowledge—to local chapters of gay and lesbian organizations. If queer theorists are correct that homosexuality is a free choice, then parents might be forgiven for thinking such advocacy a kind of recruitment.
Without doubt, most parents would look at the subversive agenda on offer at GLSEN conferences and in LGBT-friendly curricula and find it bizarre and offensive. What sense, they might ask, does it make to “queer” math or science or other classes—whatever that might mean—when so many public schools fail even to produce minimally literate and numerate graduates?
Especially when all the evidence suggests that the incidence of self-labeled homosexuality and bisexuality in the population is in fact minuscule—just 1.4 percent of female subjects and 2.8 percent of male subjects, according to one of the largest and most scientific surveys by the National Opinion Research Center. Even Kinsey, with a very distorted sample population of volunteers, prison inmates (including sex offenders), and deliberately solicited homosexual respondents, only came up with a 4 percent figure for exclusive homosexual behavior, still far below the 10 percent frequently cited by homosexual activists. Should we revolutionize the schools for such a tiny minority?
Even more to the point, how many parents, even those not just tolerant of homosexuality but actively sympathetic toward homosexual rights, would really want their teenage children to be seeking out a “unique expression” of sexuality (let alone with their school’s help) or learning how to “fist”? How many would want their kindergartners—just figuring out their identities and desperately needing clear-cut categories like “boy” and “girl” to make sense of them—to engage in “non-traditional role play,” so that they grow up with warm feelings about transgendered people? Or their elementary school boys and girls exposed to sexual themes that they aren’t old enough to understand and that are likely to fill them with anxiety? Parents might well brush off an old-fashioned word and describe it all as, well . . . perverse.
As for bullying, the real problem is not anti-gay prejudice but the overall breakdown of school discipline. No child should have to put up with verbal or physical intimidation at school. Making schools safer, however, does not require importing a broader LGBT agenda that offends the values of many students and parents.
Nevertheless, though many parents aren’t aware of it yet, the agenda has moved far beyond the wishful thinking of activists. The keynote speaker at GLSEN’s 2000 conference was Robert Chase, president of the 2.7 million-member National Education Association, the nation’s biggest, most powerful teachers’ union. The program booklet for the event featured greetings not only from Chase but from then-president Clinton, Chicago mayor Richard Daley, and the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-biggest U.S. teachers’ union. The celebratory notes expressed the kind of praise once reserved for groups like the Boy Scouts. A long list of well-known organizations has backed LGBT programs in the classroom, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Library Association, and the National Association of Social Workers.
No organization has been more steadfast in its support of GLSEN than the NEA. During the NEA’s annual convention in July 2001, many observers expected the teachers’ union to pass an official resolution incorporating GLSEN’s sweeping educational goals into K–12 curricula nationwide. As it turns out, the NEA, clearly trying to minimize public awareness of an unprecedented infringement on parental prerogatives, tabled the resolution and announced a task force to study how best to approach LGBT issues in the schools. But in February 2002, the NEA board of directors approved the task force’s report—a pure emanation of the GLSEN worldview, as is clear both from its numerous citations of GLSEN documents in the footnotes and from its recommendations.
Following the task force’s lead, the NEA will now struggle to expunge “heterosexism” from the consciousness of children in the classroom. The union has encouraged schools to integrate LGBT themes into curricula, instructional material, and programs; to emphasize the legitimacy of different “family structures,” including domestic partner arrangements; and to offer counseling services for students struggling with their “sexual/gender orientation.” Small wonder that GLSEN greeted the NEA task force’s report, and its endorsement by the union, with hosannas. “These powerful new recommendations signal that help is on the way for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students and staff who experience day-to-day abuse in America’s schools,” enthused GLSEN head Jennings.
The queering of the public schools has perhaps advanced furthest in California, where a new state law requires public schools to teach all K–12 students (and K means five-year-olds) “to appreciate various sexual orientations.” What the new law might mean in practice, warned a state assemblyman, was on display at Santa Rosa High School, where invited homosexual activists “talked about using cellophane during group sex and said that ‘clear is best because you can see what you want to lick,’ ” or at Hale Middle School in Los Angeles, where during an AIDS education course, “12-year-olds were subjected to graphic descriptions of anal sex and tips on how to dispose of used condoms so parents don’t find out.” As the assemblyman noted, sex ed courses throughout California public schools, influenced heavily by national sex education advocates SEICUS and Planned Parenthood, have already enthusiastically endorsed the GLSEN worldview.
But California is only the cutting edge: efforts to queer the schools are under way in many other locales, from Massachusetts to Oregon. The co-chair of the Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, for example, informs the Boston Globe that teachers across that state are increasingly integrating LGBT themes into lessons—discussing the sexual orientation of authors as an interpretive tool in literature classes, she says, or comparing gay and bisexual with straight student mental health data in order to study percentages. After a ferocious battle, the Broward School Board in Florida recently voted to rely on GLSEN to train teachers in LGBT “sensitivity.” In Gresham, Oregon, in early 2002, school officials at Centennial High School brought in gay and lesbian speakers in English, drama, and health classes during the school’s annual “diversity” week, neither telling students about it beforehand nor letting them opt out of the classes if they wanted. Parental anger forced school officials to issue a public apology.
GLSEN constantly emphasizes the need for tolerance for homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism, but if someone bucks the LGBT party line in a school that follows it, watch out. Consider the experience of Elliott Chambers, formerly a student at Woodbury High School in a suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Woodbury High had posted pink triangles on 48 of its 60-odd classrooms and offices (what made the other rooms “unsafe” isn’t clear). Belonging to a conservative family, Chambers decided one day to express his values and wore to school a sweatshirt with the words STRAIGHT PRIDE emblazoned across the front and an image of a man and woman holding hands on the back.
Parents or other concerned citizens who complain about any aspect of the queering of public education can face withering attacks, not just from gay activists but from cultural elites in general. When the two members of the Parents’ Rights Coalition released their tape of the GLSEN-sponsored fisting workshop to the public, to take one typical example, the Boston Globe didn’t condemn the use of public funds and state employees to instruct schoolchildren in an arcane and dangerous “sexual” practice; instead, it denounced the whistleblowers as fomenters of “intolerance.”
School districts that refuse to go along with the homosexual agenda now must contend with the American Civil Liberties Union, too. The ACLU’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project has launched a national effort, called “Every Student, Every School,” that plans to sue on First Amendment grounds any school that refuses gay/straight student clubs on its premises. Already, schools in Kentucky and Texas face legal action.
No compulsory public school system can be justified unless what it teaches is a worldview that the taxpayers who fund it can support. The “common schools” came into existence, after all, to acculturate immigrants to American values. For schools to try to indoctrinate children in a radical, minority worldview like that promoted by GLSEN and its allies—a vision that will form those children’s values and shape their sense of selfhood—is a kind of tyranny, one that, in addition, intentionally drives a wedge between parents and children and, as queer theorist Michael Warner boasts, “opposes society itself.” We must not let an appeal to our belief in tolerance and decency blind us to indecency—and to the individual and social damage that will result from it.
To the editor:
Marjorie King’s “Queering the Schools” [Spring 2003] does not fairly or factually represent the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network [GLSEN]. King’s article poses as a well-researched critique, but she interviewed no one at GLSEN before writing this grossly inaccurate, misleading piece. And her irresponsible, salacious claims are given credibility by appearing in City Journal—not usually an outlet for half-baked journalism.Among King’s egregious misrepresentations is her description of a workshop conducted by a Massachusetts Department of Education employee at a GLSEN conference in 2000, which she calls “typical” of the “GLSEN agenda.” In fact, upon learning of the workshop’s content, GLSEN issued a statement that the workshop leader had been inappropriate, and took steps to ensure that such incidents wouldn’t be repeated. This incident was isolated, not part of a pattern, and no similar incident has occurred since.
King cites as examples of GLSEN’s “recommended curriculum” a series of books that are not recommended in our BookLink catalog.
She attacks students working to end school violence, saying they bear “a uniform faith . . . that experimenting with a range of homosexual behaviors serves the cause of civil rights.” These students include a Special Olympics board member, an anti-smoking advocate, and an aspiring special-ed teacher; they exhibit a civic engagement that should be applauded, not denigrated with glib and inaccurate characterizations.
King dismisses the need for anti-bullying and anti-violence programs for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender [LGBT] students: “gay groups contend—dubiously—that such programs are necessary because homosexual students must endure bullying and hatred every day in schools across the country.” King should ask the families of Matthew Shepard, Gwen Araujo, or Sakia Gunn—students murdered partly because of their sexual orientation—how dubious this contention is.
The facts are clear: harassment is the rule, not the exception, for LGBT students. The Centers for Disease Control have found that LGBT students are more than twice as likely to be threatened or injured with a weapon as non-LGBT students (18.6 percent vs. 7.6 percent, respectively) and to miss school out of fear for their safety (16.4 percent vs. 7.6 percent). If you’re too afraid to go to school, you’re not going to get an education.
GLSEN’s mission is to ensure that schools are safe, effective environments for all students to learn, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. All claims to the contrary are mere distractions that force our organization to turn our attention to debating distorted half-truths. To mischaracterize and attack an organization whose sole mission is to end harassment is contemptible.
Kevin Jennings
Executive Director, GLSENThe editors respond:
GLSEN’s Kevin Jennings hurls many insults at “Queering the Schools”: “misleading,” “distorted,” “salacious,” and “contemptible,” among them. But Mr. Jennings never substantiates his baseless charges—and he makes some highly misleading comments in the course of his name-calling.The first concerns a workshop for “youth only—ages 14-21” held in 2000 at Tufts University, which (among other things) instructed teens in the dangerous practice of “fisting”: inserting a fist into a sexual partner’s anus or vagina. Mr. Jennings admits the event was “inappropriate” and claims that GLSEN has taken steps to ensure it won’t happen again. We’re glad GLSEN agrees that the workshop was wrong—though “inappropriate” is a tame word to describe teaching such practices to kids not old enough to drink legally. But Mr. Jennings seems to forget that parents’ groups criticized GLSEN for its 2001 Tufts conference, as well—where, for instance, Planned Parenthood reportedly handed out kits to teenagers for “safe” fisting.
Moreover, Mr. Jennings says nothing about workshops for teachers, featured at these and other GLSEN conferences, exploring themes like “Addressing GLBT Issues in Preschools, Daycare and Kindergartens” and “Gender in the Early Child Classroom.” He remains silent because GLSEN does think it appropriate to have schools plan activities in which second-grade boys dress up in high heels—as one GLSEN-recommended teachers’ resource book suggests—to fight bigotry against transsexuals. We don’t agree, and it’s a safe bet that most other parents don’t, either.
Next, Mr. Jennings protests that GLSEN doesn’t endorse the books cited in “Queering the Schools,” like Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which features homosexual teen sex and bestiality. Apparently, he hasn’t seen the “Selected Bibliography of Books for Children and Young Adults” on his own website, which describes that book as “incredibly compelling.”
Third, Mr. Jennings complains that, in describing GLSEN student activists as loyal to GLSEN’s belief that experimentation with homosexual behavior serves the cause of civil rights, we don’t also mention their other activities: stamping out smoking, volunteering for the Special Olympics, etc. It’s great that these kids have interests other than GLSEN. Yet Mr. Jennings doesn’t reject our characterization of GLSEN’s worldview or their student activists’ commitment to it.
Finally, Mr. Jennings argues that “Queering the Schools” ignores the harassment that LGBT students face daily in schools, which in turn necessitates GLSEN’s radical remaking of school (even pre-school) curricula to emphasize LGBT themes and endorse LGBT behaviors. This agenda runs counter to the most deeply held values of many parents.
No one wants to see any child bullied or harmed, for any reason—as our article says. But unsafe schools result from a breakdown of school discipline generally, as Mr. Jennings’s own numbers underscore. If 18.6 percent of LGBT students have been threatened or injured with a weapon, so have 7.6 percent of all students. Since LGBT students are a tiny fraction of all students, that 7.6 percent represents a much bigger problem. Make schools safe for everybody; forbid all examples of intimidation and abuse—that’s our commonsensical view. There’s no need to revolutionize school curricula in ways that seek to transform tolerance for homosexuals and the transgendered into full-fledged approval.
GLSEN’s project is so radical that it risks undermining public toleration of homosexuality. A recent Gallup poll shows that 46 percent of Americans think homosexual relations should be illegal, while 49 percent say homosexuality “should not be an acceptable alternative lifestyle”—a much more anti-homosexual result than previous polls. These stark numbers mark a powerful public backlash against homosexuality in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision invalidating anti-sodomy laws. Elites using public schools to indoctrinate children—even very young children—into a minority worldview at odds with their parents’ values is a kind of tyranny that will also call forth an inevitable backlash.
Remember GLSEN Encourages Teens In Anal SEX "Don't give up."?
About the time Hurricane Isabel reached landfall on Thursday, September 18, 2003, a group of activists, educators, and junior high and senior high school students gathered in Washington, D.C. for the annual GLSEN (Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network) National Conference. Like the havoc that Isabel wrought on communities in North Carolina, GLSEN threatens to produce far greater
What I witnessed during these brief 72 hours left me with the conviction that GLSEN is a cultural hurricane that’s hitting our schools with the kind of force and devastation that may take years to fully assess. Let me try to paint the picture.
GLSEN is a self-styled pro-gay education network targeting our kids in public schools.
The danger is in how they seek to accomplish this mission. In effect, GLSEN’s objective is to cut out parents and adult leaders in the child’s life who don’t agree with the LGBT agenda. Every speaker at the national conference made this message very clear.
On Friday night founder and co-director Kevin Jennings defiantly declared, “Neither rain, nor wind, not even a hurricane will stop us from bringing justice to our schools!”
A clinic earlier that day was entitled “Strategies for Responding to Homophobic Bigotry: Everybody’s Business!” The title accurately set forth this point in their agenda-- to make the GLBT agenda everyone’s agenda, yours and mine included. And the strategy is to get to our kids.
It’s not just that they are generously funded, though they certainly are. Revenues for 2001 were $3.35 million, and this year’s conference was liberally supported by Kodak, Levi Strauss, Microsoft, and IBM whose logos were emblazoned on banners, brochures, and conference freebies. For the close to 500 people in attendance, including about 100 junior high and senior high students, the companies hoped to capture this powerful purchasing sector—gays and youth—arguably two of the most powerful buying sectors in America today.
No, GLSEN’s success comes from a carefully planned message that homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identity issues represent the next human rights and civil rights battle, on par with Martin Luther King, Jr and other reformers great work of the last 200 years. Again, this message is targeted at our kids. Today, GLSEN sponsors about 1700 campus student clubs, called GSA’s (Gay Straight Alliances) promoting LGBT issues.
The opening plenary included Washington, D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes. “Homophobia,” announced Holmes-Norton, “is alive and well in the House of Representatives.” She ranted on, “They are a group of fools who should know better. What you [the GLSEN crowd] are doing has more to do with leaving no child behind than what Congress is doing.” Speaking for a moment directly to the students in the audience, she summed up her philosophy this way, “I believe that every one of you should be left alone to be who you are.” The comment embodied the conference message: do whatever you want with your sexuality. It’s a message our kids are hearing on many public school campuses across the nation.
Candace Gingrich, famous gay activist sister of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, led the workshop entitled “Everyday Heroes: How Openly GLBT Faculty, Administration, Students, and their Allies Help to Facilitate Safety, Support, and Respect in Our Schools.” As the manager of the Human Rights Campaign's National Coming Out Project, she used the 90 minutes as a bully pulpit to rouse the forty or so of us in attendance to “work to include anti-discrimination language in your school district policies and support GLBT staff to come out.” At one point, suddenly aware of the steep political pitch of her comments, she said, “Forgive me if I’m being too political.”
Never mind she was supposed to be addressing a group of public school educators.
Most importantly, you need to know that there is, coming to a school near you on April 21, 2004, GLSEN’s “Day of Silence.” This is their latest plan to impact high school and junior high students. The promotion is intended to impose a campus-wide silence in observance of LGBT issues. In 1999 300 high schools sponsored the Day of Silence. In 2001, over 1900 schools and 100,000 students participated in the event. In the words of their web site, “The possibilities are endless.” Their giddy confidence that the sky’s the limit is understandable when you consider that they’ve seen over 300% growth in attendance in just four short years.
The hurricane that GLSEN represents is hitting our schools. Unlike Isabel, this hurricane doesn’t threaten homes, businesses, and lands. Instead, this force threatens our most precious resources—our kids.
Marc Fey brings ten years of teaching experience in California public schools and seven years of pastoral ministry to his work as Education Analyst at Focus on the Family.
'Gay marriage' confusionsSowell's article is a must for the index.
Done.
I need to further update rev 1.2 but time is a major problem right now. I can update the index one article at a time as time permits, so folks, let me know what you think should be in the database.
There will be more Jennings/GLSEN documentation coming soon...
Important note: As was pointed out in reply #126 above, GLSEN's "Day of Silence" will be held in approximately one month. Students should start planning now to hold a "Truth Without Interruption Day" to counter the "Day of Silence." Here is a link to an article that may be useful to help students start planning (note - the article was posted two years ago, but the information linked is still available and relevant):
Now is the time to help students start planning this event! Please pass this information on.
I'll post additional related links later this evening...
The Deception and Desensitization of America's Youth ( see reply 7 )
"We acknowledge our social responsibility...to take into account not only the scientific merit of articles but also their implication for public policy....Clearly the article included opinions of the authors that are inconsistent with APA's stated and deeply held position on child welfare...issues....Three inconsistencies between the conclusions the authors suggest and positions of the association should have caused us to evaluate the article based on its potential for misinforming the public policy process. This is something we failed to do, but will do in the future....We are strengthening procedures within the association to assure that journal editors will fully consider the social policy implications of articles on controversial topics."
Stalinist psychologists would love this guy. He admits the primacy of policy over basic research, and takes the oath to defend APA's queer orthodoxy. I bellyfeel plusgood duckspeakers.
Thanks for the pings, EdReform, and that was quite a read about GLSEN. Seeing that they have a program coming up in April in the schools, I'm going to pass that post to a retired school administratrix I know who will be quite willing to answer awkward questions about GLSEN's programs in my home town. I'm sure they have a big one; Houston is one of the official "gay meccas" of North America, and they've been very active in city politics for at least 25 years. Former Houston mayor Kathryn J. Whitmire used to turn in her monthly report card to the assembled Gay Political Caucus in Montrose fern bars back in the 80's.
During the trial, the defense attorney presents an expert witness (very much sounding like Judith Reisman) to whom our intrepid, PC prosecutor directs the withering sneer (paraphrased), "have any of these studies been published anywhere? Backed by the leading psychiatric professional organizations?"
As long as gays "own" the "three APAs'" professional committees on homosexuality and paraphilias, and as long as they can get together the kind of professional witch-hunt to punish professionals who step out of line that Zuriff et. al. complain about in your post above, then gays will always be able to throw that sneer at nonconformists to their party line. There was also a reference to the APA's removal of homosexuality from DSM-III, and the sneering challenge -- "or is it all just a big conspiracy?!"
To which the actual answer is -- yes!
The black rapper 50 Cent used several anti-gay slurs in an April interview with Playboy magazine, but even so, a homosexual advocacy group has restrained its criticism of him -- even inviting him to "get to know the LGBT community."
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) offered a relatively mild response to words uttered by rapper 50 Cent, in marked contrast to GLAAD's relentless attack on a conservative radio talk-show host several years ago. That talk show host - Dr. Laura Schlessinger - never said the words that 50 Cent did...
Dr. Laura's 'Rhetoric and Defamation'
In contrast to its gentle treatment of 50 Cent, GLAAD showed no such restraint in its three-year campaign against conservative talk show host Dr. Laura Schlesinger.
In a March 20, 2001 press release, GLAAD announced it had culminated its "three-year public education campaign against the rhetoric of talk-show host Laura Schlessinger."
The group hailed the cancellation of Schlessinger's TV show as a "major victory against defamation and anti-gay intolerance."
GLAAD said it launched its campaign against Schlessinger in 1998, when she "began using terms such as 'deviant,' 'disordered' and 'biological error' to describe gays and lesbians."
"In coalition with thousands of local activists from across the country, we have held Laura Schlessinger accountable for her defamation of our community," GLAAD Executive Director Joan M. Garry said at the time.
"And we've sent a strong message that we are no longer an easy target for prejudice. GLAAD hopes the cancellation of 'Dr. Laura' will make media corporations think twice about giving a platform to someone who promotes derision and exclusion. Such decisions will never go unchallenged."
GLAAD accused Dr. Laura of perpetuating misinformation and reinforcing damaging stereotypes about homosexuality (including the concept that homosexuals can choose to change their behavior).
Like many homosexual activists, GLAAD rejects the notion that homosexuals can be "converted" to heterosexuality. It calls the notion "dangerous."
According to GLAAD, "Schlessinger's attacks first came to GLAAD's attention in 1997 when she characterized homosexuality as a "biological faux pas" in her syndicated newspaper column. In February 1998 and March 1999, GLAAD Executive Director Joan M. Garry met with Schlessinger in an unproductive effort to educate her about the hurtful impact of her words. When Schlessinger signed with Paramount Domestic Television for a TV talk show in mid-1999, GLAAD launched a campaign to bring the topic of defamatory language into the national public consciousness."
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation says it is "dedicated to promoting and ensuring fair, accurate and inclusive representation of people and events in the media as a means of eliminating homophobia and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation."
When A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality was published last month, the book's publisher, InterVarsity Press, placed an advertisement for the book in the popular magazine Psychology Today.
Shortly after the ad appeared, a lesbian activist and psychotherapist named Betty Berzon contacted Psychology Today's editor Robert Epstein to express her outrage.
Berzon was incensed that the magazine would accept an advertisement for A Parent's Guide, a book which views homosexuality as a developmental condition rather than a core identity. Berzon claimed that Epstein's magazine should have refused to print the ad. She threatened to organize a boycott against the magazine, and then followed up by sending out a flurry of postings on gay and lesbian internet sites in order to gain support for an organized boycott...
A story about the conflict was published in the December 10th issue of the gay magazine The Advocate, by columnist Michelangelo Signorile.
"When the editor in chief of Psychology Today reveals his support for so-called conversion therapies to turn gays straight, what does that say about the state of American psychology?" asked Signorile"
Signorile then described Epstein and his work as editor of Psychology Today in unflattering terms. He said the editor was a publicity seeker who "might view such a position [advertising a non-gay-affirmative book] as an attention grabber."
However, Signorile warned, editor Epstein would do well to remember what the gay community had succeeded in doing not so long ago to Dr. Laura. In a series of acrimonious and very public protests, gay activists were instrumental in forcing Dr. Laura's television show off the air by flooding the airwaves, the print media, and the streets outside the TV studio with protests that frightened off her advertisers.
Dr. Epstein had published the advertisement for A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, and expressed support for reorientation therapy for unwanted homosexuality, "perhaps not realizing," Signorile said, " that the last celebrity 'doctor' who stepped into the homosexuality debate with dubious assertions--Laura Schlessinger--soon saw her multi-million dollar career deflate, as gay activists supported successful advertiser boycotts of her show amid a bruising campaign against her."
Defending Dr. Laura and America
Senator Says LCR Puts Homosexual Agenda Before GOP Welfare ( FR Thread )
"Although the gay liberation movement's arguments were based mostly on the social implications of the diagnosis, the board tried to limit its consideration to scientific and medical arguments. The "scientific" considerations were based on two kinds of evidence. One was a body of research strongly pointing to a major biological basis for homosexuality. This included ethological studies finding homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, cross-cultural investigations indicating homosexuality is a human universal (and in some cultures, socially accepted), and neuroendocrinological studies showing the effects of hormones on brain development. The implication was that homosexuality is not simply the result of childhood trauma. It is neither freely chosen nor "unnatural."
The more important evidence came from psychological studies of gay men and lesbians in the general population. A major criticism of pathological theories of homosexuality was that they were derived from observations of homosexual patients who were seeking professional help. Not surprisingly, they found that homosexuality was closely associated with a variety of psychopathologies. However, when nonpatient homosexual populations were studied, it was found that many homosexual adults were leading well-adjusted, fulfilling lives. In general, homosexuality was not associated with any increased incidence of psychopathology.
Neither of these bodies of evidence is decisive. To be sure, findings supporting a biological contribution to homosexuality undermine the early psychoanalytic explanations. But the evidence is not all in, and even today it is too early to prejudge the issue. More important, even if homosexuality is shown to be genetically based, biological determination does not preclude a condition from being a disorder or from being treated. Some forms of depression and anxiety are known to have biological causes but are nevertheless considered psychiatric disorders and are often effectively treated, both biologically and psychologically.
The second argument, that homosexuality is not associated with other conditions recognized as psychopathologies, also falls short. It begs the question as to whether homosexuality in and of itself is a psychopathology. From the fact that a person can be perfectly healthy except for a broken bone, we would not argue that fractures are not medical problems. One could just as well argue that because many people with phobic anxieties manage to cope well, live full lives, and show no symptoms other than their narrowly focused anxiety, phobias are not psychopathologies. Furthermore, several of the disorders retained in DSMII also do not necessarily involve subjective distress (e.g., fetishism).
Thanks for the pings, EdReform, and that was quite a read about GLSEN.
You're welcome! More coming later...
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