Everything You Don't Want To Know About Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings, BUT SHOULD

February 11, 2010 by Anonymous

The following article is comprised of a number of published accounts written about the Obama Administration's Safe School Czar Kevin Jennings, his background, his motives and what he plans on teaching kids in public schools if he isn't stopped.

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Kevin Jennings' twisted terminology
By Troy Silva
Published on American Thinker October, 08, 2009
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/kevin_jennings_twisted_termino_1....

Kevin Jennings is Safe School Czar not by some vetting breakdown. He was an official in the Obama Campaign as its Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual fund-raising co-chair. For twenty years until 2008, Jennings succeeded on a massive scale at pro-homosexual propagandizing of school children. His adeptness and accomplishment at semantic deception are extraordinary.

In a 1990 "report" for the Massachusetts Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, it was Jennings himself who re-coined the very term "safe school" to mean a pro-homosexual school. Just as the word "gay" is forever tainted and can now rarely be used in its original sense without prompting the snickers or confusion of the listener, so the term "safe school" is now a post-op product of Jennings that bears no similarity to its original meaning.

This fairly recent change is lost on most of the public, to the severe detriment of millions of American children in public school whose curriculum is controlled by edu-crats who use the Jennings definition. The term "safe school" in the fraudulent sense used by Jennings, et al, must not be confused with the original sense of the term, which was quite literal. The term in this original sense dates at least to the Reagan-era Department of Education "safe school" initiative to curb drug and alcohol use in schools. Remember the "Just say no" campaign of that era? Today, however, the term in the speciously redefined sense is now used on the Department of Education web site, where incidentally it states that Jennings and his partner, Jeff Davis "are the proud parents of three dogs", including a "grand dog". The cultural notion of what constitutes absurdity has slackened a bit, has it not? Were Ronald Reagan to have read such a line, he would most assuredly have thought it a spoof!

Jennings boasted in a 1995 speech entitled "Winning the Culture War" that he "tilted" the 1990 Massachusetts report with use of the term "safe" in order to put opponents of pro-homosexual curriculum in that state "on the defensive". His national template, used over and over in hundreds of districts and thousands of schools across the country, is to fabricate an epidemic of bullying and violence to homosexuals in schools, in part by citing bogus census or other statistics where classes of people are conflated to come-up with artificially high numbers of incidents of sexual-orientation-based "bullying", "harassment" or violence.

The next step is to contend that the only solution is to make "allies" out of 100% of the straight students in the school or district. "Allies" are made by implementing a usually district-wide "safe-schools" or "anti-bullying" curriculum that force-feeds homosexual propaganda to kindergarten through 12th grade. Prominent psychologists and psychiatrists who oppose them notwithstanding, these towering intellects that run school districts reject all research that will contradict their foregone conclusions.

While there is much controversy even among secular mental health professionals as to whether or not homosexuality is disordered, there is no such controversy as to heterosexuality. This is an additional, secular reason that all lifestyles should therefore not enjoy parity in school curricula. Why do the Jennings types fear the presentation of research data from all sides, rather than just their own? If indeed Jennings and company valued academic freedom and fearless intellectual inquiry, they would also present the findings of these prominent doctors, who have a lot of studies to back up their positions.

The term "ally", a play on Jennings' Gay-Straight Alliance, is another buzzword which denotes a straight student who worships LGBT's and unequivocally endorses their lifestyle, and who reports on any student who so much as voices an opposition to homosexuality. Such voiced opposition is punished as the "bullying" of a "hater". "Ally of the month" awards are then handed-out at monthly school assemblies. Even assuming for the sake of argument that there were an epidemic of bullying and violence at schools against homosexuals, the contention of parents who oppose the pro-homosexual curricula is that what the schools are doing is unconstitutional. The purported end does not justify the means here. Those pushing this pro-homosexual curricula, who omit from the equation the Constitutional rights of the parents and children who oppose them, ought to be able to understand this concept.

In his revelatory 1995 speech, Jennings accurately stated that in order for his side to win, it was essential to keep control of the terminology, especially the term "safety". He admittedly seized on the pre-existence of this popular Reagan theme and nomenclature of "safe schools." The tactic worked well for him; he got his pro-homosexual curriculum in Massachusetts. And if it worked in Massachusetts, Jennings realized that it could work nationwide -- and it has.

Jennings founded the Gay Straight Alliance GSA and the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) which have imparted and logistically supported his original propaganda model to thousands of GSA staff presently indoctrinating children in grades K-12 in every state. A couple of other important examples of his ability to lie semantically are his use of the terms "Straight" and "Alliance" in the GSA and GLSEN names in order to falsely imply that the GSA and GLSEN are some dialoguing roundtable. He thus nicely disguises the insidious propaganda machines that these organizations truly are. Parents should check their school or district curriculum for seemingly innocuous terms as "safe school", "anti-bullying", "safe space", "hate-free", "tolerance", "respect differences", "be an ally", "no name calling day", "be who you are", "free to be fully me", "day of silence", and so forth. If these terms are present, they are defined by Jennings, not Webster, and the accompanying curricular material will probably be objectionable.

Jennings' jargon and the mythical bullying epidemic even showed-up in the recent Presidential address to school children: (emphasis added):

Maybe you'll decide to stand up (referring to "allies") for kids who are being teased or bullied (disagreed with) because of who they are or how they look (homosexual or transvestite), because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe (pro-homosexual) environment to study and learn.

The Jennings terminology in this line of the controversial speech was no doubt unrecognized by the average adult reader as anything but generic. Unlike the adult audience who watched the speech voluntarily if at all, children across the country in public schools, at whom the speech was directed and who were its captive audience, hear these identical psychobabble terms day in and day out in the very precise context of the nationwide pro-homosexual curriculum designed by Jennings. These children knew exactly what was meant by these terms as used in the Presidential speech.

For the students who may have previously debated or voiced any opposition to their school's pro-homosexual curriculum content, there was now the President on television taking the side of their school administration and its curriculum content. It's ironic that the Presidential bully pulpit was used in support of the fraudulently-named "anti-bullying" regimen of so many hundreds of school districts. Had the speech line been referring to race, handicap or gender, there would have been no need to disguise terms. Nor would the trademark Jennings jargon have been used.

The influence of the Jennings ilk on the speech is quite obvious to those of us who are sensitized to the jargon used nationwide by the homosexual-indoctrination movement. In echoing the jargon of the pro-homosexual curricula, the President mightily validated the profound distrust voiced by so many Americans when his intention to give the school speech was announced.

Fox News and Rush Limbaugh recently covered the scandal of some 250 California public schools ordering the pro-homosexual "Boy in a Bikini" cartoon indoctrination video. I am the father who was interviewed recently on Fox and Friends with my attorney, Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute.

The topics were the video and the force-fed pro-homosexual curriculum in my school district and others. Although until now the Jennings and school-video scandals have been covered separately, there is a substantial connecting line to draw between Kevin Jennings and "Boy in a Bikini." Kevin Jennings founded the GSA in 1988. Youth in Motion, the video producer comprised of a partnership between Jennings' GSA and the company Frameline, actually produced "Boy in a Bikini", and also distributes this indoctrination video to hundreds of schools -- including our local elementary school. So the reprehensible "Boy in a Bikini" video and many other vile propaganda videos were co-produced by the very GSA founded by Safe School Czar Kevin Jennings!

Expect more of this, funded with your federal tax dollars.

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Breaking: Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar” Is Promoting Child Porn in the Classroom– Kevin Jennings and the GLSEN Reading List
Friday, December 4, 2009, 6:13 AM
Jim Hoft
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2009/12/breaking-obamas-safe-school...

Scott Baker from Breitbart-TV.com and Co-Host of ‘The B-Cast‘ submitted this shocking report today on Obama’s deviant Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings.

—-Warning on Content—–

I was recently approached by a team of independent researchers that I have known for some time and have come to trust. They prepared this report involving ‘Safe Schools Czar’ Kevin Jennings and the organization he founded, GLSEN, and asked that I find a way to help draw attention to what they uncovered. Knowing that Gateway Pundit has followed Kevin Jennings since his appointment, as we have on The B-Cast (here, here, and here), and on Breitbart.tv (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here), I felt this would be an appropriate place for this report.

Warning: The following material is very explicit.

Scott Baker

Co-Founder, Breitbart.tv

Co-Host, The B-Cast

Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings was the founder, and for many years, Executive Director of an organization called the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN started essentially as Jennings’ personal project and grew to become the culmination of his life’s work. And he was chosen by President Obama to be the nation’s Safe Schools Czar primarily because he had founded and led GLSEN (scroll for bio).

GLSEN’s stated mission is to empower gay youth in the schools and to stop harassment by other students. It encourages the formation of Gay Student Alliances and condemns the use of hateful words. GLSEN also strives to influence the educational curriculum to include materials which the group believes will increase tolerance of gay students and decrease bullying. To that end, GLSEN maintains a recommended reading list of books that it claims “furthers our mission to ensure safe schools for all students.” In other words, these are the books that GLSEN’s directors think all kids should be reading: gay kids should read them to raise their self-esteem, and straight kids should read them in order to become more aware and tolerant and stop bullying gay kids. Through GLSEN’s online ordering system, called “GLSEN BookLink,” featured prominently on their Web site, teachers can buy the books to use as required classroom assignments, or students can buy them to read on their own.

According to GLSEN’s own press releases from the period during which its recommended reading list was developed, the organization’s three areas of focus were creating “educational resources, public policy agenda, [and] student organizing programs”; in other words, the reading list (chief among its “educational resources”) was of prime importance in GLSEN’s efforts to influence the American educational system.

The list is divided into three main categories: books recommended for grades K-6; books recommended for grades 7-12; and books for teachers. (The books on the list span all genres: fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, even poetry.)

Out of curiosity to see exactly what kind of books Kevin Jennings and his organization think American students should be reading in school, our team chose a handful at random from the over 100 titles on GLSEN’s grades 7-12 list, and began reading through.

What we discovered shocked us. We were flabbergasted. Rendered speechless.

We were unprepared for what we encountered. Book after book after book contained stories and anecdotes that weren’t merely X-rated and pornographic, but which featured explicit descriptions of sex acts between pre-schoolers; stories that seemed to promote and recommend child-adult sexual relationships; stories of public masturbation, anal sex in restrooms, affairs between students and teachers, five-year-olds playing sex games, semen flying through the air. One memoir even praised becoming a prostitute as a way to increase one’s self-esteem. Above all, the books seemed to have less to do with promoting tolerance than with an unabashed attempt to indoctrinate students into a hyper-sexualized worldview.

We knew that unless we carefully documented what we were reading, the public would have a hard time accepting it. Mere descriptions on our part could not convey the emotional gut reaction one gets when seeing what Kevin Jennings wants kids to read as school assignments. So we began scanning pages from each of the books, and then made exact transcriptions of the relevant passages on each page.

Are we exaggerating, or misconstruing quotes that could be interpreted a different way? No: Read the passages below and judge for yourself. There’s no wiggle room. The language is explicit, the intent clear.

To be specific, the books we read were:

Queer 13

Being Different

The Full Spectrum

Revolutionary Voices

Reflections of a Rock Lobster

Passages of Pride

Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian

The Order of the Poison Oak

In Your Face

Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son

Love & Sex: Ten Stories of Truth

We can only vouch for what’s in these 11 books, since these are the only ones we’ve read through. Are there other books on the GLSEN reading list that are similarly outrageous? We can’t say for sure, but it seems very likely. What you see excerpted below is probably only the tip of the iceberg.

Let it be clear: This issue has nothing to do with gayness or straightness, which is irrelevant to this report. The point proven here is that the GLSEN reading list promotes the sexualization of children in general, regardless of the “orientation.”

And this is not about censorship: It’s about deciding what constitutes appropriate reading material for children. We’re perfectly OK with these books existing and being read by adults; we only start to worry when these books are assigned to children. All sorts of books are excluded from school reading lists, for all sorts of reasons. Even many books once considered classics are now considered off-limits due to language or attitudes now deemed inappropriate. And yet, according to Kevin Jennings and GLSEN, books about a 13-year-old getting “my cock sucked and my ass fucked” or about a teenager enjoying the “exquisite bitter taste” of his friend’s semen are not just acceptable, they’re highly recommended. As GLSEN’s own site says, “All BookLink items are reviewed by GLSEN staff for quality and appropriateness of content.” Really? (Note: GLSEN does advise adults to “review content for suitability.”)

Although GLSEN does not address how books get added to its list, it’s hard to imagine that they are chosen by low-level staffers or volunteers, with no oversight. Since the list of recommended books is one of the organization’s primary tools (”The GLSEN BookLink, an online library of recommended resources, along with the Safe Space program remain cornerstones of GLSEN’s education work.” source), it’s likely that the books were chosen carefully. Kevin Jennings stepped down as Executive Director last year after leading GLSEN since its inception, but every single book mentioned in this report was added to the list while Jennings was in charge (dates are given for each title’s addition to the list). Therefore, it’s reasonable to believe he was aware of the addition of these works – especially since most were added when GLSEN was still quite small and the Executive Director had a hands-on role in daily operations.

Below you will find dozens of excerpts taken from books on the GLSEN “Booklink” recommended reading list for grades 7-12 (i.e. for children between the ages of 12 and 17). To prove that these books are indeed recommended by GLSEN for children, click on each book’s title to see its individual listing on the GLSEN Web site. And to prove that each excerpt is transcribed exactly as it appears in each book, click on the page numbers or the small images along the left to see scans taken directly of the book pages in question. (Ellipses ["..."] indicate unrelated passages not included in some of the transcriptions; click on the full-page scans to see the complete extended quotes.) Each passage is preceded by a brief summary, given in italics.

You decide for yourself if you think these are appropriate for kids as young as 12 years old to read. And then decide if you think the man who headed the organization responsible for recommending these books to children should be in charge of school safety in this country.

Content Warning:

Keep in mind that, although the material below has been deemed by Kevin Jennings and GLSEN to be appropriate for children, some of the excerpts contain explicit language and pornographic descriptions, so if you don’t want to see such things, stop reading now.

I CUT THIS ARTICLE OFF HERE BECAUSE THE EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOKS CITED WERE SO DISGUSTING AND HORRIFICALLY EXPLICIT THAT I DIDN'T THINK IT A GOOD IDEA TO POST THEM ON THE ROPE WEBSITE. YOU MAY VISIT THE WEBISTE ITSELF TO VIEW THEM IF YOU MUST, BUT I THINK I WOULD AVOID IT. YUCK.
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2009/12/breaking-obamas-safe-school...

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Who’s funding GLSEN?
By Michelle Malkin • December 7, 2009 01:34 PM
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/12/07/whos-funding-glsen/

Did you make sure to read the not-safe-for-school reading list of GLSEN, the radical gay rights advocacy group founded by Obama’s safe schools czar Kevin Jennings?

If you missed it last week and you’re a parent, you better go read it now in my summary post from last week. You’ll also get a recap of “Fistgate” (it is as bad as it sounds) and learn about GLSEN’s sponsorship of this year’s “Santa is Coming Out” extravaganza.

You might be wondering who’s behind GLSEN.

Well, they receive financial backing from numerous private foundations, corporations and corporate foundations.

Their national sponsors “make an annual commitment to GLSEN of $75,000 or more and, in addition to our gratitude, receive recognition as National Sponsors in our publications and website. Current National Sponsors are Cisco, Citi, Goldman Sachs, IBM, KPMG, National Education Association and PepsiCo.”

Here are their listed sponsors:

American Federation of Teachers
Anonymous
Arcadia
Arcus Foundation
Calamus Foundation
Cisco Systems, Inc.
Citi Foundation
DaimlerChrysler Corporation
David Bohnett Foundation
Eastman/Kodak Company
Ernst & Young
Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund
Ford Foundation
David Geffen Foundation
Gill Foundation
George Gund Foundation
Heckscher Foundation for Children
Human Civil Rights Organizations of America: A CFC
IBM Corporation
International Association of Gay and Lesbian Country Western Dance Clubs
Johnson Family Foundation
KPMG LLP
Metropolitan Tennis Group, Inc.
Morningstar Foundation
National Education Association
New York Community Trust
The Overbrook Foundation
PepsiCo
Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation
Ted Snowdon Foundation
The Streisand Foundation
Time Warner
W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation
Working Assets/CREDO

Now you know. Make sure they know that you know what they’re helping put in public school classrooms.

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Eastman Kodak stands by GLSEN
By Michelle Malkin • December 8, 2009 11:32 AM
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/12/08/eastman-kodak-stands-by-glsen/

Yesterday, I printed a list of sponsor companies and foundations that fund GLSEN, the radical gay rights group founded by Obama safe schools czar Kevin Jennings.

The full list is here.

A reader wrote to GLSEN sponsor Eastman Kodak about the group’s not-safe-for-school reading list and other explicit, extra-curricular activities. This is the response Eastman Kodak sent in reply:

Eastman Kodak Company is proud of its sponsorship of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). Our support of this educational not-for-profit organization clearly reflects the five Kodak Values:

* Respect for the Dignity of the Individual
* Uncompromising Integrity
* Trust
* Credibility
* Continuous Improvement and Personal Renewal

When Kodak supports entities such as GLSEN, we demonstrate our commitment to honoring diversity, fostering community, and valuing each and every individual.

I am very proud to work for a company that embraces diversity and respect for individuals. We truly regret that these values offend you.

Sincerely,

Deborah A. Shuryn
Senior Customer Relations Specialist
Worldwide Customer Care

Eastman Kodak Company
343 State St
Rochester, NY 14650-0944

CustomerRelations@kodak.com
www.kodak.com

Question: Where do “Fisting Kits” and dental dams for children fit into the Kodak Values system?

Source: MassNews.com

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Must-read flashback: Marjorie King’s 2003 City Journal expose’ of GLSEN: Queering the Schools.

***

A Kodak moment of intolerance circa 2002:

On October 11th 2002, the Kodak Corporation, as part of the company’s continuing “Winning & Inclusive Culture” campaign, sent out a memo to all employees regarding the Human Rights Campaign’s annual “Coming Out Day.” Among other things, the memo ordered employees to:

“Acknowledge your level of awareness of this topic, and share your personal willingness to understand. Acknowledge his/her courage to publicly share this personal information.” 8

One employee, 23-year Kodak veteran and devout Christian Rolf Szabo took offense to the memo and emailed the company the following response:

“Please do not send this type of information to me anymore, as I find it disgusting and offensive.”9

Mr. Szabo’s right to express his religious beliefs in the workplace is protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. The “sex” mentioned in Title VII refers to gender based discrimination against a person. It contains no legal reference to homosexuality.

However, the corporate thought-police have little use for Federal Statues. Szabo was immediately reprimanded by his supervisor, who informed the entire company that,

“our behaviors must align to the Kodak values [as outlined in the Winning and Inclusive Culture] campaign.”10

Szabo was then asked to sign an employee commitment plan stating he regretted what he had written and outlining steps to prevent a similar incident from reoccurring. When Szabo refused to reconcile his Catholic faith with Kodak’s Winning and Inclusive Program, he was fired.

What is truly terrifying about the Szabo – Kodak incident is that Szabo was fired not because he violated any law or statute, but because he rejected the groupthink mentality demanded by Kodak. No longer is job performance or company loyalty sufficient for continued employment; an employee’s core beliefs must now conform to a Leftist political agenda.

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Queering the Schools
Marjorie King
http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_queering_the_schools.html

At a high school in prosperous Newton, Massachusetts, it’s “To B GLAD Day”—or, less delicately, Transgender, Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian Awareness Day. An advocacy session for students and teachers features three self-styled transgendered individuals—a member of the senior class and two recent graduates. One of the transgenders, born female, announces that “he” had been taking hormones for 16 months. “Right now I am a 14-year-old boy going through puberty and a 55-year-old woman going through menopause,” she complains. “I am probably the moodiest person in the world.” A second panelist declares herself an “androgyne in between both genders of society.” She adds, “Gender is just a bunch of stereotypes from society, but I am completely personal, and my gender is fluid.”

Only in liberal Massachusetts could a public school endorse such an event for teens, you might think. But you would be wrong. For the last decade or so, largely working beneath public or parental notice, a well-organized movement has sought to revolutionize the curricula and culture of the nation’s public schools. Its aim: to stamp out “hegemonic heterosexuality”—the traditional view that heterosexuality is the norm—in favor of a new ethos that does not just tolerate homosexuality but instead actively endorses experimenting with it, as well as with a polymorphous range of bisexuality, transgenderism, and transsexuality. The educational establishment has enthusiastically signed on. What this portends for the future of the public schools and the psychic health of the nation’s children is deeply worrisome.

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.

But even as the homosexual-rights campaign won elite endorsement and lavish funding, even as supportive organizations proliferated, the gay movement began to split internally. By the early nineties, many gay activists viewed goals such as gay marriage or domestic partner unions as lamely “assimilationist”—an endorsement of standards of behavior that “queers,” as they called themselves, should reject as oppressively “straight.” And they militantly began defending the “queer lifestyle” not as an ineluctable fate but as the result of a fully conscious choice.

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.

Rutgers English professor Michael Warner, a leading queer theorist, observes that categories like “heterosexual” and “homosexual” are part of “the regime of the normal” that queer theory wants to explode. “What identity,” he writes, “encompasses queer girls who f*&k queer boys with strap-ons, or FTMs (female-to-male transsexuals) who think of themselves as queer, FTMs who think of themselves as straights, or FTMs for whom life is a project of transition and screw the categories anyway?” To overturn the old dichotomies of hetero/homo and even male/female, Warner encourages continuous sexual experimentation.

A relatively recent arrival on college campuses, queer theory has swiftly dominated the myriad university gender-studies programs and spread its influence to other disciplines, too, “queering” everything under the sun. Type “queering” into Amazon.com’s search engine, and up comes Queering the Middle Ages, Queering the Color Line, Queering India, and many other books, many from prestigious academic presses.

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.

The school principal found this expression of support for heterosexuality unacceptable. He forbade Chambers from wearing the sweatshirt in school, explaining that another student had found it offensive. Chambers’s parents, increasingly concerned about what they considered Woodbury’s aggressive endorsement of the LGBT agenda, met with the principal, who charged them with being “homophobic”—a frequent accusation made not only against anyone who questions the morality of homosexual acts but also against anyone who doesn’t accept the entire gay activist program, as if such questioning could only grow out of psychological disturbance rather than reasoned judgment. The parents then filed a federal lawsuit, claiming that the school had squelched their son’s First Amendment rights.

When a preliminary judgment came down in Chambers’s favor, the principal announced over the school public address system that the court had actually agreed with school officials that the sentiment of “straight pride” seemed intolerant toward homosexuality, and if circumstances changed so as to create “a reasonable belief that a substantial disruption of, or material interference with, school activities might ensue” from the wearing of the shirt, the school could prohibit it again. Foreseeing further disturbance, Mrs. Chambers decided to home-school her son.

The Chamberses’ experience was far from unique. Objecting when a teacher joins the ranks of the transgendered is out of the question in some school districts, no matter how disturbing it may be to schoolchildren and parents alike. But for those adhering to the queer agenda, the problem is with the kids and parents, not their “evolving” educator. When Principal Donald Reed of the Marie Murphy Middle School in Wilmette, Illinois, announced to school officials a few weeks before the 2001 school year began that he had undergone “gender reassignment”—a sex-change operation—and would henceforth be Principal Deanna Reed, the school superintendent and other administrators, faithful to the GLSEN spirit, didn’t remove him/her, despite parental outrage. Instead, the school district hired a psychologist to advise teachers on how best to counsel children who seemed confused or disturbed by their principal’s strange transformation. Administrators encouraged parents, too, to bring their concerns to “professionals.”

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.