Students in California public schools may not be leading the nation in their knowledge of the “three R’s,” but they are well on their way to being experts in deviant lifestyles. Under a law signed last year by Gov. Jerry Brown (D), all public schools in the state are now required to promote homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality, and same-sex “marriage” at every grade level, including kindergarten — and to do so without parental consent or even notification.
Known as the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act, the law adds “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender [LGBT] Americans” to the list of minority groups which schools are required to portray positively. It mandates that social-science “instructional materials” include “the role and contributions of … lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans.” It prohibits teachers and school districts from “sponsor[ing] any activity that promotes a discriminatory bias on the basis of … sexual orientation.” It forbids state and local school boards from adopting any curriculum “reflecting adversely upon persons on the basis of … sexual orientation.” And since the required instruction is woven into regular social-science lessons, parents are given no warning that it will occur and no option to remove their children from class when such instruction is taking place.
“Children will be taught to see homosexuality, bisexuality, cross-dressing, sex-change operations, and homosexual marriages as good and natural and perhaps even for them,” Randy Thomasson, founder and president of the pro-family values organization SaveCalifornia.com, told CNSNews.com. Moreover, he maintained, because the law bans anything “reflecting adversely upon” homosexuality, it in effect “prohibits the government schools from teaching the facts that homosexuality is inherently unnatural and unhealthy with the highest rate of sexually transmitted diseases and the highest mode of transmission for HIV/AIDS.”
“The truth is prohibited; the facts are prevented,” he averred. “It’s ironic and sad that children in California government schools will be taught that cigarettes are negative, driving drunk is negative, drug use is negative, but they won’t be taught homosexuality is unhealthy.”
Some California schools had already implemented such curricula prior to the law’s passage, giving parents in less “progressive” districts an inkling of what to expect. For instance, reports the Los Angeles Times:
In 2005, [the Los Angeles Unified School District] debuted the nation’s first chapter in a high school health textbook on LGBT issues covering sexual orientation and gender identity, struggles over them and anti-LGBT bias. A section on misconceptions says sexual orientation is not a choice — a statement many religious conservatives disagree with. …
An art history teacher includes portraits of same-sex couples in her studies. An English teacher has discussed writer Langston Hughes, who is widely believed to have been gay. And in 11th-grade U.S. history, Daniel Jocz covers LGBT issues, especially during the unit on 20th century civil rights movements.
Using video clips of Kanye West, Tyra Banks and other celebrities, Jocz engages his students in lively discussions about language — including the taunt “that’s gay.” His students study the LGBT resistance to police arrests in the Stonewall riots alongside Rosa Parks’ refusal to sit in the back of the bus. And the murder cases of Emmett Till, an African American teenager, and Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, are examined in the class segment on hate crimes.
For kindergartners and students in early grades, there are lessons on the notion that “families come in all sizes, shapes and configurations,” including “a girl with two mommies,” the paper adds. As for older students, “sex education begins in fifth grade, so more specific LGBT instruction is considered appropriate — and necessary, experts say, as bullying steps up in these years.”
Of course, no one is in favor of students’ being bullied because they happen to engage in behavior other students consider immoral; but the law now in essence bullies those other students into accepting these behaviors as normal and even praiseworthy, forcing them to check their religious and moral convictions at the school door. Students may find themselves torn between what they are taught at home and in church and the lessons they learn in school. For this reason, the law had “already prompted some parents to pull their children out of public schools” as early as October, according to the Times.
Students (and parents) opposed to LGBT lifestyles aren’t the only ones in danger of having their consciences violated. Teachers, too, must affirm these lifestyles in the classroom or risk running afoul of the law’s requirements that they not “reflect adversely upon” or “promote a discriminatory bias” against persons with such lifestyles. Grace Callaway, a teacher near Yuba City, told the Times “she will refuse to teach LGBT issues to her fifth- and sixth-graders because she believes homosexuality is a ‘destructive lifestyle.’” “How administrators plan to handle ‘conscientious objectors’ like Callaway is unclear,” the newspaper observed.
Golden State taxpayers who oppose these sexual behaviors are yet a third class of victims under the FAIR Education Act. After all, they are the ones who will have to pay the teachers to, in Thomasson’s words, “sexually brainwash” their young charges; and they will have to foot the bill for all the new textbooks and other materials needed for this indoctrination.
The new LGBT-friendly textbooks are not expected to be in schools until at least 2019, though schools are required to develop their own materials to comply with the law now. Once the textbooks begin rolling off the presses, however, expect them to pop up in schools all across the country. California being the largest market for textbooks, whatever it mandates usually makes its way into books used in most other states.
Parents, both in California and elsewhere across the fruited plain, would therefore be wise to heed Thomasson’s advice to “rescue [their] children from the immoral, imploding, dysfunctional state school establishment” and put them in private or home schools. The alternative, he says, is a “sexually confused and academically stunted” generation.
