BEFORE marriage is redefined, we're always told these things will never happen. Yet this seems to be what always happens.
A recent anti-bullying presentation at a middle school in New York that focused on homosexuality and gender identity has angered parents after their daughters have come home to tell them they were forced to ask another girl for a kiss.
During the workshop for girls, the 13 and 14-year-olds were told to ask one another for a kiss. They were also taught words such as “pansexual” and “genderqueer.”
Parent Mandy Coon told reporters that her daughter was very uncomfortable with the exercise. “She told me, ‘Mom, we all get teased and picked on enough; now I’m going to be called a lesbian because I had to ask another girl if I could kiss her,’” she lamented. “They also picked two girls to stand in front of the class and pretend they were lesbians on a date.”
Coon stated that she was especially irate over the matter because parents were given no warning about the presentations, nor an opportunity to opt out. She is also dismayed that college students were granted the right to come into the classroom and encourage her daughter to be sexually active. -Christian News Network
A primary school teacher faced disciplinary action because she didn’t want to read to her class from a storybook about gay penguins.
The teacher, who has not been named, works in a school in a London Borough and her case has been told to a committee of MPs looking at the gay marriage Bill.
Another teacher, from Scotland, says he was pressurised to promote gay marriage against his will and it contributed to a breakdown.
The two teachers have remained anonymous because they fear for their careers, but have permitted a lawyer to outline their cases to Parliament.
Patrick Craine, Canadian Bureau Chief of LifeSiteNews, promotes our latest MarriageADA video on the threat of same-sex marriage infringing on the rights of parents:
Just as Ontario’s new Premier Kathleen Wynne has announced plans to reintroduce an explicit sex-ed program, the Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance, and our friend Damian Goddard have released a great video about a striking case where exactly this type of program has been used as a battering ram against parental rights.
... It’s bad enough that this stuff would be taught in the classroom at all – why not let parents judge for themselves when their kids are ready to discuss sex? – but now there’s an increasingly entrenched opposition to even informing parents when it comes up.
The video is an interview with Dr. Steve Tourloukis. Tourloukis asked the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board to be told when his kids would be discussing same-sex “marriage” and other controversial issues in the classroom, but they said to do so would be a violation of “human rights.” So he’s taking them to court to get a declaration that the parent has primary authority over his children’s education.
The school board, amazingly, has the gall to oppose him in court on even such a basic proposition.
This type of abuse by schools is coming to cities across North America and the West, so parents need to be ready. Our children’s hearts and souls depend on it.
As Great Britain's government prepares to vote on a bill legalizing same-sex marriage, an official from the Secretary of State for Education's office reportedly has expressed trepidation toward the bill, arguing that primary school teachers in the country could possibly lose their jobs if they do not teach about gay marriage in the classroom.
One unnamed senior source from the office of Michael Gove, who serves as the country's current Secretary of State for Education, has recently said that ultimately the U.K. government is not in control, should a teacher lose their job for refusing to teach same-sex marriage, and the case would ultimately go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, where the European Parliament is located.
... Additionally, those critical of the upcoming same-sex marriage bill argue that hospital chaplains and other people in authority may be faced with difficult decisions when their conscience conflicts with their work protocol.
There will be a shocking impact on schools if same-sex marriage is passed into law, experts warned at Westminster press conference today.
Experts on family policy, sex education and ethics agreed that schools will become a focus for the promotion of radical and explicit homosexual material to schoolchildren. In addition, same-sex marriage will be used as a reason to silence objections by teachers and parents to explicit sex education.
The press conference was organised by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) www.spuc.org.uk , a leading pro-life and pro-family organisation, to launch its campaign warning headteachers about the consequences to schools of same-sex marriage (see further below for the full text of SPUC's letter to headteachers of all state-maintained secondary schools).
SPUC opposes the redefinition of marriage in law to include same-sex couples, because it would undermine the true nature of marriage and thus the pro-life benefits of marriage. Marriage offers the most protective environment for both unborn and born children. SPUC also campaigns against explicit sex education because such teaching fails to reduce abortions.
Katherine Kersten in the Star-Tribune on the agenda behind Minnesota's anti-bullying initiative:
"...Why this new law? The task force appears to presuppose that bullying is a pervasive and growing problem. In fact, however, incidents of bullying and intimidation have dropped markedly in recent years, according to surveys by the Department of Justice.
And while the task force gives the impression that LGBT students are a primary focus of bullying, evidence suggests that the vast majority of bullying is directed at other students. The DOJ surveys indicate that the percentage of 12- to 18-year-old students who reported being targets of hate-related words based on their sexual orientation fell from 1.0 percent in 2007 to 0.6 percent in 2009.
... Not surprisingly, the task force's proposed new antibullying regime would not treat all children equally, despite lip service to this goal. Instead, it focuses on students in "protected classes," including sexual orientation and "gender identity or expression."
Under the task force's vague and overbroad definitions of bullying and harassment, students could be punished for "direct or indirect interactions" that other students --especially those in protected groups -- claim to find "humiliating" or "offensive," that have a "detrimental effect" on their "social or emotional health," or even that promote a "perceived imbalance of power."
By this standard, a student who voices reservations about same-sex marriage could be accused of bullying LGBT students." (Star-Tribune)
As French Catholics prepare to mobilize on January 13 for a national march against the creation of homosexual “marriage,” the country’s education minister is warning Catholic schools against participating, claiming that it could cause “homophobia” against homosexual students.
National Education Minister Vincent Peillon has written a letter to all of the country’s 8,300 Catholic school principals, claiming that they have the responsibility to maintain “neutrality” regarding the debate over homosexual “marriage” in their institutions, according to reports by Le Monde and the French Press Agency.
“It is your responsibility in effect to ensure that the debates that are occurring in French society not be expressed, in the schools and establishments, by the phenomena of rejection and homophobic stigmatization,” wrote Peillon.
... Peillon also asks principles to inform him “as quickly as possible regarding eventual incidents and regarding any initiative contrary to these principles, within the public institutions as well as the private institutions under contract.”
Next week, fourth-grade students at Penn Valley Elementary School in the gilded Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion will spend part of their school day watching and discussing a very clever piece of cinematic propaganda courtesy of organized homosexuality. The film is called That’s a Family!, and it is endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign along with other homosexual activist groups.
... That’s a Family! is not about tolerance or treating people decently. It is about indoctrination, a fact that its enthusiasts make little attempt to hide. It lists among its endorsers such Democratic worthies as Senator Barbara Boxer, who declares that the film can be used to “break down” attitudes she finds disagreeable. Loret Peterson, a fourth-grade teacher in (of course) San Francisco, wrote that the film provides “a gentle starting point to reach elementary age children with a message of respect for all differences before biases become entrenched and the pressures of middle school set in. . . . We have the opportunity to take an active, moral approach to deflating the power of stereotypes by addressing them in the classroom.”
... There are no cease-fires in the culture wars, because the Left simply will not stop until it has achieved total conformity, which it pursues under the banners of “tolerance” and “diversity,” i.e., a virtue the Left does not possess and a condition the Left will not abide. The front runs through every corporate human-resources office, every college campus, every church, and the fourth-grade classroom at Penn Valley Elementary School, too.
Eastern Michigan University has agreed to settle an Alliance Defending Freedom lawsuit filed on behalf of Julea Ward, a graduate student whom the university expelled from a counseling program for abiding by her religious beliefs. As a result, a federal district court issued an agreed-upon order of dismissal Monday.
Even though counseling referrals are a common and accepted professional practice, the university expelled Ward when she sought to avoid violating her religious beliefs by referring a potential client to another counselor. In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled in her favor.
“Public universities shouldn’t force students to violate their religious beliefs to get a degree. The 6th Circuit rightly understood this and ruled appropriately, so the university has done the right thing in settling this case,” said Senior Legal Counsel Jeremy Tedesco, who argued before the court in October of last year. “When Julea sought to refer a potential client to another qualified counselor--a common, professional practice that is endorsed by her profession’s code of ethics--EMU denied the referral. Then it attacked and questioned her religious beliefs, ultimately expelling her from the program. We are pleased that Julea and her constitutionally protected rights have been vindicated.”
Visit our Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance page to learn more about citizens who have experienced discrimination and harassment for their pro-marriage views.
Derek Bekebrede, a senior majoring in economics at Harvard, writes in search of a party that shares his social conservative principles:
"...John Londregan and Luis Tellez on Public Discourse already have shown why the Republican Party should continue its principled support of life and marriage, but the debate has thus far ignored a critical obstacle to the conservative movement’s efforts to appeal to youth: the American college campus. More than sixty years ago, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote in God and Man at Yale that on college campuses, “the conservatives, as a minority, are the new radicals.” We remain so today.
After three years at the helm of Harvard’s student conservative movement, I know that the campus is not only liberal but also hostile to conservatives, especially social conservatives. As the Republican Party and fellow conservatives try to appeal to young voters, they must not ignore the university environment in which many of those voters live and learn. The actual state of America’s universities is worse than most Republicans realize, not because conservatives’ efforts have failed but because they have not wholeheartedly been tried. Instead of abandoning fundamental portions of the Republican platform, it’s time for the party to embrace a new one: outreach to America’s universities on social issues." -- The Public Discourse
Countering previous studies that found little difference between kids of same sex couples and those in a traditional marriage, a new report reveals that children of gay parents are 35 percent less likely to make normal progress in school that those living with their own married parents.
Based on the largest sample to date for such a study, the new work from three economists raises anew the impact state laws approving of same sex marriage have on children.
The new study provided to Secrets said: "Children of same sex couples are significantly less likely to make normal progress through school than other children: 35% less likely than the children of heterosexual married parents, 23% less likely than the children of never married mothers, and 15% less likely than the children of cohabiting parents."
The study also looked at similar scholarly work that had determined no difference in children of same sex and traditional marriages. The authors said that those studies filtered the sample of children to get their result.
The journal Demography has just published a very interesting article that reexamines the claims of a 2010 study that suggested (and was widely reported) as showing that children raised by same-sex couples experienced no academic disadvantages. The catch of the earlier study was that it was significantly different from previous studies on same-sex children and their parents since it used a large sample from the Census rather than a small self-selected one which is more typical of this body of research.
The 2010 study had excluded children who were not biologically related to the head of household and who were not in the same home for at least five years. This reduced “the sample size by more than one-half.” The 2012 study explains that putting the children who had been in unstable households (lived at the same address less than five years) back into the sample increases the sample “by more than 80 percent.” This fact alone seems important. The new study’s conclusion is that “children being raised by same-sex couples are 35 percent less likely to make normal progress through school.”
A letter to the editor in the Baltimore Sun from a Maryland teacher:
In response to Jean Marbella ("Just who's 'teaching' gay marriage?" Oct. 31), I would point out that in a teacher-student relationship, teaching happens actively and passively. If the idea of "values" has been taught, and there is the expectation that the teacher will identify evil values from good, then some kind of active and passive communication applying values will be given on relevant topics as needed. I cannot imagine a literature analysis course being taught without active and passive values analysis and judgment given to the characters in the books. So when in elementary school, the class reads, "Heather has two mommies," values will be examined and assigned.
Teachers do not teach as values neutral agents regarding human behavior choices just because something seems to be simply "a choice" without harm to another. When teachers give tests, they do not remain values neutral if a student pulls out a cheat sheet during the test. Using the cheat sheet is just a choice of response to the test, and brings no harm to any others, right? But teachers, at least the ones I know of, do not allow such personal choices. Instead, they address that response — a response that does not interfere with anyone else's "values response" — as unacceptable.
I am in schools 95 percent of the days they open. I see what students actively and passively infer about protocols, behavior and values. And if the teacher says nothing, or does nothing regarding a particular behavior, they infer that it is acceptable. Teachers know this and consciously attach values once they realize that if they are passive, then a student might default to a wrong value.
A recent anti-bullying presentation at a middle school in New York that focused on homosexuality and gender identity has angered parents after their daughters have come home to tell them they were forced to ask another girl for a kiss.
A primary school teacher faced disciplinary action because she didn’t want to read to her class from a storybook about gay penguins.
Next week, fourth-grade students at Penn Valley Elementary School in the gilded Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion will spend part of their school day watching and discussing a very clever piece of cinematic propaganda courtesy of organized homosexuality. The film is called That’s a Family!, and it is 
Countering previous studies that found little difference between kids of same sex couples and those in a traditional marriage, a new report reveals that children of gay parents are 35 percent less likely to make normal progress in school that those living with their own married parents.
The journal Demography has just published a very interesting 
