One Door That Shouldn’T Be Opened Pro-Senate Vote Don’T Let Any Schools Encourage Homosexuality

Fri., Aug. 5, 1994

D.F. Oliveria Editorial Writer

In “The Overhauling of Straight America,” Marshall K. Kirk and Erastes Pill summed up gay rights strategy in a sentence: “First let the camel get his nose inside the tent - and only later his unsightly derriere!” In other words, talk up gay rights as an abstract social question but downplay sexual practices and health risks.

Occasionally, however, gay activists expose a cheek while waiting to crawl into the mainstream. That happened last year when New York City schools tried to teach first-graders a sanitized version of the homosexual lifestyle. Parents revolted, and the chancellor was dismissed.

The U.S. Senate saw the movement’s unadorned rump in the explicit propaganda of the school health curriculum and overwhelmingly rejected it. The material was “so graphic and disgusting” that U.S. Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., refused to show it on the Senate floor.

Powerful U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., whose heterosexual excess is legendary, and his minions probably will neuter the common-sense legislation. But the message is clear: Many people don’t want homosexuality taught in public schools as an acceptable lifestyle.

Most Americans don’t care what consenting adults do in their bedrooms - as long as it doesn’t affect them or their families. But the gay curriculum offered by New York schools and viewed by the U.S. Senate does.

Curriculum featuring books such as “Heather Has Two Mommies,” “Daddy’s Roommate” and “Gloria Goes to Gay Pride” desensitizes impressionable youngsters and may drive a wedge between them and their family’s values.

In the New York battle, parents’ advocate Mary Cummins summed up how this country feels about this issue:

“We are not going to teach our children to treat all types of human behavior as equally safe, wholesome or acceptable. On the contrary, we are going to teach them that they should never engage in conduct that would cause harm to others or to themselves.”

Homosexuality is fraught with health and emotional hazards and shouldn’t be encouraged in schools.

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