The presidential candidates who think they can run on economics issues alone and avoid the cultural issues had better bypass Iowa, because the cultural issues are red hot there. It wasn’t tax-and-spend issues that brought 1,500 voters out to a Des Moines school board meeting in January that started at 5:30 p.m. and lasted until past 1:00 a.m.
It was the Des Moines Public School District’s “Multicultural Nonsexist Education Plan” prepared by its Sexual Orientation Advisory Committee. This plan laid out comprehensive long-range and short-range goals for using the schools as a conduit to impose the gay /lesbian lobby’s value system on other people’s children.
It is unclear why this curriculum was unveiled first in Iowa, but it surely is indicative of what will be attempted in public schools all over the country. It is a detailed and explicit statement of the gay rights lobby’s strategy for targeting schoolchildren.
The most revealing part of the 900-word document is its repeated use of the word “infuse” and its plan to develop gay/lesbian information modules that can be “fully integrated” into various courses. The goal is clearly to infuse (i.e., cause to penetrate) the gay/lesbian propaganda into every level of school: every grade K through 12, every academic subject, and every school and social activity.
The flavor of the curriculum is shown by these direct quotations: “To use the instructional materials selection cycle to infuse information regarding gay/lesbian/bisexual issues into the curriculum.” “To include in the elementary, middle, and high school curriculum a discussion of the nature of families including same gender families and parenting. “
“To emphasize gay /lesbian/bisexual issues in the mandatory cross-cultural awareness training.” “To include the evolution of the modern gay/lesbian/bisexual identity [and] cross-cultural representations of homosexuality” in psychology and sociology courses.
The curriculum calls for presentation to students of “information on gender/sexual orientation and the natural diversity present in human beings.” Diversity has become a common code word for homosexual teaching:
The plan became a public controversy when an alert math teacher, Tom Lutz, caught wind of the proposal, obtained a copy, and blew the whistle just before it was scheduled to be quietly adopted at the January school board meeting. He organized a rally at the First Federated Church the night before the board meeting, and an amazing crowd of 3,000 parents showed up.
The group was addressed by local talk show host Jan Mickelson, who warned, “This is not an agenda for tolerance. This is an in-your-face gay agenda seeking taxpayer support to target your kids.”
Indeed, the curriculum is aggressively activist. It calls for encouraging staff and student attendance at the annual “Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Youth Conference,” for providing “information on the National Marches on Washington for Lesbians and Gay Rights,” for “advertising the Gay and Lesbian Resource Center in school newspapers,” and for providing “support for gay/lesbian/bisexual staff members.”
The curriculum is determined to use the public schools as a change agent to create “student awareness of homophobic thinking and behavior and to compare these with other forms of prejudice and oppression.” It calls for a ban on “heterosexual bias in language” and for increasing “gay /lesbian/bisexual materials in school libraries and multimedia centers.”
Parents may have thought that, when the New York City Board of Education fired Chancellor Joseph Fernandez, and expressed outrage against the elementary school readers entitled “Heather Has Two Mommies” and “Daddy’s Roommate,” they put a stop to gay/lesbian advocacy in school curricula. But that was only one skirmish in the cultural war.
Unless parents, teachers and talk-show hosts everywhere are as alert as they are in Iowa, they will wake up one day and find gay/lesbian advocacy so infused in the curriculum that it can’t be disentangled from English, History, and other subjects. Parents should find out if their local school district has a Sex Orientation Advisory Committee and what kind of mischief it is up to.
