Efforts to exploit public education in the service of normalizing deviant sexuality grow ever more outrageous and dangerous. Illinoisans ignore the legislative mischief taking place in other states at their own peril.
The latest legislative monstrosity has reared its ugly head in — where else — California. SB 48, which was introduced by openly homosexual California State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), is an insult to the most foundational principles of education, religious liberty, and parental rights.
If passed, this legislation will prohibit — that is, censor — any and all “instruction,” “activities,” “textbooks, or other instructional materials” in public schools that contain “any matter reflecting adversely upon persons…on the basis of sexual orientation.”
But it gets worse. While censoring everything that challenges the unproven ontological, moral, and political assumptions of Senator Leno and his ideological co-conspirators, this law would also require that “instruction in social sciences shall include a study of the role and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans.” Leno seeks to censor all resources that suggest homosexual acts are not moral, while mandating positive portrayals of homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder. Think the “Ministry of Truth” in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
Since the entire homosexuality-mainstreaming movement is built on the specious comparison of homosexuality to race, someone should demand that Leno provide justification for that analogy. The truth is that homosexuality is not like race. Race or skin color is 100 percent heritable and is not constituted by volitional acts. Instead, homosexuality is analogous to other conditions defined by subjective experiences of desire and volitional acts, like adult consensual incest, polyamory, or promiscuity.
Is Leno prepared to apply the principles embedded in his bill consistently? Those who experience, for example, selfish, vain, greedy, gluttonous, deceitful, promiscuous, incestuous, masochistic, gossipy, philandering, or polyamorous impulses and engage in behaviors impelled by such impulses have also contributed to society. Should teachers be required to identify those proclivities while teaching about the contributions of such people? And should schools censor all resources and activities that adversely portray those proclivities?
Substituting for homosexuality another condition equally irrelevant to achievement and equally morally questionable brings into sharper relief the dubious nature of Leno’s proposed legislation. I would agree that if a cross-dresser has contributed something to the world that is universally accepted as both positive and important, then it would be appropriate to educate students about the contribution. His cross-dressing, however, would be irrelevant.
So why do homosexuals and their ideological allies insist that the sexual proclivities of cultural contributors be taught rather than just their contributions? The reason for their insistence is that they desperately want to associate achievement with homosexuality in an attempt to change the moral views of naïve students. Associate homosexuality with something positive like creativity, intelligence, compassion, or self-sacrifice, and eventually the good feelings society has for creativity, intelligence, compassion, or self- sacrifice will be (irrationally) transferred to homosexuality or cross-dressing. The process could be described as innocence by association.
It’s really not the failure to teach about the achievements of homosexuals that bothers homosexual activists. It’s teaching about their achievements without identifying their sexual proclivities that bothers homosexual activists — sexual proclivities, by the way, that many consider immoral.
Homosexuals are not a category of humans in the same sense that racial minorities are a category of humans. Homosexuality is a sin disposition — not a morally neutral condition like skin color. When homosexuals have contributed something of value to society, those contributions should be noted. Their sexual predilections, however, are worthy of neither honor nor mention.
On his website, Leno says, “We can’t simultaneously tell youth that it’s OK to be yourself and live an honest, open life when we aren’t even teaching students about historical LGBT figures or the LGBT equal rights movement.” The idea that it’s “OK” to engage in homosexual behavior is a moral belief, not a fact. And no government employee has the right to teach moral claims as facts — particularly revolutionary moral claims on which there is no societal consensus. How incredibly presumptuous of Leno to suggest that public school teachers should be teaching students that it’s “OK” to live a homosexual life.
Leno, operating as if the comparison of homosexuality to race is valid and proven, then implicitly compares the Civil Rights Movement to the efforts to mainstream deviant sexual behavior, arguing that the history of the “LGBT equal rights movement” should be taught in schools. But, as I’ve already argued, homosexuality is more akin to polyamory. Now imagine a legislator arguing that the history of the “polyamory equal rights movement” must be taught in public schools. It’s unlikely that such a legislator would long retain his elected office.
Leno further asserts that “negative stereotypes of LGBT people…leads to increased bullying of young people.” Someone needs to ask Leno if he thinks the belief that homosexual practice is immoral is a “negative stereotype.” If he believes that it is, he should be asked what his proof is that this belief, which is held by Orthodox Jews, Protestants, and Catholics, has resulted in “increased bullying of young people.”
No one has an obligation to accept the unproven ontological and moral assumptions of Mark Leno and his ideological allies. No one has an obligation to accept the unproven, non-factual assumption that homosexuality is equivalent to race or that homosexual behavior is moral. And schools have no right to implicitly or explicitly teach either.
How can an educational institution possibly foster diversity, honor all voices, cultivate critical thinking, advance intellectual exploration, and challenge assumptions on this most controversial cultural issue if liberal assumptions on the nature and morality of volitional homosexual practice are mandated and all dissenting views are censored?
No parent who claims to be a follower of Christ can permit their children to be taught that homosexual acts and cross-dressing are moral or positive.
No teacher who claims to be a follower of Christ can ever teach children implicitly or explicitly that homosexual behavior or cross-dressing is moral, normative, or good. Christian parents can never be an accessory to the promulgation of the idea that homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder are positively contributing forces within the lives of individuals or within a society.
No taxpayer who claims to be a follower of Christ should remain silent as a bill that will require the use of their taxes to normalize homosexuality and undermine liberty moves forward.
And all who value the free exchange of ideas and the development of critical thinking skills, or who fear censorship, indoctrination, and Big Brother should vigorously oppose this legislation.
Don’t be naïve, Illinoisans, and don’t let California’s geographic distance lull you into a state of complacency: this kind of legislation is coming to every state.
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