Family Blah-Blah News Gets It Wrong

I do have to comment on this article at AgapePress. They're a "news" outlet for the American Family Association, the same guys who wanted Ford to stop advertising in gay magazines. Well, this week they expressed great concern about Montgomery County's citizens advisory committee for the sex-ed curriculum.

A Maryland school board is under fire for placing members of three pro-homosexual groups on its new Citizens Advisory Committee on Family Life and Human Development (CAC). Among the groups represented on the committee are the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), and Teach the Facts, a homosexual advocacy group whose founder has close ties to the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). School Board's Pro-Homosexual Appointments Have Maryland Citizen Activists Concerned

Now, there you go, you learn something every day,don't you?

Pro-homosexual groups.

I don't know much about NARAL, but I'll just guess, from their name, that they are ... concerned about abortion rights. I just searched their web site for the word "homosexuality," and found four mentions of it. All occurrences seem to be in a quoted sentence. I mean, "pro-homosexual?" ... this ain't that.

PFLAG, all right, there you go. This diabolical organization supports people who love their friends and family members. That is terrible, they think people should love their children even when they're gay. Yikes! How anti-family is that?

And then, third ... there's us. A "homosexual advocacy group." Can you believe that? No, we're not that. We're an "education advocacy group," if anything. As the educational topic is sexual variation, we support the idea that the schools would teach the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts. We expect the latest information from medicine and science in the public schools, and religion can be taught in the home and in the places of worship. And we'll feel the same way when the anti-evolution nuts start feeling their cheerios in our county, too. And when the book-banners come through, we'll stand up for knowledge and openness.

But that last part. Man, that kills me: we're "a homosexual advocacy group whose founder has close ties to the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN)."

Who is "our founder?" Please?

The first TeachTheFacts.org meeting was held at a Mexican-food place in Wheaton called Cobano's. I'd say six or eight of us showed up. Seems like more than half of that group is still with us, others went off onto other things. There was no founder.

But, y'know, that doesn't matter, because none of us has any "close ties to the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN)."

We know where this lie came from. Last fall, somebody at GLSEN was trying to reach somebody about a conference call, and all they knew was that that person was a member of our Yahoo group, so they posted a note there. Actually, we blogged about it HERE and HERE. The CRC somehow got it in their heads that we had some big link to GLSEN, and now here it is on the big nutty national web site.

We do know somebody from GLSEN, in fact I saw her the other night at the citizens committee meeting. They routinely monitor school board meetings and other public events, and we run into each other all the time.

It is really something else, seeing how a paranoid fantasy at the local level becomes a news story at the national level. It is really weird, trust me, to be there when it happens. The way this works, now this AgapePress article is copied and pasted onto a thousand rightwing blogs, and this lie will attain the status of fact among a certain gullible portion of our society.

There's more:

Members of a conservative parents group called Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum (CRC) are criticizing the Montgomery County Public Schools ((MCPS) for the pro-homosexual appointments to its advisory committee. Also, CRC says a settlement agreement they reached with the school board guarantees them a chair on the committee, yet the board is not allowing the group to designate its own representative.

Michelle Turner, a spokesperson for CRC, says the Montgomery County Board of Education has apparently not learned its lesson from a recent lawsuit that led to the demise of its biased sex-ed curriculum. "We don't quite understand why the school system is going back to having these representatives on this advisory committee, which is supposed to be representative of the community," she notes.

Well, I'm not going to comment on that. If they really want to be part of the process, they know what they have to do. If they just want people to feel sorry for them, they know what they have to do. Either way, whatever, their call.