Whining, With Flags and Eagles

Several people sent me links to this slick website where the CRC complains about the new curriculum. The Center for American Cultural Renewal actually looks like something out of the Colbert Report, with bald eagles and flags, and look, there's a happy bride and groom, holding hands.

Here's how they describe themselves:

The Center for American Cultural Renewal is a grassroots public policy and advocacy organization working to promote and protect traditional values based on the Judeo-Christian ethic. We work to restore the Constitutional principles embodied in the founding of our nation and base our arguments on logic, natural law and empirical evidence.

Our goal is to renew the promise of America envisioned by the Pilgrims of the 17th Century and the Founding Fathers of the 18th Century restoring our greatest institutions; traditional marriage, two-parent families, community and religious organizations, and civic responsibility for the purpose of renewing our values to fall in line with our most cherished traditions.

We work to restore America’s purpose.

So, OK, turn the hands of time back to the good old days, fine, I hope they're happy.

Their article is called New Sex-Ed Curriculum Is Still Biased, if that gives you a clue about what follows. Most of the stuff comes from CRC literature, either their minority report or some public comments at the school board; we've heard it all before.

It starts like this:

While the following story comes from Montgomery Maryland, the homosexual advocates are promoting and implementing radical sex-ed curriculum in government schools around the country. Under the guise of keeping homosexual, bisexual and other students “safe,” the sexual lobby has gained access to your children. Activists have intimidated administrators and school boards in to allowing them free rein to promote whatever sexual practices it chooses in the most graphic and inappropriate manner possible.

The amount of propaganda being disseminated is astounding. Nothing is too far-fetched to be excluded, and nothing is considered off limits even to what is taught elementary students.

How's that for a rollicking start?

You get the feeling right away that they're against it.

This thing is too long, I'm not going to reproduce it here. But let's look at some snatches...

“That all five lessons of the curriculum focus on and promote homosexuality and don’t even touch on the value of having a traditional family should tell parents of the enormous influence of sexual advocacy groups placed by the Board on the Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC),” according to [Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum President Michelle] Turner.

Yes, four of the five new sections focus on homosexuality a little bit. Because ... that's what they're about. For twelve years a kid goes to school learning about stuff, for four 45-minute classes he's going to hear something about sexual orientation.

The fifth section is about condoms and doesn't mention sexual orientation at all, or have anything to do with it.

Turner points out that the material for the curriculum is drawn from an excerpt from a book by Holt Lifetime Health, written for one of the most liberal school districts in the country, Los Angeles. It was authored by a gay activist and contains glaring omissions on the health risks of homosexual behavior.

I can't believe this one. They are so outraged over the authorship of this book. Who wrote your kids' other textbooks, do you know? Of course not. Did they come from liberal school districts? Who cares?

I mean, really, who cares who wrote the textbook?

The Board also approved a new video that recommends condoms for every act of "oral, anal, or vaginal sex," while ignoring a petition from over 200 physicians requesting that it include a specific warning about the dangers of anal sex.

That petition is a fraud. Those doctors didn't know what they were signing. The petition asks for a statement from a 1980s Surgeon General to be included. It's absurd.

Also, the CRC always ignores the fact that the video that is now in the schools, and has been for years, also says to use a condom for anal, oral, and vaginal sex. It's not new. In fact, we've been looking at that movie, Hope Is Not a Method. I think I'll have a blog post about it pretty soon.

They like to bring up anal sex because it sounds dirty. The CRC keeps talking about it, it's like an obsession with them.

Oh yeah, and this was under the headline: Condoms and Anal Sex Approved.

Ha -- the citizens committee threw these nuts a curveball:

FRC's [Family Research Council] Vice President for Policy, Peter Sprigg, a Montgomery County resident, represented Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) on a Citizens Advisory Committee that reviewed the curriculum. Even the liberal-dominated committee had voted to include a statement saying, "Civil expressions of disapproval of homosexual behavior out of sincere religious, moral, or health-related concerns should not be labeled as homophobia." But school system staff removed that caveat from the lessons approved yesterday.

Yeah, the liberal committee was OK with that. How liberal does that make them? I don't know why the school district didn't include it, they didn't include some things I wanted, either. Whatever, you move on.

Additionally, the curriculum refuses to acknowledge the existence of "ex-gays." Parents should be aware that on the subject of homosexuality, some public schools have gone beyond education to indoctrination.

No, nothing about "ex-gays," which at least they put in quotes. There's nothing in there about unicorns, either.

The CRC's rep on the committee, Ruth Jacobs, gets in on it, too.

Dr. Jacobs, an infectious disease specialist, was upset by the bias on the committee, “I have found that MCPS and the CAC avoid saying anything that could reflect negatively on homosexuality, regardless of the health risks.

Yes, that's true, both the district and the committee were careful not to be disrespectful. That's a real black eye for the community, I'm sure.

“It is wrong to use the lives of our children as political footballs. Forty-five percent of the deaths from AIDS infections in the U.S. are due to men having sex with men even though they are about 2 percent of the population,” she continues, “To not warn the children of these risks is irresponsible.”

I agree with that last sentence. That's why I'm glad the Montgomery County Public Schools have an entire section of the Health curriculum devoted to just that, sexually transmitted infections, how you get them, how to prevent them. It doesn't belong in the sexual orientation section, because ... that's not what it's about. The sexual orientation section, oddly enough, is about sexual orientation, which has nothing to do with disease.

Ooh, this is nicely written fiction right here:

CRC also points to the introduction of transgenderism as normal, natural, unchangeable, and healthy.

It's true, in tenth grade they learn that some people experience being a different gender from their physical bodies. There's even a little vignette about a transgender teenager. Nowhere does the curriculum say that it is "normal, natural, unchangeable, and healthy." Why would it? It's just something that happens sometimes, you don't have to get all judgmental about it. Transgender people don't ask to be that way, they just are. Hearing about it in school isn't going make the boys want to be girls all of a sudden, everybody knows that, really.

It's as if this were a criticism of the curriculum. It is certainly a fact that some people's subjective gender is inconsistent with their physical features. I can't see what's wrong with mentioning it in a class on sexuality.

In fact, major reputable medical facilities such as Johns Hopkins University Hospital and the Cleveland Clinic no longer perform reassignment surgery because they consider it unsuccessful in treating transgenderism.

We've already talked HERE about the history of sexual reassignment surgery at Johns Hopkins. I looked around the web and don't see anything about the Cleveland Clinic. Whatever, sexual reassignment surgery is accepted by the medical community. The fact that the guy can name two places that don't do it is ... well, it's nothing.

“In many ways this curriculum is more radical than the previous one. It certainly contains many of the elements we sued over in the first place,” says Turner.

Oooohh hee hee hoo hoo yuck yuck -- I love this.

Of course it's "worse" than the other one. The Montgomery County community doesn't have anything against gay people. The first curriculum tried to compromise, tried to find a middle ground, but the CRC wouldn't have it -- it had to be all or nothing for them. Well, they got nothing. And so the schools had to start over, but this time they didn't try very hard to accommodate the litigious whiners.

What did you expect?

Hey, this is a weird one:

Literature by Homosexual advocacy Group

Children will read and analyze four stories developed by a gay advocacy group:...

And then it goes on to quote some vignettes from the Holt textbook.

I must have missed something. Were these "developed by a gay advocacy group?" The book doesn't seem to say where they came from.

And anyway, if I may say so -- what a stupid criticism. So it was developed by a gay advocacy group? So what? Who cares? What is wrong with that?

Oh yeah, then they say:

No heterosexual stories were included.

Well, everything else in the whole Health curriculum is about heterosexuals, how can you complain about a couple of days' less attention?

See, this piece of junk was full of lies and misconstruals. It sure would be nice to be able to sit back and not worry about it. But this is how it starts. These liars start out getting all puffed up about things, and squawking everywhere about it, and after a while the whole barnyard's in an uproar.

We're waiting to find out where the new curriculum will be pilot-tested, and when, exactly. Oh, and of course I suppose we're waiting to find out what the suers will find to complain about this time.