Gay Conservative

Perusing the current stories on foxnews.com, I ran across the story of a kindergarten teacher named Tara Miller.  She teaches at Faith Ringgold School of Arts and Science in Hayward, California.  This week, her students’ parents were shocked to learn that their 4- and 5-year-old children had been made to sign “pledge cards” that Miller had brought from a group called GLSEN.  No parental consent had been requested, and when the parents found out what had happened they were furious.

GLSEN has had absolutely nothing to say about the incident.  The school and the governing district have closed ranks and refused to say what, if any, discipline will take place.  There’s been no public apology of any kind.  I realize that I run the risk of really making a few people angry with what I’m writing about here, but in case anyone was questioning whether this is really that big a deal, I’m here to tell you it is.  Young children are not capable of understanding the difference between gay and straight, and making them sign pledge cards to not call names or bully a person based on their sexual orientation is going to confuse the hell out of them.

A few months ago, another batty California teacher took her elementary-aged class on a “field trip” to a lesbian wedding.  Where was the uproar over that?  The mainstream media had next to nothing to say about it.  In that case as well, nobody sought parental consent, they just took the kids.  What gives any teacher the right to bring politics into the classroom in such disrespectful ways?  And in a day and age when many schools are cutting their music programs to balance the budget, it infuriates me to see teachers opening up their schools to multimillion-dollar lawsuits.

GLSEN stands for Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.  Their mission is an admirable one; it’s to help stop harassment and violence against GLBT students and teachers in the public school system.  GLSEN started Project Safe Space, a program that offers one or two classrooms in participating schools where students can go to escape bullying and harassment.  I think it’s great that they’re doing those sort of things.  Right now, Hillary Duff is working in conjunction with GLSEN on a public service announcement and a few other programs designed to help stop bullying aimed at gay and lesbian teens, and I think that’s fantastic.  But young, elementary-aged kids?  Can’t GLSEN at least come out and say that they had nothing to do with that incident?

Things like this only work to discredit our cause.  As long as there’s stuff like this going on, we won’t really be taken seriously.  Bringing our politics into schools and trying to foist them upon impressionable young kids isn’t going to make things any better, it’s just going to piss off their parents and the discussions at home will be even more scathing.  Is that what we’re trying to accomplish?

Here’s one of the pledge cards, signed by a kindergartener who can barely write his own name, much less understand what he’s putting it on:

And even better…a sign, at the same elementary school, for “National Coming Out Day.”  This is equally disgusting to me:

My cousins’ kids are very young.  We have a lesbian cousin, Mary, and she’s been living with her partner Sharon for as long as I can remember.  They understand that Mary and Sharon are our family, but they don’t understand what their relationship is.  I can’t imagine one of them coming home from school and asking one of us, “what does gay mean?”  How do you explain that to a six-year-old?  I can think of a couple of things I might say, but it still wouldn’t really explain it.

This sort of thing looks to many like recruitment, pure and simple.  And if we’re not willing to respect them, how dare we ask them to respect us.