from Gay Activism in the Schools

I have long warned that the agenda of the gay movement for public education is to turn schools into recruiting centers for homosexual activism. As I saw last week with my own eyes, Santa Rosa High School is one place where this agenda has been fully implemented. I was privileged to be one of a panel of experts opposed to the gay agenda who had been allowed to make one 50-minute presentation during the first day of Diversity Week at the school. The Principal, Mr. Waxman, considered this single slot sufficient to provide balance in a week-long program that included more than 20 hours of pro-homosexual indoctrination of students. The requirement of balance had been imposed on the school by the school board following a parental revolt the prior year, when a single Day of Diversity at another local high school in the district failed to include any opponents of the homosexual political agenda.

This year, parents were better prepared, and on the first day of Diversity Week over a dozen of them went to school in the place of their teens. One group went immediately to the office of the new school superintendent to ask why the school had failed to provide balance as the parents had been promised. As it happened, the superintendent was the same person who had written the school board policy requiring balance, and he in turn called Mr. Waxman into his office to face the parents himself. Meanwhile, other parents fanned out across campus to find out just what had happened to turn their school into a hotbed of gay activism.

What they (and I) learned during the course of that day was astonishing, even to a veteran pro-family leader like myself. We discovered a comprehensive system for promoting homosexuality to the student population, complete with a taxpayer-funded staff facilitator and the approval of the administration.

The paid facilitator is a veteran gay activist named Jim Foster. Foster teaches what is called Peer Education at the school and also runs an off-campus community center called Positive Images where gay teens can mingle with older homosexuals. I met several members of Foster's eight-person "Peer Education" class, each of whom was an outspoken, self-identified homosexual, bisexual or transgendered teen. Each member of Foster's class receives the title of Peer Counselor, which appears to bestow upon its bearers a special status in the student peer group. One member of the class whom I interviewed told me that it was the Peer Education class which had designed and sponsored Diversity Week The young man seemed remarkably unimpressed that the school had turned over the entire campus for a full week to accommodate the social engineering projects of his small team of gay activists-in-training.

Gay activists they were, indeed. The week's schedule included at least four sessions on "homophobia" (defined as any disagreement with the social objectives of the gay movement), and many additional hours devoted to gender issues, transexualism and other topics dear to gay activism. While prominent, homosexuality was not the only subject. Other sessions featured radical environmentalism, animal rights, veganism and reasons to hate America.

I took the opportunity to sit in on a "Panel on Homophobia." It was worse than I expected. Seven or eight young people sat in a row on tables at the head of the room and addressed a standing-room-only crowd of their peers. They took turns giving personal testimonies about how joining the gay movement has changed their lives from misery to bliss. Each one began by establishing his or her credentials as a victim of "homophobia," then explained how he or she had "come out" as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. Each finished by reciting how much he or she now felt loved and accepted in the gay movement.

Frankly, the only comparable experience I have ever had to this has been in church settings where people have testified as to how Christ changed their lives. Only here, the "savior" was identified as the gay community.

I spent a lot of time looking at the faces of the teens in the room. These seemed like typical, high school kids from middle- and upper-middle-class homes. Alarmingly, I saw no hint of disapproval in their faces; they listened raptly. When the speakers offered the old chestnut that "no one would choose a lifestyle that evokes such hostility from others," the heads nodded. I wanted to challenge the blatant sophistry that had duped these young minds, but I was only a spectator. One young man, who declared that he was a bisexual, openly attacked Christianity in his presentation, and no one objected.

A parent later told me that this young man, on his "bi days," comes to school in drag and uses the girls' restrooms. The school officials do not object.

Angered at what I had seen, I went to visit Mr. Waxman. He, still stinging from his earlier meeting with parents in the superintendent's office, greeted me warily, but was unwilling to concede any error in allowing the Diversity Week program or in the manner in which it was being conducted. He defended the unqualified use of the term "homophobia" (as if one had to be "phobic" to disapprove of any part of the long list of gay-activist objectives) and rejected out-of-hand the notion that 20-plus hours of one-sided pro-homosexual instruction amounted to indoctrination.

It was clear that this man was decidedly not on the side of the parents. However, he did grudgingly agree to try to find additional slots in the program for our speakers. I later headed one such addition in the art department, while a second group of parents headed another.

Upon leaving Mr. Waxman's office, I was confronted by a teenage girl who said that she was the head of the "Gay-Straight Alliance" club on the campus. She defiantly announced to me that the new club already had more than 40 members and was making huge strides in converting students to the gay cause. She searched my eyes as she told me this, and was visibly pleased that I was pained by the news. As she walked away, one of her companions said aloud, "I hope he dies."

Later, as I was leaving the campus, one of the parents called to me from across the parking lot and gestured me over to a car parked near the office. As I approached, I saw that its license plates read "Pos Imag." It was the car of Jim Foster, the school's gay-activist peer facilitator.

"Look on the seat," said the parent. There, as if placed to be noticed by passers-by, was a black and white poster. It was a picture of young boys around the age of puberty sitting together on some front porch steps. In big block letters at the bottom of the picture read the message, "INCITE QUEERNESS."

Nothing could have more perfectly captured the spirit that permeated this "day of diversity."

Updated: 8 February 2008

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