A public hearing is taking place Wednesday morning in the Massachusetts State House to look into a controversial sex survey given to middle school and high school students.
Developed by the Centers for Disease Control and called the “Youth Risk Behavior Survey,” the survey asks students as young as 12 a series of very personal and highly ideological questions.
The survey asks students if they are homosexual and if they are transgender. It also asks if they have had oral or anal sex and if they have performed such acts with up to six people.
Whether or not they have carried a gun, smoked cigarettes, consumed alcohol and how much also appear on the questionnaire, as well as whether they have taken drugs, such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin. It asks how often their guardian uses a seat belt, if the youngster has a sexually transmitted disease, and where they sleep.
The group MassResistance says the survey is “psychologically distorting” and will lead the child to think he is “abnormal if he is not doing it all.” The group stated that “having children reveal personal issues about themselves and their family can have emotional consequences.” They also complain that “the survey results are used by radical groups from Planned Parenthood to LGBT groups to persuade politicians to give more taxpayer money [to] these groups.”
Though students fill out the survey anonymously, MassResistance warns that “they are administered by the teacher in the classroom and there is often pressure for all kids to participate.”
The test is given nationally and not without controversy. The Chicago Tribune reported two years ago that a Chicago teacher was reprimanded for telling students they had a “constitutional right” not to fill out the survey.
This post is a lead-in for my 2 PM post, which tries to explain what people on the secular left are hoping to achieve by trying to break down the natural resistance that children have to sexual exploitation.
It seems to me that we need to have another massive protest like we saw in Indiana! Some impertinent little girl at a gay rights parade in Toronto has dared to refuse to celebrate at a gay pride parade.
Look at her committing a hate crime against this innocent gay man. (I am not posting this picture on my blog, and viewer discretion is advised)
The story says:
Earlier this week, our managing editor Steve Jalsevac published a slideshow with his photos from the 2011 Toronto Gay Pride Parade. Many of the photos were shocking. But one commenter pointed out a detail in one photo that many people probably missed.
The photo says it all: Naked men marching in Toronto’s Pride parade, showcasing what supporters cheer on as the advancement of “gay rights” and “sexual liberation.” The naked men march past men, women, and yes even children. Everyone is encouraged to celebrate “diversity.”
Oh, but what’s this? A young girl with blond hair in a turquoise teeshirt knows that something is wrong.
The girl, maybe 8 or 9, doesn’t want to see naked men displaying their genitals. She feels assaulted by what she sees. She implicitly understands that her innocence is threatened by what she sees. She knows something wrong is happening.
Death threats and getting people fired is getting to be a common response of gay activists to anything less than enthusiastic celebration of the gay agenda. That’s what happened to the religious liberty law in Indiana, to the pizza store that refused to cater a gay wedding. Maybe this little girl needs to be taught a lesson, too, right gay activists?
Where does it end?
Interesting to note that Ontario, the province where this occurred, has elected a gay premier (governor), and that their sex education curriculum was written in consultation with a convicted sex offender.
Read it:
A man who was once Ontario’s deputy minister of education has pleaded guilty to three child pornography-related charges in a Toronto court.
Benjamin Levin, who was also a university professor, entered a guilty plea for making written child pornography, counselling a person to commit a sexual assault, and possession of child pornography.
He was originally charged with seven child-pornography-related offences.
The investigation that led to Levin’s July 2013 arrest began in mid-2012 after officials in Toronto were contacted by authorities in New Zealand and later police in London, Ont.
From late 2004 to early 2007, Levin held the post of deputy education minister in Ontario, and was on Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s transition team as she took office.
He also served as Manitoba’s deputy minister of advanced education and deputy minister of education, training and youth between 1999 and 2002.
Levin has been back in the spotlight in recent days as Ontario released an updated sex-education curriculum.
Kathleen Wynne is the lesbian premier. She divorced her husband and left her three kids when she “came out”. Something to celebrate! You’d better celebrate it, or else. And the sex education curriculum will make sure that going forward, fewer and fewer people will see anything wrong with what she did.
CLC has studied the 2015 proposed curriculum and we have found that the controversial elements of the program that angered parents in 2010 have remained unchanged, word for word, at the same age-inappropriate grade levels as before, when it was written under the direction of confessed child pornographer Benjamin Levin, then Deputy Education Minister. The only difference now is that Kathleen Wynne has made the curriculum even more explicit and more age-inappropriate than before, dramatically increasing the mentions of “Gender Identity” theory, sexual “identities” and “orientations”.
Anal intercourse is still being presented in a way that students will interpret as carrying no higher risk for STIs than vaginal intercourse, an irresponsible and misleading presentation of the former which carries a 3000% higher risk for contracting HIV. The curriculum also downplays the seriousness of contracting HIV, potentially leaving the impression with students that it’s not really that big a deal. A section on HIV and AIDS seems to have an undertone of making it acceptable and normal for individuals who are HIV positive to continue having sex with others. Of course this is not science-based teaching. It’s political and social engineering. It is irresponsible and may also put lives at risk.
The 2015 version has added a new, controversial and very flawed theory that will be taught to elementary school children, called “gender expression”. The new curriculum document also has a much stronger undertone of sex as a purely recreational activitywhose purpose is pleasure, apart from love or marriage. In fact, the words “love” and “marriage” never appear once in the sex-education strand of the curriculum. Not a single mention. Does that reveal the mindset of its writers, if not the philosophical underpinnings of the curriculum itself?
That’s what politicians on the left stand for. That’s what they want for your children. Canada is about 10-20 years ahead of us, but we are catching up to them with each new Democrat we elect.
Hillary Clinton and the Human Rights Campaign
Make no mistake that Hillary Clinton is on board with this agenda, and she gives speeches extolling the virtues of the gay agenda to the Human Rights Campaign, just as Obama did.
“Mr. Cochran held his own news conference Tuesday. He said that the city’s investigation found that he had not acted in a discriminatory way toward gay people, and said that he had asked for, and received, permission from the proper bureaucratic channels to write the book — an assertion [the Mayor’s] office disputes.”
So gay advocates are cheering the mayors decision, the mayor finds himself in something of a political controversy, but the fire chief is out. He’s out of a job for having written a book that was basically privately published and very narrowly distributed in which he stated something that is fundamental to evangelical moral conviction – something that basically amounts to nothing more, or least a little more, than actually quoting the Bible, quoting the Scriptures.
The mayor described the book, or at least this portion of the book, as having inflammatory content. But once again, looking at the material supplied by the media, the inflammatory content is what is drawn directly from Scripture – especially from very specific biblical verses dealing with homosexuality. So what we’re looking at here is an undeniable case in which religious conviction actually got the Fire Chief of Atlanta fired; fired simply because he dared to write a book in which he stated his Christian convictions.
This raises a host of very interesting and complex, not to say troubling, questions. Can anyone now be an evangelical Christian and serve as a Fire Chief or even in the fire department? This raises the question as to whether one can believe that homosexuality is a sin without discriminating against homosexuals. The clear implication of the Mayor’s decision is that the Fire Chief is out, not because he acted in any way, in any discriminatory fashion toward any gay member of the fire department staff or anyone else for that matter, but simply because he expressed his biblical conviction that homosexuality is a sin.
Now once again, this raises a host of very interesting questions the mayor and furthermore our culture is not going to be able to avoid. Is the Bible itself now going to be defined as hate speech because by any measure the language that the Fire Chief used is drawn, if not immediately from Scripture, then with language that is tantamount to it? Can anyone who holds to a biblical understanding of sexuality, anyone who is a member of an evangelical congregation serve in this kind of political and public role? Or does that moral conviction absolutely mean, in a categorical sense, that discrimination is the obvious outcome? Or is holding the belief itself, is holding that biblical conviction itself a form of discrimination; even if no discriminatory act ever follows?
[…]Let’s look at exactly how the mayor describe his decision as the New York Times reports and I quote,
“Despite my respect for Chief Cochran’s service, I believe his actions and decision-making undermine his ability to effectively manage a large, diverse work force. Every single employee under the fire chief’s command deserves the certainty that he or she is a valued member of the team and that fairness and respect guide employment decisions.”
Well let’s just look at that statement and imagine what the Mayor has now not only implied but openly stated by firing the chief. One can’t hold that all persons are of value, one can’t operate in terms of neutrality, in terms of personnel decisions, if one holds to traditional biblical Christianity. Some may argue that it isn’t the problem that the chief held these positions and convictions but it’s a problem that he published them, that he put them in print.
But as the world is supposedly universally affirming the importance of freedom of expression, are we now to be told that evangelical Christians – or for that matter Orthodox Jews and traditional Catholics – simply must hold their tongue and hold their peace? Never putting their biblical convictions into print or into some form of public statement? The action in Atlanta is not only ominous, it’s absolutely frightening. The religious liberty implications of the normalization of homosexuality and the legalization of same-sex marriage are massive, they are unavoidable, and they are now inevitable. And they’re showing up in this case not in New York City or Seattle but in Atlanta, Georgia – right in the heart of the South, in a city that the New York Times acknowledges includes millions of evangelical Christians and others who would also hold to the Chief’s conviction.
No matter how lavishly people may claim to believe in freedom of expression and no matter how much they may argue this isn’t an issue of religious liberty, the bare facts are simply unavoidable. The Fire Chief of Atlanta has been fired. Not because he acted in any way that was discriminatory, not because any employee brought any grievance against him for acting in a discriminatory manner, but merely for having stated, for having articulated in print, his biblical convictions on issues of morality.
I urge people who want to take a position on homosexuality and/or same-sex marriage to write under an alias. The more serious a sin is, the more people who engage in it will go to any lengths necessary in order to stop criticism of it. The invocation of “tolerance” and “diversity” on the gay left is a smokescreen. Their goal is to make everyone who disagrees with them not only agree but actually celebrate their behavior. That’s one of the reasons why we need to careful about letting our natural compassion cause us to approve of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. We have our protect the right to say “it’s wrong”. Al Mohler has a longer article on this conflict between religious liberty and erotic liberty up today, too.
UPDATE: Today’s episode of the The Briefing takes a look at the response from the mainstream media, including the response of a gay New York Times columnist. Mohler’s main point is that secularists want to reduce the religious liberty to worship inside a church and private feelings. But religious liberty is more than that – it is the right to honor and respect God in every aspect of our lives, including freedom to speak our disagreement with immorality, and the right to educate our children in schools that respect OUR values – not the values that the secular left seeks to impose on us. Mohler also links to a response by pro-marriage scholar Mark Regnerus.
WINTERY KNIGHT 