EDITORIAL: Queering our schools

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By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Fifty-three Republican congressmen yesterday demanded that President Obama fire his embattled "safe schools czar," Kevin Jennings. Mr. Jennings' bizarre sexual agenda for American grade schools is one reason the president should dump this dangerous radical.

Mr. Jennings wrote the foreword to a 1998 book titled, "Queering Elementary Education." The book he endorsed was a collection of essays by different authors who supported teaching young children about homosexuality. Mr. Jennings' foreword explains why he thinks it is important to start educating children about homosexuality as early as activist-educators can get away with doing so. "Ask any elementary-school teachers you know and - if they're honest - they'll tell you they start hearing [anti-homosexual prejudice] as soon as kindergarten." And "As one third-grader put it plainly when asked by her teacher what 'gay' meant: 'I don't know. It's just a bad thing.' "

As another author in the book notes: "Any grade is 'old' enough [for the proper education] because even five-year-olds are calling each other 'gay' and 'faggot.' " Other writers claim there apparently is no problem getting into these discussions because, "The belief that children are not sexual beings is not substantiated by research."

The authors of "Queering Elementary Education" don't seem to be bothered by the dearth of evidence to justify their position in favor of teaching children about homosexual relationships. Because they do not provide the names of teachers who told various anecdotes included in the book, there's no way to check how many of the stories are secondhand exaggerations or even pure fiction.

One author in the book attacks the conservative notion that "artificial insemination, transient relationships, same-sex marriages and tangled family structures are not issues children should have to know about." Others contributors advocate that "sexual-diversity issues are central to multicultural education" and that schoolchildren should sing songs such as "In some families we have two Moms." Mind you, the authors don't provide scientific evidence that their policies accomplish the strange goals they push.

"Queering Elementary Education" argues consistently that children should be taught that same-sex-parent families are as normal and common as the traditional two-parent family or single-parent families. But it is one thing to argue certain behavior is acceptable; it is quite another to distort basic facts in an effort to change the worldview of children.

Mr. Jennings is one who claims that homosexual couples are more common than they actually are. One of his books titled "One Teacher in Ten" claims that 10 percent of people are homosexuals. Almost no one defends the old Alfred Kinsey survey that Mr. Jennings relied on to make this claim. That 1948 survey interviewed a high percentage of prison inmates and known sex offenders. There's plenty of more objective studies out there. For example, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that the number of homosexuals in America was less than 1 percent.

Advocating the indoctrination of kindergarten children based on anecdotal evidence or flawed science isn't Mr. Jennings' worst offense. But it's certainly not what Americans expect from a White House "safe schools czar" who is responsible for making policy decisions that impact children's safety.