OPINION:
If you were the devil, what would be your most important mission, other than inventing false religions? It would be to corrupt innocent children.
I’d start by kicking God out of the public schools and excising from textbooks the truth about America’s deeply Christian heritage. I’d get rid of glaringly obvious ties between Christianity and the Founders’ vision of unalienable rights and limited government. Children would be indoctrinated to think of themselves as cosmic accidents of random mutation and survival of the fittest, not precious beings with eternal souls created in the image of God. The result would be an effectively atheistic system of moral relativism.
Next, I’d cloak sexual promiscuity in terms of self-fulfillment, mix it up with junk science and lobby the teachers unions to openly promote the Kinsey sex education model of children as “sexual beings” whose “orientation” has no moral relevance.
Finally, I’d expose the kids to outright propaganda through clever websites designed to promote deviance and to brand anyone with any qualms, such as parents, as hate-filled bigots and bullies.
If any school districts resisted, I’d slap them with legal threats. And that’s where the devil’s law firm comes in.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is running around the country, shaking its fists at school districts and demanding that kids be exposed to whatever the homosexual movement deems appropriate. In Prince William County, Va., after an ACLU threat, school officials removed the filter blocking homosexual websites. The Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group, has sent letters to eight school districts, including Prince William, advising them that they have every right to keep the filters. But Prince William has caved, at least for now.
In Missouri, the ACLU sued the Camdenton School District on Aug. 15 in U.S. District Court because it refused to remove its general “sexuality” filter. The district had responded in a May letter to the ACLU from Superintendent Tim Hadfield, who wrote that the district “does not explicitly block” LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) categories but that some were blocked because of the “sexuality” filter. He said the filter settings were “acceptable for our general audience within our network of pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade students,” according to Fox News. The district later unblocked some sites dealing with bullying, but the ACLU is complaining that the filter still blocks “hundreds” of LGBT sites.
A question: Why, if the LGBT agenda is just about civil rights and tolerance, is the “sexuality” filter blocking all those sites? Could it be that the LGBT “community,” whose pride parades are the only public marches that regularly feature nudity and obscene and sacrilegious signs, has an abundance of sites that parents would rather their children not visit?
The ACLU also has launched the Don’t Filter Me! campaign, which pressures software companies that sell filters to schools to remove any filter that blocks “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender websites.” So far, the ACLU claims it has pressured at least one software company, Lightspeed Systems, to remove a school filter that flagged “LGBT-supportive content.”
In a tight economy, the ACLU is counting on companies doing almost anything to avoid controversy. And it is hoping that strapped school districts will quickly surrender rather than spend money on lawyers’ fees. Its claim: “This viewpoint discrimination violates students’ First Amendment rights to free speech and the Equal Access Act. Simply put: It’s illegal.”
No, it’s not. Schools, like public libraries, do not have to provide any and all materials just because someone wants them to do so. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA) in United States v. American Library Association Inc. CIPA bars federal funds to public libraries that do not install software “to block images that constitute obscenity or child pornography, and to prevent minors from obtaining access to material that is harmful to them.”
Having lost the library fight, the ACLU is concentrating on schoolchildren. The websites for the gay groups that the ACLU is representing are not porn sites, but they are gateways to a world of temptation for vulnerable children unsure about their sexuality. They go far beyond promoting tolerance and openly promote homosexuality.
This is fine with the ACLU, which advocates breaking all sexual barriers. The ACLU even consistently opposes laws against possessing child pornography along with any attempt to shield children from exposure to Internet porn.
Years ago, in Dover, Del., I was on a panel debating whether taxpayers should have to support art that they found offensive. The debate over the National Endowment for the Arts was lively, but the most interesting part occurred at the pre-debate dinner. The liberal museum staffers who hosted the event probed the ACLU representative about the line between art and obscenity and, to their surprise, heard her contend that there is no meaningful line. One of them asked about child pornography. She shrugged and acknowledged that it was illegal but, with a knowing smile, added, “For now. But it won’t be for long.”
Even the liberal museum folks almost dropped their forks. But they quickly moved on to condemn censorship of all sorts and to show solidarity against people like me, who thought Congress has every right to refuse to use taxpayer money for obscene exhibits.
Likewise, schools have the right to refuse to aid and abet groups that seek to corrupt kids in the name of tolerance. More administrators need to adopt the attitude exhibited by Tom Mickes, attorney for the Camdenton, Mo., district, who told Cheryl Wetzstein of The Washington Times, “No offense to the Easterners, but we want to run our school district based on what our citizens and the kids in Missouri need, not what somebody in New York wants.”
The ACLU’s latest venture, couched in the language of preventing “viewpoint discrimination,” is part of a long march to destroy Judeo-Christian morality and replace it with legally enforced acceptance of immorality. Demoralized children are not merely collateral damage in this quest, but the very object.
There is nothing “civil” about corrupting kids. In fact, nobody has that “right.”
Robert Knight is a senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union and a columnist for The Washington Times.
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