I was in 10th grade when Bill Clinton was running for president. One day during French class, somebody made a comment about how they hoped he would win. A handful of other students mumbled their agreement. But then a girl in my class, who I will call Karen because her name was Karen, red-faced, cried out, “But he wants to let homosexuals serve in the military!” As I remember it, the response to her outcry was a collective shrug. Which is not nothing considering the time and place: a predominately white and Republican city in Michigan.
I don’t know what became of Karen, but I can’t help but wonder if she grew up to be someone like Linda Harvey, author of “Maybe He’s Not Gay: Another View on Homosexuality.” Harvey and her group, Mission America, see gay bogeymen everywhere and are, essentially, always on high-homo alert, constantly sounding the alarm bells.
And with school beginning across the country, Harvey is screaming from the rooftops that “the gays are after your children.”
In an Aug. 29 screed on World Net Daily, Harvey warns of “pink propaganda” in public schools.
“While your children frolicked at the lake, visited Grandma and sang songs at summer camp, the leaders of America’s education system prepared more essential ‘LGBT’ lessons to infuse into the hearts of Chloe, Emma and James,” Harvey warns. “Most will be packed with insidious, Christ-less lies that present great risk to every child’s medical, social and spiritual future.”
As evidence, she points to an Aug. 26 Huffington Post piece by openly gay teacher Anthony Nicodemo, titled “Five Ways to Make Your Classroom LGBT-Inclusive.” Nicodemo’s advice includes things like being someone LGBT kids can trust and not assuming every kid you encounter is straight when you talk to them about girlfriends or boyfriends.
This last idea is scandalous, according to Harvey. “But what if he is straight, as most boys are (or should be)?” Harvey asks.
OK, I’m just going to jump in right here. Because do you really need to hear more after “or should be?” It’s clear that Harvey doesn’t get it and that she cannot empathize with LGBT kids and what it feels like to have people assume you are something you are not day in and day out, always casting you as an undesirable “other.”
Harvey seems to think that Nicodemo is advocating some kind of public humiliation rather than simple inclusivity.
“Good plan, teacher! Put our boys on the spot. Start rumors. Fuel adolescent insecurities,” Harvey laments. “But it’s all for the greater cause of deceptively painting the ‘gay’ identity with glorious rainbow colors, and not in the blackness of sin it deserves.”
I’m not sure how Harvey goes from using “girlfriend or boyfriend” in a sentence to showing kids how “absolutely fabulous” being gay is, but it no doubt uses some very tortured, and NSFW, logic.
Harvey’s column is basically an anti-public school PSA.
“The smart parent will seek a responsible faith-based alternative, or else be prepared to teach constantly against the curriculum and its wicked indoctrination,” she writes. “Yet the sad reality is that your children may still decide to believe the school, not you.”
It is true. If you try to make your kid conform to your narrow-minded and hateful worldview that rejects reality in favor of a paranoid fiction where LGBT people are some kind of enemy force then, yes, there is a chance that your kid will one day decide you’re full of shit. That’s the chance you take, I guess.