1 post tagged “public education system”

Update: 3.13.08 I was receiving quite a few comments that were completely unacceptable on this post. I even changed my settings for comments to where none would be posted without my approval. But I decided to switch it back. I thought everyone should read the comments like the ones I deleted that will be posted here. They claim there is no homosexual agenda being pushed on our children. I say they are flat out liars! They are justifying this book as good literature because it won some award. Hum, I wonder who voted for that. I bet we can all guess correctly on that. Would anyone care to share what the agenda was behind that?

Again the intolerant of the those who would protect our children are screaming "Judge Not". If only they would practice what they preach!
Humbled Infidel

Update: Here is another article about this by CampusReportOnline.net

School-Sponsored Smut
by: Bethany Stotts, March 10, 2008

A new genre has been added to the list of promoted high school literature: racist gay porn. Deerfield High School of Deerfield, Illinois decided to integrate the Pulitzer Award-winning play, Angels in America: a Gay Fantasia On National Themes into its curriculum. The play features pervasive swearing, graphic sexual content, bigoted remarks, and involves sexual experiences profaning both angels and the Mother Theresa. If high schools are sensitive about assigning Mark Twain’s great classic, Huckleberry Finn, due to its pejorative language, then why is Deerfield High promoting Angels in America?

The book was actually required reading at Deerfield High until recently, but the school demoted it to an “optional title” after parents filed a formal complaint. This means that students who are willing to read the book can still receive course credit for it.

The Illinois Family Institute, which has launched a campaign against the book, provides excerpts (warning: extremely explicit content) from the book and estimates that the book contains 221 vulgar words. “The school justifies this egregious choice because of its themes of hope. Evidently, all great literature with themes of hope have already been exhausted so teachers need to start offering pornography. We say—enough,” Executive Director of North Shore Student Advocacy, Lora Sue Hauser, told IFI.

The Tennessee Herald-Citizen has come out in favor of Angels in America, publishing both a favorable review and article about the play’s local performance this February. Andrew William Smith, an English instructor for Tennessee Technological University describes the play and its characters as “epic,” “complex and controversial,” “profound” and “dynamic.” “Confronting issues such as gays, Republicans and gay Republicans, the play hilariously combines fantasy and reality, politics and pop culture, spirituality and sexuality,” he writes.

Similarly, the Herald-Citizen’s February 11 article mainly quotes the actors involved and vaguely alludes to the controversy as between liberals and conservatives. They quote Mark Creter as saying “‘Angels’ is the kind of play that you’ll want to talk about after you leave. It celebrates what it is to be human, both good and bad…Yes, it’s edgy. Yes, it’s adult, but it’s a smart show...It completely fulfills my mission to embrace important works that, because of its controversial nature, are avoided by educational institutions.” Deerfield High is apparently not so hasty to avoid such “controversial” material.

Staff writer Elizabeth Ayres writes that the play, which features gay themes, has “also been the root of controversy between liberal theater-goers and their more conservative counterparts.” This marginalizes opposition to the play as homophobic, rather than grounded on family values. Or are they meant to be considered the same thing?

“It’s disgraceful for [the high school staff], who have been entrusted to help mold the minds of Deerfield’s impressionable youth, to have abused those youth by ostensibly violating the very laws intended to protect them...Deerfield parents should seriously consider every possible legal option to ensure that these people are held accountable,” said Concerned Women for America Policy Director Matt Barber in a recent press release. But those legal options may be slim. According the CWA, Hauser was told by the State Attorney’s office that both state and federal obscenity laws specifically exempt educators from prosecution.

Barber rejected the idea, offered by some, that this is a free speech issue. “My jaw hit the ground when I read what’s in this book. This isn’t a First Amendment issue; this is about school officials betraying the community trust,” he said.

Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia.

High School Offers Homosexual Porn, Parents Complain
By Pete Winn
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
March 10, 2008

(Editor's Note: This story contains references to graphic material about homosexuality and violence.)

(CNSNews.com) - Parents in Deerfield, Ill., are upset that a local high school is using books in advanced English classes this spring that they say are laced with graphic sexual content, pervasive expletives and mockery of religion.

Worse, the books - "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Parts 1 & 2)" - are required reading for advanced placement English students at Deerfield High School, but a parents' group wants them removed.

"Who would have ever thought that we would be handing out pornography in public schools?" asked Lora Sue Hauser, executive director of North Shore Student Advocacy, and a Deerfield parent.

"The fact that this was required is even more astonishing," she told Cybercast News Service.

Hauser cites numerous examples of offensive passages from the text, including the following:

Man: What do you want?
Louis: I want you to f*** me, hurt me, make me bleed.
Man: I want to.
Louis: Yeah?
Man: I want to hurt you.
Louis: F*** me.
Man: Yeah.
Louis: Hard?
Man: Yeah. You been a bad boy?

(They begin to f***.)

(Louis slips his hand down the front of Joe's pants. They embrace more tightly. Louis pulls his hand out, smells and tastes his fingers, and then holds them for Joe to smell ... they kiss again.)

Hauser said her group formally challenged the use of the books in school, and a school district committee reviewed their challenge.

"It was quite a lengthy process," Hauser told Cybercast News Service. "They spent five or six weeks deciding whether this book should be removed. Their final answer was it would be taken off the required reading list and put on an 'optional title' list.

Peter LaBarbera, with Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, a conservative group, said the two books are simply parts 1 and 2 of a 10-year-old play on the topic of AIDS - one that has been heralded as "one of the great American plays of the 20th century."

In fact, playwright Tony Kushner won the Pulitzer Prize, and "Angels in America" won two Tony Awards. An HBO adaptation for television was nominated for an Emmy.

"It is defended as a literary work that shows forgiveness, kindness and compassion," LaBarbera said. "Of course, the first question that comes to my mind is, how many classical works of literature are there that show these virtues without delving into graphic homosexual sodomy?"

Parents like Hauser said the work, which even mocks the Catholic nun Mother Teresa, is porn - not literature - and offers bad messages:

Man: I think it broke. The rubber. You want me to keep going? (Little pause) Pull out? Should I --
Louis: Keep going. Infect me. I don't care. I don't care.

"There's no other way to describe this," Hauser said. "It is so egregious and so vulgar. I've been doing advocacy in schools a long time - and this is the worst thing I've seen."

She added: "It's an example of what I call 'the competition of edginess.' High schools across the country have this 'thing' going, where they choose literature or they choose programming or curricula that pushes the envelope, and keeps pushing the envelope - and now after years and years of it, this is what we've ended up with - clearly pornographic materials."

While the books may be pornographic, they aren't legally prosecutable as obscenity, as the parents' group soon found out.

"The first route we went down was the criminal, because we saw this as distributing material that is harmful to minors," Hauser said. "But basically you can't prosecute schools and libraries, because all they have to do is say there is some educational purpose for these materials."

Pat Trueman, who ran the U.S. Justice Department's obscenity enforcement unit from 1988 through 1992, confirmed what the group found out is true.

"Federal obscenity law says that material can be prosecuted as obscene if it appeals to a prurient interest - that is, a shameful or morbid interest in sex - and if it is patently offensive, and if it doesn't have any literary, artistic, scientific or philosophical value. That's the situation you run into if it doesn't have pictures and is just the written word," Trueman told Cybercast News Service.

The fact that pornographic books can be protected from prosecution if they have "serious literary value" doesn't surprise parents, but it is disappointing.

"These laws need to be changed," Hauser said.

Hauser noted that this isn't the first time that Deerfield High School and the school district have come at cross-purposes to parents. The district ordered 14-year-old freshmen to take a seminar that amounted to homosexual indoctrination, she said, and had them sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to tell their parents.

Matt Barber, policy director for cultural issues at Concerned Women for America, a conservative group, is stunned by the actions.

"It's not enough that students at Deerfield High are being exposed to improper and offensive material relative to unhealthy and high-risk homosexual behavior, but they've essentially been told by teachers to lie to their parents about it," Barber said.

Calls to Deerfield school superintendent George Fornero and other administrators were referred to the district's communications director, who did not respond to interview requests prior to press time.

More links about this story.
http://libertyjustincase.com/2008/03/10/call-me-a-prude/

cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp [cnsnews.com]

kxmd.com/getArticle.asp [kxmd.com]

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