Illinois school district ejects homosexual activist curriculum

by Ben Johnson

ERIE, ILLINOIS, June 25, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – An Illinois school district has bucked the national homosexual lobby by voting to remove books that promote same-sex “marriage” or mainstream alternate lifestyles.

After parents complained about The Family Book, which the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) recommends “to naturalize and celebrate family diversity,” the Erie Community Unit School District 1 voted to remove all GLSEN curriculum from the district. The vote was 5-2. 

Ann Schipper, the mother of three children in the system, said the curriculum “completely wipes away what my kids have learned at church and at home, and it creates confusion in them.”

GLSEN’s “Ready, Set, Respect!” curriculum, aimed at elementary school students as young as kindergarten, intentionally hopes to alter young children’s definition of family and sexual identity.

Its toolkit states: “The elementary school years offer a wonderful and important opportunity to instill and/or nurture positive attitudes and respect for individual, family and cultural differences, including diversity related to sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.”

The guidelines recommend books like Cheryl Kilodavis’ My Princess Boy, intended for grades K-2, or Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, which introduces students to the idea of same-sex “marriage.”

Other suggested activities include having children draw pictures of “Cinderella in a knight’s armor, Spiderman wearing a magic tiara,” and other gender-bending storybook heroes.

Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute, has written that the attempt to foist this curriculum on unsuspecting children is significant, because “cultural change rarely happens through dramatic, single events, but rather through the slow, accretion of little events that we ignore or dismiss as minor…Once in, they gradually increase the number and directness of homosexuality-affirming messages.” 

GLSEN called the parent-directed vote “deeply counter-productive” and is urging fellow homosexual activists nationwide to pressure the school district to reverse itself.

“It’s tragic that selfish adults deliberately create motherless or fatherless family structures,” Higgins wrote, “but schools have neither the obligation nor the right to affirm those immoral structures.”

She wrote that since “so few public school administrations and teachers with the wisdom and spine to oppose the efforts of homosexual activists to impose their beliefs on public schools — or infuse curricula with their beliefs — the courage of the Erie Community Unit School District stands out.”