Eric Zorn & Homosexuality-Affirming “Ally Week” at St. Charles North High School
In early November 2010, suburban St. Charles North High School became embroiled in a controversy during yet another public school event designed to affirm homosexuality.
In response to “Ally Week,” a pro-homosexual week sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), three students wore t-shirts that said “Straight Pride” on the front and had a verse from Leviticus on the back that read, “If a man lay with a male as those who lay with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination and shall surely be put to death.”
Administrators asked the students to cross out parts of the verse, but the next day when two students wore shirts that simply read “Straight Pride” with no Bible verse, administrators asked them to cover their shirts with sweatshirts because they deemed the phrase disruptive. Space does not permit a discussion of First Amendment speech rights, diversity, tolerance, fairness, or disruptiveness, all of which deserve a full discussion.
Instead, I want to respond to an editorial by homosexuality-affirming demagogue, Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, who wrote the following:
“Gay Pride” is an antidote to gay shame – the sense of alienation and otherness in adolescence that prompted writer Dan Savage to start the It Gets Better project to reduce the incidence of suicide among gay teens; kids who kill themselves in part because they’re treated unmercifully by the sorts of peers who would wear shirts to school consigning them to being murdered at the command of an angry God.
…the expression “Straight Pride” can only be read as a gratuitous and contemptuous response to the suggestion that gay people not be marginalized.
…Most of us long ago got our minds around the idea that “Black Power,” a slogan calling for dignity and opportunity for historically oppressed African Americans, is not the bland mirror image of “White Power,” a slogan employed by bigots clinging fearfully and often violently to the vestiges of Caucasian prerogative.
School administrators have not just the right but also the obligation to quell such hate speech within their walls.
Before responding to Zorn’s comments, I want to say that the verse from Leviticus was unnecessarily provocative. For a proper understanding, this verse requires context and theological exposition–two things in which liberal journalists seem little interested even as they pontificate on things theological.
Also, I hope readers will research the man to whom Zorn refers: Dan Savage is a homosexual writer and speaker who uses sophomoric, hateful, and obscene rhetoric to promote sexual perversion and denigrate Christians.
Zorn is wrong in asserting that “Straight Pride” can “only be read as a gratuitous and contemptuous response to the suggestion that gay people not be marginalized.”
Although “gay pride” may signify a proclamation against shame, it also implies that conservative views are wrong, hateful, and must be silenced. Zorn implicitly affirms this when he compares those who hold conservative moral beliefs about homosexuality to hateful, fearful, violent, bigoted oppressors. That’s a lot to impute to teens who wear “Straight Pride” t-shirts. And it’s a message they don’t need to hear from Mr. Zorn, because they likely hear it repeatedly at school.
“Straight pride” is not contemptuous of the message that homosexuals should not be marginalized. “Straight pride” rebels against the idea that only pro-homosexual messages have a right to be spoken in public schools. “Straight pride” conveys the idea that conservative moral beliefs are right, true, and entitled to a place in public discourse, including schools.
Adolescents don’t take kindly to authoritarianism or censorship, which is what many conservative teens rightly perceive in the endless implicit and explicit criticism of traditional moral beliefs in public schools. Again and again, conservative kids hear that their moral beliefs about behavior constitute hatred of persons and must be silenced. The phrase “Straight pride” is not a contemptuous message of hatred for persons who identify as homosexual; nor is it a threat. It is an act of non-conformity that conveys the message that conservative students have as much a right to express their moral beliefs as liberal students and teachers have to express theirs.
Teens can see what many taxpayers don’t want to see: activist ideologues inside and outside public schools are imposing their unproven political, moral, and philosophical beliefs on students.
And some teens have had enough.
If taxpayers would oppose this sustained and systemic propaganda, teens wouldn’t feel the need to.
Those who truly love children–parents, grandparents, public school teachers and administrators, church leaders, and legislators–should no longer tolerate government employees preaching homosexuality-affirming dogma in schools that their taxes subsidize.
In schools that purport to care about diversity, the free exchange of ideas, and critical thinking, students are entitled to study competing ideas about, for example, whether homosexuality is analogous to race; whether disapproval of homosexual acts constitutes hatred of persons; whether homosexuality is biologically determined; whether homosexuality is fixed; whether interracial marriage is analogous to homosexual marriage; and whether children have an intrinsic right to a mother and a father.
Don’t avoid discussions about homosexuality. Talk to your neighbors, friends, teachers, and church leaders. Write letters to your local press and elected legislators. Ask your pastors and priests to speak up in the communities in which they live. Ask them to teach adults and teens in your church how to think through the secular arguments used to normalize homosexuality. Don’t flee from persecution. Persevere for the sake of our children, our schools, our freedom, and truth.
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