Windy City proposes 'gay'-friendly school

Find this article here.

A battleground is forming in Chicago over a proposed "gay"-friendly high school for homosexual, lesbian, and transgendered students, or any other students who want to attend. According to reports, taxpayer money would be used to fund the school.

The school would be called the Pride Campus of Social Justice High School, and plans are under way to possibly open its doors in 2010. Advocates of the school say it is needed in order to combat the bullying, dropout, and depression rate among homosexual students. The Chicago Sun-Times quotes a member of the school's design team who says students at the school would be taught about "gay and lesbian historical figures" so those students "have heroes."

Laurie Higgins and her group, the Illinois Family Institute, are at the forefront of the fray. "A high school that is dedicated to or centrally focused on homosexuality necessarily requires that public educators have come to some prior conclusions about the nature and morality of homosexuality," she points out. Those are aspects of homosexuality that she says stand "far outside the purview of public educators." (hear audio report)

Pro-family advocate Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About homosexuality [Caution: This website contains graphic images] takes issue with the fact that the school would be run on taxpayer monies. "The taxpayers -- whether they're Christians, Orthodox Jews, Muslims -- they will be funding [this] pro-homosexual indoctrination school for so-called 'gay' youth," he explains.

The activist also takes issue with the prospective principal of the school --29-year-old Chad Weiden -- who was asked what it would have been like if had had a school like Pride Campus to attend. "

...[H]e says quote: 'I would have made progress a lot earlier. I would have had a model of what it meant to be a gay man -- that a gay man could be in a committed relationship, a marriage; could have children. I didn't know that was possible.'

"Well, it's not possible," LaBarbera reacts. "Two men cannot produce a child -- and they can't, quote, 'have children.'"

Higgins agrees that public funding for the school would be inappropriate. And as for the rationale for the school being needed to combat bullying of homosexual students, she believes rules of conduct should be established and enforced on an equal basis. "The task is to combat harassment and abuse and bullying, while not affirming disordered thinking and immoral behavior," she explains.

And while she acknowledges that some homosexual students are bullied, Higgins' experience in public education reveals another group that she feels suffers more. "I can say with assurance that the kids who are very conservative Christians are probably the ones who are the most ridiculed or made fun of," she states.

Chicago Public Schools is soliciting public input for a vote. LaBarbera and Higgins both encourage concerned Chicago parents to petition that the school not be allowed to open.

Corrections to Gender Jumble

Two different attorneys wrote to me to point out an error in my NRO article, Gender Jumble. They both called attention to the fact that I had quoted the language from an early version of the bill. The difference is between "reflects adversely" upon anyone based on sexual orientation and "promotes a discriminatory bias."
My first message was from Matt McReynolds, Associate Counsel for the Pacific Justice Institute:

As a matter of accuracy, please note that the original versions of SB 777 and its predecessors containing the "reflects adversely" language were amended before it was adopted. In place of "reflects adversely," which caught a lot of flak last year when it was proposed as SB 1437, the statute as enacted now prohibits instruction or activity that "promotes a discriminatory bias." The substantive effect will likely be the same, but I thought I should alert you to the distinction before someone from the left tries to use that point to discredit your piece.

As I understand it, Pacific Justice Institute was involved in tracking SB777 and commenting on its potentially disastrous consequences.
My second missive came from another attorney:

Dear Jennifer: I enjoyed your article about SB 777. However, you quoted the OLD statute rather than the NEW one. The old law was bad enough, but the new version is much worse. Whereas the old language barred any instruction that "reflected adversely on any person" in the protected groups, the new language leaves out "any person" and bars any statement that "promotes a discriminatory bias." This phrase is nowhere defined in California law. It does not require a showing that any specific person has been adversely affected. It simply focuses on the potential that a sentence uttered by a teacher, or by a student at a school activity, might make it more likely that any person in their audience subjectively might become more rather than less biased toward a member of the protected groups. It is clear from statements by the author of the legislation that ANYTHING that criticizes the LGBT agenda, such as opposition to gay marriage, or even quoting a news story in which such opposition is voiced, would be punished as a violation of the new law. In other words, gay rights groups now have the power under California law to completely censor any statement that disagrees with their political views. Indeed, any statement critical of SB 777 itself is now a violation of law and can result in punishment of teachers and students and lawsuits by LGBT groups against the schools. Schools must take the political position of the LGBT groups or be punished. It is a violation of the First Amendment, both in its free speech and freedom of religion clauses. Indeed, it amounts to an "establishment" of a religious philosophy that sees all kinds of sex outside of marriage as moral.

He offers a more complete analysis of his argument here. I am not qualified to evaluate his claims, as I am not an attorney. Does anyone else have any analysis of this issue? As I said in my original article, any bill that can not be easily interpretted is worth defeating on that grounds alone. But this bill not only passed through the legislature, but it was signed by the Governator.
Readers might be interested to know that the Capitol Resource Institute is sponsoring a petition drive to overturn the law.

Gender Jumble on National Review

The powerful California gay rights lobby has passed a bill regulating the content of public school curriculum, requiring that it not "reflect adversely" on persons based on sexual orientation or sexual identity. I illustrate how this will amount to a huge power grab by the state in my latest article.

Attack on Fathers on the Comic Page

I just wrote the following letter to the editor of my newspaper. I hope others will do so as well. I will blog more about this later. Dr J

To the Editor of the San Diego Union Tribune,
The comic strip “Opus” by Berkeley Breathed should be discontinued immediately.
This Sunday’s strip depicted three characters talking about a child of their acquaintance with two mothers. They speculate “Makes you wonder how he’ll do without a male role model in the house.” The visual answer to that an angry, inebriated, misogynist father throwing a TV out the window and swearing at the baseball player.
The comic should be pulled immediately, for these reasons.
1. It wasn’t funny.
2. It was mean.
3. It was anti-male, anti-father hate speech. If you doubt that, imagine if the images had been reversed: an innocent white male married father confronts an unattractive out of control gay person. The Human Rights Campaign would go ballistic. In my opinion, this comic is reason enough for happily married women to go ballistic at the intentional assault on their husbands.
4. It was in extremely poor taste to run an anti-father cartoon the week before Fathers Day.

Sincerely,
Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D.

Rejoinder to Glenn Sacks.

Rejoinder to Glenn Sacks

I want to take this opportunity to thank Glenn Sacks and the Gentlemen of the Fathers’ Rights Movement for their thoughtful response to my article “Are Dads Disposable?” I apologize for not responding sooner. But Glenn’s posting came just as I was leaving for an intense and exhausting travel schedule. This is my first opportunity to formulate a reply. I continue to believe that the lesbian custody cases will not prove helpful to the interests of fathers, quite apart from Glenn’s hopes.
Here are the crucial issues for the lesbian custody cases. How shall parental rights be established for a same sex couple who wish to jointly parent a child? For opposite sex couples, their marriage suffices to establish the paternity of the husband. The marriage law radicals and same sex marriage advocates want to apply a similar rule to legally valid same sex unions. The second issue is how much discretion shall family law courts have in determining parentage? I maintain that the “bright line” rules of the common law are good precisely because they limit judicial discretion. Instituting a new category of “de facto parents” parents” gives judges way too much discretion, and is completely unnecessary for meeting the needs of same sex couples who wish to parent together.
The common law for opposite sex couples held that a woman’s husband is presumed to be the father of any children born to her during the life of their marriage. In the Miller-Jenkins case, Lisa and Janet decided together to raise a child. But suppose instead that Lisa had come home pregnant with the child of the proverbial milkman. Who, besides Lisa, has rights and responsibilities to that child? Does Janet automatically have responsibility for the child who resulted from her partner’s infidelity? Does the father of that child automatically lose his paternal rights? There is neither justice nor common sense in applying the “presumption of paternity” to this case.
For opposite sex couples, that presumption of paternity was not intended to protect either the wife or the husband. The presumption was intended to protect the Marriage: under the presumption, the Marriage could survive the wife’s infidelity. In a same sex union, the presumption does not and cannot serve any such function. If one partner comes home pregnant by a man who is by assumption, outside the union, there is no purpose to be served by the law pretending something which can not be pretended, namely, that the other partner is the parent of the child.
For parental rights to be clearly established within a lesbian couple, some specific steps need to be taken, in addition to them establishing a legally recognized union and having sex. The paternity rights of the father need to be terminated. The parental rights of the second mother need to be established. Everyone would be better served by making these decisions explicitly, rather than implicitly. Glenn quite correctly noted that if a man donates his sperm to a sperm bank, he automatically relinquishes those rights. My point is that, one way or another, he must relinquish his rights before the lesbian partner can take up any parenting rights.
This is what the dissenting judge in the Washington state case was saying. The legislature has specified criteria for establishing legal maternity in the case of opposite sex couples. These criteria cover all the possible cases, including giving birth, sperm donation, egg donation, surrogacy and of course adoption. Judge Jackson maintained that these criteria can be applied to same sex couples, without creating a new category of “de facto parent.” The couple lived together for several years after the birth of the little LB. Therefore, there was plenty of time for the lesbian partner to take steps to legally adopt the child. Since she did not, she was not a parent. No matter how nice she was to the little girl, no matter what the ladies talked about over the course of their relationship, she is not a parent. The court has no business making these detailed enquiries into the understandings of the parties. She didn’t adopt the child when she had the chance to do so. Therefore, we may presume that the birth mother did not give her consent to share parenting rights with her.
This would have been a superior ruling in both the Washington case and in the Miller Jenkins case. The two women would have had to confront the question of parentage directly. The lesbian partner would have had to ask herself, do I want to adopt this child and have all the responsibilities that entails? More importantly, the birth mother would have had to ask herself, do I want to allow this person to adopt my child and share all the legal rights of parenting that I have?
One may reasonably suspect that in both the Washington case and the Miller-Jenkins case, the birth mother was reluctant to assign parental rights to her partner. Perhaps they had misgivings all along. It is impossible to say in retrospect. But in both cases, the couples had the legal opportunity to do a second party adoption and did not.
The Washington Post published an article about the Miller and Jenkins case since I published my original article. The WaPo article reported facts originally unknown to me, which strengthen my original contention that these cases do not portend any good for displaced fathers. A social service worker advised the lesbian partner that she really ought to do a second party adoption. Miller and Jenkins now dispute whether they even discussed adoption as a possibility. But whatever they may or may not have discussed, the fact is that they didn’t do an adoption.
Moreover, when the birth mother first retained an attorney, she hired someone she found in the Yellow Pages. As it turned out, the attorney she randomly picked out, was a gay rights legal activist. That attorney advised her client that her partner had parental rights and she just needed to get used to that. The attorney applied her own rereading of the common law dictum, “children born into the union are the children of both.” She declined to advise her client that this legal presumption is rebuttable and that she had the right to try to rebut it. In my view, this was legal malpractice, but let that slide. The activist attorney made her position clear: the law should treat same sex couples exactly like opposite sex couples, even when they aren’t alike. This is the position of the radical marriage law advocates, as well as of the gay rights advocates.
This brings me to the second point: how much discretion should judges have? The marriage law radicals want to institute “de facto parent” as a status that supplements biological parents. Family law judges would have discretion to assign parent status to biologically unrelated individuals. In my view, the innovation of “de facto parenting” gives far too much discretion to judges.
Glenn seems to think that I ‘sympathize’ too much with the biological father in the Washington case who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple. My sympathy should be irrelevant. Glenn’s sympathy should be irrelevant. More to the point, the judge’s sympathy should be irrelevant. The only relevant fact is that he is the child’s biological father. Unless and until he relinquishes his parental rights, or the court terminates his rights due to his unfitness, he should be recognized as the father.
The institution of “de facto parenting” is in fact designed to break down the distinction between biological parents and the parenting function. To become a de facto parent, the person need not use the already established procedures for becoming a parent, through biology or adoption, or some form of surrogacy contract. A person becomes a de facto parent by convincing a judge that he has met some multi-part standard for care of the child. This system gives the maximum discretion to the judge.
I can not see for the life of me, how fathers can expect to do well in a system that allows people to present their sad stories to the arbitrary decisions of family courts. This is precisely the system that has served fathers so poorly up until now. Women are likely to prevail over men in any system that relies on generating sympathy and presenting oneself as a victim. Men don’t look like victims and they don’t like presenting themselves as victims. Judges, male or female, are more likely to view the “little woman” as the victim. And as Warren Farrell has pointed out, men are suckers when women cry.
On a slightly irrelevant note, I must say I found it amusing that Glenn described me as a “conservative columnist.” I actually think Glenn is more conservative than I am, in that he appears to accept things as fixed features of the social landscape, simply because they have been established through time and (relatively) long usage. But I am unwilling to accept as given things which I believe to be wrong.
For instance, I do not take as given the current legal institution of “anonymous sperm donors.” This legal fiction allows women to have children without having a relationship with the child’s father. This means that the woman is making a life-long decision that her child shall have no relationship with his or her father. Now I can understand why a woman might wish to do this. What I do not understand is why the law should assist her.
The law deliberately separates children from their fathers and mothers and fathers from each other. This separation is a completely artificial creation of the state, not possible in the ordinary course of male and female interactions. It is a profoundly anti-social act. There is no public purpose served by creating this permanent estrangement among individuals who ordinarily would be forming the most basic and most intimate of social unions. And incidentally, it contributes to the entirely pernicious social vision that fathers are unnecessary.
And why does the state do this? Simply because the woman wants it.
I accept as a fact that under current law, becoming an anonymous sperm donor is one way for a man to relinquish his paternity rights. But I do not take the institution of anonymous sperm donorship as a given. It is a deep injustice in which the state should decline to participate.
Glenn, I truly wish you well in trying to defend the rights of fathers who have been unjustly separated from their children. But I do not think the lesbian custody cases will serve that end.

Presumption of Parenthood

is not exactly equivalent to the Presumption of Paternity that has long reigned in family law. This is just one of the many issues involved in the Miller-Jenkins custody dispute that involves both Vermont and Virginia law. One of the attorneys birth mother Lisa Miller hired early in the case told her that under Vermont's civil union statute, there was a presumption that any child born within a civil union was presumed to be the child of both parties to that union. A rule that makes perfect sense in the case of an opposite sex union makes no sense in the case of same sex unions. Here is an excerpt from a long article on the Miller-Jenkins case::

JUDY BARONE HAD BEEN A FAMILY LAW ATTORNEY IN RUTLAND for more than 20 years when she agreed to represent Lisa. Barone concluded that her new client had been unjustly deprived of her right to argue that Janet was not Isabella's parent, she said. So she filed a motion asking Judge Cohen to withdraw the waiver of that right.

Cohen wanted to know if Barone was suggesting that Janet was not entitled to any parental rights solely because she had no biological connection to Isabella.

"No," Barone said. "The law in Vermont is clear that a child born during the time of the marriage to one of the people in the marriage . . ."

"And civil union," the judge interjected.

"And civil union," Barone agreed. "Would be rebuttably presumed to be a child of the civil union, the marriage. That leaves the right of either party to rebut the presumption. My client chose to rebut the presumption. She noticed the court of her choice, and it was waived involuntarily by her counsel that morning. Our request, judge, is that we put that issue back before the court."

Lisa and Janet's breakup had exposed a fundamental flaw in Vermont law, Barone suggested. Vermont's civil union statute made it a rebuttable presumption that Janet was Isabella's parent, yet spelled out no specific grounds for rebuttal. Other Vermont statutes, which predated the civil union law, detailed two routes to establishing legal parental rights: having a biological connection to a child, or adopting. Janet would not meet either of those standards, Barone said. "I think this case is really about the standard in Vermont that we have to be able to establish parentage," Barone told the judge. "What can be more basic and important?"

Janet's lawyer, Theodore Parisi, said that he found it a "huge stretch" to think that the Vermont statutes requiring proof of adoption or a biological connection to establish legal parental rights applied to people in civil unions.

Cohen agreed. Janet "is presumed to be -- in my view, your client without question is presumed to be the natural parent . . . by the basis of the civil union," Cohen told Parisi.

"We've got to look at the law," Barone countered. "That's our job here . . . If there is a problem with this law, then that's not your fault, my fault, this couple's fault. The solution will come. But we can't deny her her rights . . . There's a law that says who the parents are. We've gone by this for years in marriage, and in civil unions we have to work this out. It may be uncomfortable, and I grant you that it is for everybody concerned. But it's important."

Sorry to disagree with my friend Glenn Sacks

But I think he has it wrong here.
He is comparing the plight of a lesbian "social mother" with the plight of divorced dads: both are being excluded from their children's lives by birth mothers. True, but there is a big difference between these kinds of cases: the lesbian "social mother" has no biological connection with the child, while the father does. The test for paternity is straightforward. The "test" for parental rights for an unrelated adult is necessarily subject to judicial interpretation.
I'm writing a full column on it. More later.

Overblown Reaction to the Gay Sheep Story

The scientist on the gay sheep story tells his side of the story here. Dr. Charles Roselli is a much more sympathetic character than his detractors. I'll take an honest scientist over gay radicals and animal rights extremists any day of the week.

No Wonder they need gay foster parents....

This report from the UK gives a new spin on why social service agencies need to recruit gay couples as foster parents. The agencies discourage certain kinds of straight parents.

Under Labour, social workers have been pressing for more gay adoption.
Advice from the councils' umbrella body, the Local Government Association,
has praised authorities that encourage gay adoption and instructed social
workers to strike off from their list of potential adoptive parents anybody who disagrees with gay adoption.