Religious right supports bad policy over the needs of students

Peter Sprigg

A recent article in the American Family Association's One News Now more than illustrates how the organization bends over backwards with other so-called morality groups to obscure the truth about a critical issue.

The Anoka-Hennepin school district in Minnesota has been in the media because its negative treatment of gay students and its inability to combat the bullying of these students. Recently, the district settled a brought by six students.

From The Slate:

Until Tuesday, the Anoka-Hennepin school district, north of Minneapolis, was known for a virulent clash over the rights of bullied gay students. Now the district has agreed to change its approach to handling anti-gay harassment and to teaching students about gender and sexuality in the classroom. It’s a local shift that’s also about something bigger. The growing recognition that students should be protected from bullying is forcing schools and communities to make space for students to be themselves—whether they are gay or perceived as gay or just don’t act the way other people expect a boy or a girl to behave. The Anoka-Hennepin schools, like some other districts, are making that space in the face of heated opposition from local conservative Christians.

Here’s the history: In the last few years, LGBT and gender-bending students in the Anoka-Hennepin district have reported being mocked, urinated on, and physically harmed by their classmates, and nine students, four of whom identified as gay, took their own lives. In 2011, six students represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights sued the school district, which serves 39,000 students and is represented in Congress by Michele Bachmann. The students’ lawsuit described an “epidemic of anti-gay and gender-based harassment within District schools” that was “rooted in and encouraged by official District-wide policies singling out and denigrating LGBT people.” The Obama Justice Department investigated and found that sex-based harassment was creating a “hostile environment,” because the physical and verbal bullying was severe and pervasive.

At first, the school board stood by a curriculum policy passed in 2009, which on paper instructed teachers to “remain neutral” about sexual orientation and in practice operated as a gag order. Teachers were required to refrain from saying that being gay is not a choice, even if they were quoting the position of the American Psychological Association. When history teachers included gay rights in a unit about how the strategies of the black civil rights groups influenced subsequent movements, the district deleted the reference. For a staff diversity training session, the district rejected a book called How Homophobia Hurts Children   because it did not “include an opposing viewpoint.” The schools also scrubbed LBGT support services, like a gay and lesbian helpline, from the list of health resources given to students. And a conservative Christian parents’ group called the Parents Action League pushed for teaching gay students about “reparative therapy”—how to root out their homosexuality—by promoting groups that treat it as a sin against the will of God. In 2010 the head of the group told the Minnesota Independent that LGBT students had killed themselves not because of bullying, but because of “homosexual indoctrination” and their own “unhealthy lifestyle.” (The statewide sponsor of the Parents Action League is a group called the Minnesota Family Council; last spring, Bachmannn and Newt Gingrich were the headline speakers for an MFC fundraiser.)

So how did One News Now cover this issue? Did the publication focus on the students? Did it go into detail like Slate?

 Of course not. One News Now attacked the settlement by talking to only one person - Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council. Bear in mind that this is the same Peter Sprigg who creates false, cherry-picked studies on the lgbtq community. That is when he is not commenting about exporting gays out of the United States and expressing a desire that homosexuality "be declared illegal:"

FRC policy analyst Peter Sprigg says serious bullying in schools should never be tolerated, but it is wrong to suggest that Anoka-Hennepin's neutrality policy was a factor in promoting harassment.

"Any suggestion that this neutrality policy was a license for harassment or bullying of students who were identified as 'gay' or perceived as gay simply makes no sense," he contends. "If bullying was going on, and it was not being prevented, then that may have been a problem. But it was not because of this neutrality policy."

Students filing the lawsuits claimed the neutrality policy prevented teachers from effectively protecting homosexual students.

But Sprigg says, "It's ironic because you have a situation now where neutrality about sexual orientation is not good enough. In order to be truly politically correct, you have to be overtly pro-homosexual."

Per usual, Sprigg has no idea what he is talking about. He never attended the school and never witnessed what was going on. The students who brought the lawsuit said that the neutrality policy did cause problems.

Furthermore, an investigation conducted by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education said the same thing:

"A hostile environment exists in the District," the report concludes. "The District's existing  policies and procedures have contributed to the hostile environment."

In that sentence, the DOJ agreed with the crux of the lawsuit -- that the neutrality policy and the policies that preceded contributed to harassment of gay kids. The report, based on an investigation of the district that began in November 2010, goes on to enumerate the evidence of bullying in the cases of 10 current and former students, identified only as "students A-J."

Seems to me that Sprigg (and One News Now) care more about condemning homosexuality than protecting our children.

It's disappointing, but not surprising.