Opponents Gear Up as Calif. Gay History Law Takes Effect
With California’s law mandating public schools to teach about the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans now in force since New Year’s Day, opponents are urging parents to take their children out while preparing for a repeal referendum.
“Under SB 48, homosexual-bisexual-transsexual role models are now mandatory in every public school, for every child, behind the backs of parents,” Randy Thomasson, president of SaveCalifornia.com, said in a statement Tuesday.
The Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful Education Act, also known as Senate Bill 48, took effect Sunday. Gov. Jerry Brown signed it on July 14, making California the first state in the nation to force gay history into the public school curriculum.
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The law mandates that all pupils, including those in kindergarten, “admire ‘the role and contributions of ... lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans’ in all ‘instruction in social sciences,’” said Thomasson.
Textbooks and instructional materials must positively promote LGBT Americans’ contributions in the same way that schools currently include the contributions of ethnic minorities, the law requires. It also prohibits materials and instruction that reflect adversely upon persons because of their sexual orientation.
State Sen. Mark Leno, author of the bill, stated earlier that the bill will help students be more receptive to homosexuals and in turn will hinder the harassment many gay students face.
While it may take a few years for the schools to get printed textbooks containing LGBT history, teachers will be required to include such instruction using “supplemental materials,” beginning this month.
Since California is the largest textbook market in the country, critics fear that other states will also be forced to use textbooks with LGBT history as publishers revise textbooks to meet their largest client’s requirement.
Thomasson believes the new instruction is aimed at sexually indoctrinating students. The new law has no opt-out provisions.
“The only way parents can exempt their children from sexual indoctrination is to permanently exempt them from the state school system,” Thomasson said in a statement to “parents who want to protect their boys and girls from these negative influences.”
His group operates RescueYourChild.com, which lists the chronic problems of California government schools and provides solutions for parents. In this case, it is “informing parents with facts that the government schools refuse to teach children – that homosexuality is neither natural nor healthy.”
The Stop SB 48 campaign, recently led a referendum to overturn the bill but failed to qualify for the 2012 state ballot by a few thousand signatures. However, the Calif.-based coalition filed another initiative last week.
“Last time, we had under 75 days, and this time, we have 150 days,” Karen England of the Capitol Resource Institute, a key group of the coalition, told OneNewsNow. “So we have double the time, and we were very close. We’ve worked on a lot of the problems we had with volunteer signatures, so we are confident we’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it within the 150 days.”
In its previous initiative, the coalition gathered nearly 500,000 signatures, falling short of 504,760 signatures needed to qualify the referendum.
The current initiative, filed with the California attorney general and designed to reverse the overreaching aspects of the legislation, “assures that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other minority figures are not excluded from inclusion in California curriculum while requiring accurate historical portrayals of all individuals,” the coalition says.
Another coalition, the Committee to Repeal SB 48, has also filed paperwork with the state attorney general’s office to qualify the Repeal SB 48 Act.
England predicts that the law will “make the parents more angry when their kindergartener [or] first-grader [is] being taught these things,” and “give more fuel and momentum to our battle here to make sure that history is taught … and it’s fair and accurate and not just based on someone’s sexual orientation.”
The law must not be taken lightly, Thomasson said. “Because of the Democrats’ social-engineering laws, children left in California government schools are guaranteed sexual brainwashing, but not guaranteed proficiency in reading, writing, and computing,” he warned.
