[1]
The Radical Homosexual Agenda — Targeting Our Schools
by Michael Foust
As illustrated children's books go, King & King starts off innocently enough: "On the tallest mountain above the town lived a queen, the young prince, and the crown kitty. The queen had ruled for many long years, and she was tired of it."
The queen, it seems, wanted to step down so that her son could become king. First, though, she wanted him to find a wife. So a search ensued — far and wide — for the perfect princess.
But in the end he chose none of them, instead opting for another prince. (Yes, a prince.) The short twenty-nine-page book ends with a "gay wedding," the proverbial kiss, the queen shedding a tear of joy, and, the reader is told, the two men living "happily ever after."
[2]King & King, a slick colorful book aimed at children six and up, was at the heart of a controversy in North Carolina earlier this year when a first-grade girl checked it out of her public school library — much to her parents' dismay.
"I was flabbergasted," her father, Michael Hartsell, told the Associated Press. "My child is not old enough to understand something like that, especially when it is not in our beliefs."
And conservatives say the book is only the tip of the iceberg in the nationwide debate over homosexuality in the public schools. Homosexual activists have made significant inroads in recent years, and their advances have come in both big- and small-town America. For instance:
• More than three thousand schools in all fifty states have Gay/Straight Alliance Clubs, student-led groups set up to promote homosexual issues within the schools. Many are in middle schools. The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a national homosexual activist organization, is the primary catalyst.
• The public school system in Boyd County, Kentucky, allegedly forced middle and high school students to participate in diversity and tolerance training, telling them homosexuality cannot be changed and warning them not to say otherwise. The Alliance Defense Fund, a pro-family legal organization, filed a federal lawsuit in February on behalf of concerned parents.
• The Montgomery County, Maryland, public school system developed sexual-education curriculum for eighth- and tenth-graders which claimed that Jesus "said absolutely nothing at all about homosexuality" and that being homosexual is similar to being left-handed. It also noted that some Baptist churches once defended racial segregation — implying that conservative Baptists today are wrong in opposing homosexuality. The pro-family legal group Liberty Counsel filed suit on behalf of two conservative groups and concerned parents, and in May a federal judge ruled against the school system, preventing the course from going into effect.
Baptist Press
Pro-Life Democrats at Work
Some pro-life Democrats continue to work toward breaking abortion's stranglehold on their party.
Democratic members of Congress recently met with Howard Dean to encourage the Democratic National Committee chairman to establish an official relationship with Democrats for Life of America (DFLA), according to The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper. The DNC has rebuffed the pro-life organization in the past, refusing to include the DFLA's Internet address on the committee's website.
Sixteen Democrats from the House of Representatives, staff members from the office of Sen. Ben Nelson, D.-Nebraska, and DFLA reps met with Dean July 21, The Hill reported. Dean seemed receptive to the group's overtures and indicated he would explore posting a DNC link to the DFLA website, according to the report.
Leaders in the effort include Nelson in the Senate and Reps. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, Tim Ryan of Ohio, and Bart Stupak of Michigan, according to the newspaper. The minority leaders in both houses, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, are supporting the efforts to produce a link between the DNC and DFLA, The Hill reported.
The DFLA has proposed a "95-10 initiative" designed to reduce the number of abortions in the United States by 95 percent in ten years. The legislative package is expected to be introduced in Congress after the August recess, according to The Hill.
In recent decades, abortion rights organizations have had a dominant influence on the Democratic Party's policies. They have managed to make support for abortion rights a litmus test for gaining nomination to national office.
Baptist Press
Dolly's Creator Wants Women to Donate Eggs
by Tom Strode
For scientists intent on cloning human embryos, there seems to exist a never-satisfied demand for more and better eggs.
Ian Wilmut, the creator of Dolly the sheep, is seeking permission from a British government agency to request that women donate their eggs for cloning research, according to the Guardian, a London newspaper. So far, cloning researchers in Great Britain have utilized only eggs left over from treatments at in vitro fertilization clinics, according to the report.
Pro-life ethicists, who largely oppose research cloning because it requires the destruction of embryos, criticized the development.
"Wilmut is trying to exploit women's compassion, but it would be a misplaced compassion to donate eggs to create embryo-babies that will be destroyed for research," said C. Ben Mitchell, a consultant for the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and an associate professor of bioethics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in suburban Chicago.
Wilmut's suggestion he needs eggs of a certain quality "turns women and their eggs into commodities," Mitchell told Baptist Press.
"Wilmut should turn his interest in quality control into ethical responsibility. He would not clone human embryos if he were as concerned about ethics as he is experimentation," Mitchell said.
Wilmut's latest request confirms what some pro-life ethicists have been contending about the slippery slope of embryo research.
"Embryos belong in uteruses," Mitchell said. "Once we began to generate them in vitro and not put them in uteruses, we made the unthinkable routine. Once the unthinkable becomes routine, it becomes expected. Once it is expected, it becomes demanded. And once demanded, a market is created."
Wilmut told the Guardian he had "never doubted that women would donate if they thought we were helping people to have treatment."
The injections required to produce more eggs than usual for extraction can be risky for the donors, the Guardian reported.
Wilmut follows in the path of South Korea's leading cloning researcher, Woo Suk Hwang, whose team created a cloned human embryo last year after receiving eggs from women, according to the Guardian.
The Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority licensed Wilmut in February to clone human embryos for research. He is seeking therapies for motor neuron disease.
Wilmut directed the team at Scotland's Roslin Institute that successfully produced Dolly, the first cloned mammal, in 1996 after more than 270 failures. He is moving to Edinburgh University, the Guardian reported.
Baptist Press
Bush Backs Intelligent Design in Schools
by Erin Curry
President Bush set off a new wave of debate over whether intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in public schools when he gave his opinion in a roundtable discussion with Texas newspaper reporters August 1.
"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," he said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
Referring to his time as governor of Texas, Bush said, "I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught."
The president also said he believes the matter should be decided by local school boards, not by a federal government mandate, according to The Houston Chronicle.
While running for president in 1999, Bush said schoolchildren "ought to be exposed to different theories about how the world started." But he has not said publicly which theory he supports.
Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told The New York Times he was pleased with Bush's stance.
"It's what I've been pushing; it's what a lot of us have been pushing," Land said, adding that evolution "is too often taught as fact," and that "if you're going to teach the Darwinian theory of evolution, teach it as theory. And then teach another theory that has the most support among scientists."
Baptist Press