Homosexuality classes for our gifted students??

**My note below.

Special Report - February 7, 2006
Governor's School Criticized for Pro-Homosexual Seminar

The Governor’s School of North Carolina is being criticized for offering a seminar on teenage homosexuality during its 2005 session, the Carolina Journal reports. In a letter to the State Department of Public Instruction, Jim and Beverly Burrows said that their son became “confused” about the topic of homosexuality after attending the Governor’s School, a state-sponsored six-week summer program tailored to advanced North Carolina high school students. The seminar in question, entitled “The New Gay Teenager,” discussed whether embracing labels based on sexual orientation is beneficial or harmful to homosexual teenagers. The Burrows stated in a letter sent to State Superintendent of Public Instruction June Atkinson that they should have been informed of the seminar’s content and been given the chance to decline the seminar on behalf of their son. Among other objections, the parents also maintained that the instructors leading the course, who are admitted homosexuals, encouraged students to open homosexual clubs in their high schools and advised them “to question and not believe what they had been taught by their parents all these years.”

The Burrows subsequently received a letter from Mary Watson, director of the Governor’s School, containing a memo from on-sight director Lucy Milner defending the seminar. Milner stated that the course “responded to a need for additional factual, neutral information about this highly sensitive issue,” and that faculty present at the seminar “were emphatic that no one attending could have thought the seminar was attempting to proselytize or to brainwash students or to promote a gay rights agenda.”

According to the Carolina Journal, “The New Gay Teenager” seminar is based on a book published under the same title written by Ritch Savin-Williams, an openly homosexual professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In the book, Savin-Williams argues that homosexual teenagers are dismissing such labels as “gay” in favor of broader terms that allegedly engender feelings of normalcy. “Regardless of gender of person and partner,” Savin-Williams writes, “if an early sexual contact is not abusive or coercive, then it likely has a positive impact on adolescent and adult sexual arousal, pleasure, satisfaction, and acceptance of various sexual behaviors for self and others.”
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RALEIGH, N.C. — The Alliance Defense Fund has issued a letter to North Carolina school officials on behalf of a parent requesting that they immediately halt their offering of a seminar titled “The New Gay Teenager.”

“Schools should be required to follow the law. The seminar in question violated North Carolina statutes,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Mike Johnson. “Teaching sexually-oriented material without parental knowledge is not only morally wrong, it is illegal.”

ADF attorneys believe officials broke the law because the organizers of the 2005 Governor’s School program did not follow state protocol, which dictates that schools must notify parents and obtain their authorization before any student can attend a class focusing on sexual matters. A unilateral decision by school officials to offer the controversial seminar apparently came without legal consultation.

“The seminar’s organizers also erred by including anti-religious advocacy in the seminar’s curriculum and activities,” Johnson said. “Such practices breach the First Amendment and require immediate corrective action."

As I noted here 12/20 from a Phyllis Schlafly article:
"Federal judges have just hit parents with a triple whammy. Two appellate courts held that parents have no right to stop offensive, privacy-invading interrogation of their own children in public schools. In a third case, the U.S. Supreme Court indicated that it is not going to do anything to protect parental rights concerning schools."

It doesn't look like the judges are on the side of parents. Never forget the government knows exactly what our children should learn.