By Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
A conservative educator from Pennsylvania received a chilly response while addressing delegates to the National Education Association’s annual convention held in New Orleans last month.
Sissy Jochmann, a second grade teacher from Pennsylvania and chair of the Conservative Educators Caucus, delivered a two-minute speech in which she urged the NEA to support students in their right to choose not to engage in homosexual behavior. But Jochmann says delegates booed and shouted angrily at her while she spoke.
Jochmann’s speech called on the NEA to provide “a full range of information and support resources available on homosexuality” and to be more tolerant of people on all sides of the issue. But the audience met Jochmann’s proposal with antagonistic heckling and jeers.
“At one point — the representative assembly — I was speaking to over 9,400 people. It was a thunderous roar — they didn’t even want to consider debating it,” she says.
Apparently the powerful educators’ union is less tolerant than it purports to be — and Jochmann is not the first to call attention to the organization’s double standards.
In an editorial written for the organization Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, Dr. Warren Throckmorton revealed that the NEA convention for the past two years has denied exhibit space to PFOX. Last year, convention organizers told PFOX, an organization that supports homosexuals’ right to choose to change their sexual orientation, that no space was available — although they continued to sell exhibition space to other groups. This year, the NEA refused even to accept the group’s application.
Throckmorton is director of college counseling and an associate professor of psychology at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. His research, “Initial Empirical and Clinical Findings Concerning the Change Process for Ex-Gays,” was published by the American Psychological Association in the June 2002 issue of their journal, Professional Psychology: Research and Practice. The researcher believes in the work of PFOX and decries the unfairness of the NEA in excluding its members’ viewpoints from the convention.
Throckmorton says it is time for the predominantly liberal educator’s union to work through its ex-homophobia. “With the NEA stonewalling attempts to present ex-gay information, one wonders what the leadership fears from ex-gays. What possible educational purpose is served by suppressing information?” the doctor asks.
Jochmann would agree that the NEA convention creates an atmosphere hostile to alternative points of view.
“It’s just amazing how people are even afraid to say that they are Republicans at the NEA convention, because it’s overwhelmingly Democrats that are represented,” she says. Throughout the event, conservatives tended to be timid about expressing their views, Jochmann adds, particularly on the issue of homosexuality.
The Pennsylvania teacher says she has often considered leaving the NEA but fears if she and her conservative colleagues all drop out, there will be no one to speak up on behalf of children, as she did at the conference.
“It was a wonderful spiritual experience. I’ll never be the same as a result. God really blessed me for my obedience, and to experience His power in that circumstance,” she says.
Despite being subjected to liberal delegates’ hostility, Jochman does not regret her decision to speak out. Her Conservative Educators Caucus gained ten new members at the meeting.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press).
