I have no idea if frogs really behave the way they do in the famous anecdote — the one where they leap to save themselves if dropped into a pot of boiling water, but sit quietly in lukewarm water and permit themselves to be boiled to death if the heat is turned up gradually. If I had to bet, I would put my money on frogs doing no such thing.
Even so, the story makes a cogent point: People tend to accept radical changes if they are introduced gradually enough. There are many examples, from abortion on demand to the vulgar language that is now routine in pop music and on network television. If you asked the proverbial man in the street in 1955 if such things would become commonplace in the United States, he would have looked around to see if he was on Candid Camera.
The contours of the homosexual revolution are another example. About ten years ago, I quoted in one of my columns a homosexual activist who proudly stated that he would not be content until American mothers and fathers beamed with as much pride at the marriage of their son or daughter to a person of the same sex as they did during a traditional marriage ceremony. I was trying to shock my readers, to make clear that the leaders of the homosexual movement were not being candid with us; that they planned far more than they were saying in public at the time.
Back then homosexual activists insisted that all they were seeking was the right to rent an apartment, equal employment opportunities and an end to violence and public humiliation directed against homosexuals — things like that. They argued that it was right-wing paranoia to contend that homosexuals were seeking the right to marry or to infringe upon the religious freedoms of those who believed that homosexual activity was either a sin or a psychological disorder.
We now know better. The homosexual activists have turned up the heat. (There are just one or two notches left on the dial for them to click. I’ll get to them in due course.) As reported in the New York Times of May 14th, a bill has been introduced in California by State Senator Sheila Kuehl (an open lesbian who once played “Zelda” on the old sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis) “to assure that lesbians and gay men get what she feels is their due in California textbooks.” The bill passed the California Senate in early May and is now headed to the state Assembly.
If passed by the Assembly, the law would forbid the teaching of any material that “reflects adversely on persons due to sexual orientation,” and mandate the “age appropriate study of the role and contributions of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.” This would mean that “a teacher talking about Langston Hughes would not only mention the fact that he was a black poet, but also mention his sexuality,” Kuehl told the Times reporter.
It may be too late to stop this bill from passing. Momentum seems to be on its side. But there is some resistance. Stay tuned. The Capitol Resource Institute has labeled the bill “the most outrageous bill in the California Legislature this year.” Cindy Moles, the state director of Concerned Women for America, said the bill was trying to indoctrinate children into “dangerous sexual lifestyles.” Moles said it was also unbalanced from a strictly educational viewpoint: “We don’t need to list all the behavior of historical figures, certainly not their sexual behavior.” The Concerned Women for America has filed a letter with the California Senate suggesting that such studies were the domain of the home, not the schools.
This issue has come to the fore in other states as well. Syndicated columnist Jeff Jacoby reports on a similar controversy in the Lexington, Massachusetts, school district, where school officials committed to normalizing same-sex marriage have clashed with residents who don’t want homosexual themes introduced into their children’s classes without parental consent.
What sort of homosexual themes? Kindergarten books with pictures of families headed by gay and lesbian couples. Also, a book that a second-grade teacher read to her students. It was entitled King & King, the story of Prince Bertie, who rejects the princesses his mother introduces him to because he “never cared much for princesses.” Bertie falls in love instead with the brother of one of the princesses, whom he marries. “The wedding was very special,” reads the text. “The queen even shed a tear or two.” The last page shows the young men exchanging a passionate kiss.
Parental demands that they be informed before such sexually provocative material is presented to their children were rejected by the Lexington school board. “We couldn’t run a public school system if every parent who feels some topic is objectionable to them for moral or religious reasons decides their child should be removed” from class, Lexington’s superintendent, Paul Ash, told the Globe. “Lexington is committed to teaching children about the world they live in, and in Massachusetts same-sex marriage is legal.”
King & King is a favorite on the Web site Lesbian Life. Kathy Belge — who describes herself as a lesbian activist — writes on the Web site that the book is “sure to capture a child’s imagination,” because the “same-sex attraction is normalized. There’s no proselytizing, no big lesson. It just is.”
What will be the next steps for the homosexual activists, the final clicks they will make on the stove-top dial? They already have Hollywood and our children’s teachers promoting the “normalcy” of same-gender sex. There is only one obstacle left for them. Christians and Jews and others who hold to the biblical teaching on sexual behavior will have to be cast in our schools as shameful and ignorant, hate-filled bigots. The advocates of the homosexual revolution already say these things in their writings and when they appear on the talk shows. Hollywood already makes movies and television programs that promote that message.
You heard it here: What they will seek next is revisions in school curricula to teach our children that parents and religious leaders, who teach them that sexual activity is morally permissible only between married men and women, are wrong, backward, ignorant, prejudiced — comparable to those who once defended laws against miscegenation. In the new moral universe of our schools, those with traditional beliefs about sex and marriage will be portrayed as the deviants. That concept will be as openly promulgated as the concept that the slave-masters and wife-beaters of the past are deserving of our contempt.
Far-fetched, you say? Did you ever think second-grade teachers would be handing out books to their students about two princes falling head over heels in love with each other? Are you ready to jump from the pot yet?
James Fitzpatrick's novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
