Fake Outrage: Deerfield High School (Updated)

Plenty of news out there folks, but just nothing that spurs my interest enough to crack out a blog post. I spent sometime yesterday giving my site a complete retool from Drupal 4.6 to Drupal 5.1. Give it a look. I'm still going to rework that theme, but I'm thinking I'm going to stick with those colors.

At any rate, I've been ducking and dodging having anything to say about the Deerfield High School Affair in which underclassman were to attend a diversity seminar and the local noise machine is having a Carnival running their yaps about it. For a while, I was thinking that maybe the Feisty Republican Whore has a point:

If you do something that 95% of people will never do (being a man who sticks his penis in other mens' rumps), people will naturally find that odd and bizarre simply because it's rare and not universally accepted as proper. Most will also, naturally, wish you to keep that tidbit to yourself in public. Sure, if you want to say that you're gay, that's cool, but it's rather natural for human beings to not want to be all up in your culture and 'what it's like to be gay'-type business. It's irrelevant to most people at the very least.

I might agree that there's limited potential for making real progress in terms of 'diversity' when talking about high school freshmen but as far as the notion of a little training session that might open a few people's minds - who the hell could object to that? Not perfectly comfortable with it? Maybe. But the reality is, gay folks are a part of life and the issue should be addressed early. Maybe a bit more maturity might be required to deal with it past age 14, but then again plenty of LGBT folks know they're gay when they are 14. But who in the hell actually thinks this 5 year old program is promoting homosexuality rather than just trying to stop the football team's defensive line from playing 'smear the queer' on some poor effeminate kid who doesn't closet himself (which of course, is just fine in terms of the average homobigots unspoken idea of gay suppression)? Give ya 3 guesses.....come on now.

If you guessed "Why Dan, our local hate organization, the Illinois Family Institute" you're correct. You'll note that the most often quoted person on this story is Lora Sue Hauser whom is listed as the head of a group called "North Shore Student Advocacy". What's not listed: long time board member of the Illinois Family Institute. IFI's site lists her most important accomplishment in combating the homosexual agenda:

For the last two years, Lora Sue has led the Alliance Defense Fund's program of "Day of Truth" at Deerfield High School; a response to "Day of Silence" from the Gay Lesbian Straight Network. Day of Truth allows high school students to express an opposing view regarding homosexuality.

In other words, she's a long time muckraker and that's why nobody is really taking this non-event seriously. You'll note that amongst the three pages of news results only a handful of them are from legitimate news sources; the rest from fringe publications. And nowhere will you find Lora Sue Hauser listed as an IFI board member, lest we have Dr. Michael Campion incident. And if you're still not convinced that this is drummed up by the noise machine, you can go ahead and take notation that the first instance of people actively having a problem over this in the last 5 years is is Porno Pete at Americans For Truth About The Homo Sexual Agenda (AFTATSHA), former IFI executive director. Predictably, IFI has said their bit. Double predictably, you can notice that the other banner waver in this case is former IFI guy J. Matt Barber at Concerned Women For America.

You'll may also take notice that the way this is going down, it's almost an exact model that was used in the StopTopinka.com incident. Literally folks, there's 4 jerkwads who share the same office in Phyllis Schlafly's basement cooking this stuff up. Through the miracles of the web, they'd have you think that they'd have millions of backers frazzled by all of this, but the reality is it's just a very tiny minority of hate filled human beings trying to draw more to the cause by misrepresenting something that is otherwise a good thing.

Remember: The stock and trade of the IFI/AFTAH/CWA crowd is the ability to dehumanize LGBT folks to make bigotry not seem like bigotry against another human being. Things like what SAGA is doing at Deerfield high school, goes a long way to humanize the gay community and thus is completely contrary to their rhetoric. Whenever somebody attempts to humanize, their method is to demonize.

Updated info - It seems that calling this a 'confidentiality agreement' was just as full of crap as the rest of the stuff you see coming from the Gang. Pam linked it up and a comment by the author of the upcoming book, Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters dropped by to lay the dish:

The rest of the two page document continues to give rules about respecting each other's right to talk and not making judgements on someone because his or her opinion. If students agree to abide by all of these regulations, they sign the form.

There are four other attachments to the commitment agreement that was posted. Americans for Truth (in name only) makes the claim that they are a part of the agreement.

But I doubt it.

It obvious that they were added by whoever posted the agreement on the webpage in order to enhance the lie of "gay indoctrination