Kevin Jennings and his GLSEN disciples push "gender identity" concepts as well as homosexuality -- even in the earliest grades. Imagine young children being forced to confront the idea of a sex change operation!
In 2003, the GLSEN-Boston conference featured workshops on how to sneak GLBT issues into the earliest grades. Massachusetts News reported:
According to one educator who has attended previous GLSEN Boston conferences, "In past years the emphasis was on children and sex. This year's conference appeared to be geared more toward teachers and a 'stealth' agenda that took the focus off sex in favor of more subtle methods, using 'gay allies' to continue the homosexual agenda in schools."
One fifth-grade teacher and workshop leader, Jan Shafer, named Kevin Jennings as her inspiration:
Shafer recalled that several years ago, while she was still "in the closet," GLSEN executive director Kevin Jennings paid a visit to her school and: "It was at that point that I was able to begin coming out."
[Shafer] asked participants to write down reasons why they think GLBT issues should be shared in the K-5 classroom. Among those given:
To validate children's personal stories
To destroy "gender binary" (male-female) stereotypes
To help children learn to become comfortable in the classroom by seeing their families respected
To help kids who "ultimately will be gay when they're older" feel "validated and comfortable at a young age."
One teacher intern at the Devotion School in Brookline gave this rationale: "It's important to help children become agents of change."
Another GLSEN-Boston 2003 workshop leader, social worker and GLSEN board member Laura Perkins, looked for "teachable moments." By 2006, Perkins had added to her repertoire, not only introducing concepts like "two mommies" or "Daddy's roommate" -- but adding sex-change operations. Newton, Mass. columnist Tom Mountain reported on this shocking occurrence in an elementary school there:
By Tom Mountain - Newton Tab, November 8, 2006
Emer O'Shea knew something was wrong the minute she picked up her daughter from Franklin Elementary School. The third-grader was normally very perky upon seeing her mother and new baby sister, but this time she glanced at her mother without indicating what was wrong, except to say that the school's social worker had visited the class. But Emer soon heard from another parent about what had happened in her daughter's class that day, and she was both stunned and mortified. The next day her young daughter finally opened up with a question that would baffle most parents of an 8-year-old child, "Mommy, is it possible for a man to have an operation to become a woman?"
Transgenders and transvestites. These were the topics that a staff member at Franklin School in West Newton chose to teach to a class of third-grade children. The school's social worker described to the children that some men like to dress up as women, and yes, some men even have operations to change into women.
The opportunity for this "teachable moment" - the kind that Superintendent Jeff Young likes to portray as merely responding to some child's "random questioning"- occurred when the social worker was describing various families outside of the traditional mommy-and-daddy norm and showed the class a picture of a woman with two children, asking what they saw in the picture. A child then raised his hand to tell her (are you sitting sit down for this?) that he thought the picture was of a man who had a sex change operation and was now a woman. Apparently, the child's own father was undergoing such an operation (which he/she has since completed).
The social worker then elaborated on this "teachable moment." But this wasn't just any social worker employed by the Newton Public Schools. This was Laura Perkins, former board member of GLSEN, the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network … READ MORE...
