The Pentagon has been moving slowly in recent months to ensure that gay and lesbian servicemembers will be treated as equals by their peers — not bullied or denied their constitutional freedoms, including the freedom of religion.
Meanwhile, relatively liberal states such as California are struggling to protect gay and lesbian students from violence and defamation and to halt antigay censorship in history courses.
Those changes have alarmed Focus on the Family, which today equated minority religious freedom, non-censorship in education, and opposition to harassment with “indoctrination.”
Focus on the Family and its partner the Pacific Justice Institute imply that it may be OK to suppress historical persons on the basis of ideology and sexuality, or to misinform students about these persons’ families. In short, these organizations project their own desire for quotas onto a state educational system.
“It seems a bit like a quota system,” said Ron Prentice, executive director of the California Family Council. “It’s based less on the level of contribution and more on one’s sexual orientation.”
Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, said: “Our Legislature just doesn’t get it — with thousands of teachers getting pink slips, this is not the time to place more expensive, politically correct mandates on our schools. This bill also undermines parental rights and is insensitive to those whose cultures and belief systems are at odds with the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) agenda.”
In fact, Focus on the Family and its affiliates already enjoy an antigay quota system in many school systems across the United States:
Heterosexual Christians: 100
Everybody else: 0
On the armed-services front, it’s clear that Focus on the Family and antigay activist Elaine Donnelly wish to bury efforts toward servicemember equality in red tape by reopening issues of housing, chain of command, religious liberty, and dress code that were settled amicably among most military leaders long ago.
In the battle to push gays out of the armed services, Christian Right activists will argue that their own rights to housing, religion, and heterosexual-only bathrooms require that everyone else lose those same rights.
