Back-to-School Tip of the Year: Identifying the Gay Agenda

Over at Jesus Needs New PR, Matthew Paul Turner posted and criticized a YouTube video that discussed a "useful" Back-to-School tip for parents: identifying the hidden gay agenda in your children's schools. At first I thought the video was a parody or some satirical spoof put together by The Onion. But lo and behold, it was a Focus on the Family supported video. Watch the video after the jump.

The video informs parents on ways to identify the "gay agenda" in their children's schools by looking through the library catalog to find LGBT-affirming books oriented towards a juvenile audience, being aware of diversity trainings, anti-bullying trainings, etc. Basically, their education analyst teaches parents how to censor multiculturalism and diversity from their children.





Parents are encouraged to protest and rebel if they find books that portray homosexuality and queer families in a positive light. Children shouldn't learn that homophobia and hate crimes against LGBTQ people are wrong. Seriously!?!?

Lets start with discussing what this level of censorship does for children. It teaches young people that all people in this world are exactly the same. We must all be White, heterosexual, evangelical Christians. Anyone else is an exception and an abnormality in our society. Children learn to then fear what is different from them. That fear results in intolerance, and in many cases, violence towards groups that they perceive to be "outside" of "normal" society. The educational system should be preparing young people to function and operate at all levels of society--a society rich in diversity and multiculturalism.

Second, if we remove all the juvenile literature from the libraries that target queer youth and children of queer families, that's still not going to change that there are gay people in the world! There is a necessity for children's queer literature in the classroom and in the libraries because I feel that it is crucial to the learning process of queer children, children of queer families, and straight students alike (I feel the same way about Chicano's children's literature, but that's for another blog). Queer children’s literature is critically instructive because it challenges and expands thinking about issues that directly affect the lives of LGBTQ youth. Through literature, writers explore issues of structural and representational violence, questions of gender and sexuality, family, trauma, and so much more. Children’s literature provides young people with a language to cope with these issues that they face everyday.

The response put forth in this video towards schools becoming more inclusive only ends up breeding more homophobia in the school system. Queer children’s literature is essential to addressing that issue because it powerfully reminds us of the structural forms of violence within the school system that impact the lives children, as well as adults. Queer literature insists that children are critically engaged thinkers with exceptional emotional comprehension. The goal of queer writers that engage in López’s notion of “critical witnessing” is to equip young readers with a means of coping with the oppression they endure in the educational system so that they may possess the levels of confidence and competence required to make both personal and social change.