Thread: High School Offers Homosexual Porn, Parents Complain

High School Offers Homosexual Porn, Parents Complain
By Pete Winn
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
March 10, 2008

(Editor's Note: This story contains references to graphic material about homosexuality and violence.)


CNSNews.com) - Parents in Deerfield, Ill., are upset that a local high school is using books in advanced English classes this spring that they say are laced with graphic sexual content, pervasive expletives and mockery of religion.

Worse, the books - "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Parts 1 & 2)" - are required reading for advanced placement English students at Deerfield High School, but a parents' group wants them removed.

"Who would have ever thought that we would be handing out pornography in public schools?" asked Lora Sue Hauser, executive director of North Shore Student Advocacy, and a Deerfield parent.

"The fact that this was required is even more astonishing," she told Cybercast News Service.

Hauser cites numerous examples of offensive passages from the text, including the following:

Man: What do you want?
Louis: I want you to f*** me, hurt me, make me bleed.
Man: I want to.
Louis: Yeah?
Man: I want to hurt you.
Louis: F*** me.
Man: Yeah.
Louis: Hard?
Man: Yeah. You been a bad boy?

(They begin to f***.)

(Louis slips his hand down the front of Joe's pants. They embrace more tightly. Louis pulls his hand out, smells and tastes his fingers, and then holds them for Joe to smell ... they kiss again.)

Hauser said her group formally challenged the use of the books in school, and a school district committee reviewed their challenge.

"It was quite a lengthy process," Hauser told Cybercast News Service. "They spent five or six weeks deciding whether this book should be removed. Their final answer was it would be taken off the required reading list and put on an 'optional title' list.

Peter LaBarbera, with Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, a conservative group, said the two books are simply parts 1 and 2 of a 10-year-old play on the topic of AIDS - one that has been heralded as "one of the great American plays of the 20th century."

In fact, playwright Tony Kushner won the Pulitzer Prize, and "Angels in America" won two Tony Awards. An HBO adaptation for television was nominated for an Emmy.

"It is defended as a literary work that shows forgiveness, kindness and compassion," LaBarbera said. "Of course, the first question that comes to my mind is, how many classical works of literature are there that show these virtues without delving into graphic homosexual sodomy?"

Parents like Hauser said the work, which even mocks the Catholic nun Mother Teresa, is porn - not literature - and offers bad messages:

Man: I think it broke. The rubber. You want me to keep going? (Little pause) Pull out? Should I --
Louis: Keep going. Infect me. I don't care. I don't care.

"There's no other way to describe this," Hauser said. "It is so egregious and so vulgar. I've been doing advocacy in schools a long time - and this is the worst thing I've seen."

She added: "It's an example of what I call 'the competition of edginess.' High schools across the country have this 'thing' going, where they choose literature or they choose programming or curricula that pushes the envelope, and keeps pushing the envelope - and now after years and years of it, this is what we've ended up with - clearly pornographic materials."

While the books may be pornographic, they aren't legally prosecutable as obscenity, as the parents' group soon found out.

"The first route we went down was the criminal, because we saw this as distributing material that is harmful to minors," Hauser said. "But basically you can't prosecute schools and libraries, because all they have to do is say there is some educational purpose for these materials."

Pat Trueman, who ran the U.S. Justice Department's obscenity enforcement unit from 1988 through 1992, confirmed what the group found out is true.

"Federal obscenity law says that material can be prosecuted as obscene if it appeals to a prurient interest - that is, a shameful or morbid interest in sex - and if it is patently offensive, and if it doesn't have any literary, artistic, scientific or philosophical value. That's the situation you run into if it doesn't have pictures and is just the written word," Trueman told Cybercast News Service.

The fact that pornographic books can be protected from prosecution if they have "serious literary value" doesn't surprise parents, but it is disappointing.

"These laws need to be changed," Hauser said.

Hauser noted that this isn't the first time that Deerfield High School and the school district have come at cross-purposes to parents. The district ordered 14-year-old freshmen to take a seminar that amounted to homosexual indoctrination, she said, and had them sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to tell their parents.

Matt Barber, policy director for cultural issues at Concerned Women for America, a conservative group, is stunned by the actions.

"It's not enough that students at Deerfield High are being exposed to improper and offensive material relative to unhealthy and high-risk homosexual behavior, but they've essentially been told by teachers to lie to their parents about it," Barber said.

Calls to Deerfield school superintendent George Fornero and other administrators were referred to the district's communications director, who did not respond to interview requests prior to press time.

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp? ... 0310a.html

If you are a Christian... I suggest you people start getting mad before this stuff ends up in your child's / grandchild's classroom

God, what has happened to this country!

This is truly sick and disgusting! No wonder more and more kids are being home schooled!

Don't care if someone is gay or straight, do NOT try to shove any of this filth down my throat or my kids throats!

This is disgusting. I remember the day when my biggest issue with the public school system was forced Spanish beginning in kindergarten and the teaching of evolution theory without offering the viable alternative - creationism.

God help the youth of America if this is what's going on in the public schools. Instead of teaching the golden rule and setting a high moral standard for our impressionable young ones, we have teachers seducing students and having their babies, school principals having sex with teachers on school grounds, and now this filthy business of passing gay porn off as "literature/art" in the classroom. Filthy, nasty, disgusting - UNACCEPTABLE! I hope folks - PARENTS - wake up SOON to the brainwashing of America's youth via the public school system.

Originally Posted by miguelina

This is truly sick and disgusting! No wonder more and more kids are being home schooled!

Don't care if someone is gay or straight, do NOT try to shove any of this filth down my throat or my kids throats!

They are trying to outlaw that to in Calif.They are going to force this on us.Welcome to the new America/Mexico

Am speechless........

Hauser noted that this isn't the first time that Deerfield High School and the school district have come at cross-purposes to parents. The district ordered 14-year-old freshmen to take a seminar that amounted to homosexual indoctrination, she said, and had them sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to tell their parents.

Deerfield High School presented a homosexual seminar to 14 year olds--if the school felt it appropriate, why make the students sign a confidentiality agreement? MINORS cannot sign a contract--parents must sign for them.

Louis: Keep going. Infect me. I don't care. I don't care.

Can't schools teaching such material to children be charged with contributing to the deliquency of minors and child endangerment by introducing them to subjects they are not mentally and mature enough to evaluate the short or long-term risks.....AIDS, Hepatitis, teen pregnancy, etc.?

Let children be children.