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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
School District Sued for Forcing Gay Propaganda
Dawn Rizzoni, CNSNews.com
Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2002
Angry parents are suing a California school district for authorizing
pro-homosexual presentations to be shown to elementary school pupils as
young as eight.
The parents say school employees forced the kids to attend the play Cootie
Shots, even though the parents had signed opt-out forms to prevent their
children from being exposed to sexually-oriented discussions.
The play was performed last year at two elementary schools that are part of
the Novato Unified School District in California's Marin County.
Fringe Benefits, a group describing itself as a coalition of theater
activists dedicated to building bridges between gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgender youth and their straight peers, teachers, and parents, presented
Cootie Shots on Feb. 26, 2001 at Pleasant Valley Elementary School and on
Mar. 2, 2001 at San Ramon Elementary School. The audience was third, fourth
and fifth graders.
Cootie Shots, also the title of a book, refers to the schoolyard taunt that
children use to brag that they have been inoculated against the cooties of
other children who might be different from them in some way. The book is
meant to promote tolerance and celebrate diversity, according to its
authors, Norma Bowles and Mark E. Rosenthal.
The Novato School District Diversity Program has similar objectives.
The [Novato Unified School] District's goal is to make sure that children
feel safe in school and part of that feeling of security comes from knowing
that unkind things will not be said to you or about you by other children or
adults, according to a statement from the minutes of a March 20, 2001 school
district meeting.
However, Brad Dacus, spokesman for Pacific Justice Institute, a non-profit
legal defense organization representing the eight parents in the lawsuit,
said the play contained homosexual overtures that led children to believe
that homosexuality is acceptable and that those who don't approve are
hate-filled bigots.
Despite the opt-out forms the parents had signed and returned to the schools
to exclude their children from programs such as Cootie Shots, Dacus said
that no students were excluded and that school staff members ended up telling
the parents that many of the opt-out forms had gotten lost.
Dianne Pavia, a spokeswoman for Novato Unified School District, was unable to
comment about the lost forms. Nor would she comment on specifics of the play,
because of the lawsuit, except to say that it was not meant to advance any
agenda other than the safety of children.
The assembly's purpose was to work with kids around the issue of bullying,
name-calling, and harassing of all kinds, Pavia said. These issues are a
national concern for all parents and the school district is dedicated to
making their schools as safe a place as possible for all students.
Undermining Parents' Rights
Dacus insists that the core issue is parental rights and that his clients'
rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution
were violated.
This lawsuit is the first in a major litigation campaign to combat school
districts who attempt to undermine the statutory and constitutional rights of
parents, Dacus said. We intend to aggressively sue every school district
that similarly violates the rights of parents.
The parents seek unspecified financial damages in their lawsuit, plus a
permanent injunction to prevent programs such as Cootie Shots from being
shown to students in the future without parental notification and written
consent, Dacus said.
Whenever irreconcilable damage has been done to children, Dacus said,
Pacific Justice Institute will make it as costly and painful as possible for
offending schools. Dacus said his organization wanted schools to know that
there's a high price to be paid for ignoring parental rights.
One skit in the play that angered the parents was The Parable of the
Stimples, during which a group of funny noise-making people are ridiculed.
The script states, BUT the BIG PROBLEM was that everyone was taught that
making funny noises was BAD! Wrong! Something to be afraid of!
During the play, Stimple Gilbert is sent to the principal's office after
making a funny noise, only to discover that the principal himself is a secret
noisemaker.
When Gilbert's parents discover that Gilbert is a noisemaker, they react with
embarrassment. They tell Gilbert not to make the noise so that he can be
normal like them. Soon, Gilbert discovers that people are afraid of the
noise.
At that point, the narrator encourages the audience to save Gilbert by making
a loud noise themselves.
Make a noise for Gilbert! the narrator says. Make a noise for all of the
Stimples in the world.
In an interview with TCG Books, Norma Bowles, one of the book's
