AGAPE PRESS: FPN Launches Campaign to Limit “Gay-Straight Alliances” in Schools

Five-State Campaign Promotes Parental OK for Club Participation

By Allie Martin – August 23, 2006

(AgapePress) – A Washington, DC-based pro-family group has launched a multi-state campaign to allow parents to give permission before public school children can take part in non-academic clubs which promote homosexual activity.

For years, Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) clubs have been formed in public schools nationwide, often without parental notification or input. That has prompted the Family Policy Network (FPN) to start a campaign that would require parental permission before children can participate in non-academic clubs. Alexander Mason, a policy analyst with FPN, says state lawmakers must be encouraged to adopt legislation that will protect children.

“Basically the legislation will seek to require public schools to notify parents of a Gay-Straight Alliance club and allow parents to preclude their children from participating,” says Mason. He expects that to cause club participation to decrease.

“We think it’s going to be really hard for most [GSA] clubs to get much of a participation factor,” he says, “because not many parents are going to want to allow their children to sit in front of a homosexual activist and learn about deviant lifestyles and how they’re okay.”

As part of the campaign, lawmakers in five states — North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Texas — will be asked to introduce measures requiring parental permission.

“Parents have a right to know that their children are going to be subjected to homosexual activism in the school,” Mason asserts, adding that “it’s just common sense” that homosexual activists should not have unfettered access to children. “And they definitely shouldn’t have the access without parents having an informed choice in the matter,” he states.

A TIME Magazine article last fall (October 2005) noted that the number of GSA clubs in schools had grown from 100 in 1997 to “at least 3,000.” The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which supports, trains, and provides resources to club organizers, claims that nearly one in ten high schools has a GSA club.