Investor’s Business Daily | Phyllis Schlafly | July 25, 2008
The nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, attracted 9,000 delegates to its annual convention in Washington, D.C., over the July Fourth weekend. Delegates sported buttons with provocative slogans such as “Gay marriage causes global warming only because we are so hot,” “Hate is not a family value,” “The Christian right is neither” and “Gay rights are civil rights.”
The delegates passed dozens of hard-hitting resolutions that now become the NEA’s official policy. The resolutions authorize NEA members and employees to lobby for those goals in the halls of Congress and state capitols.
NEA resolutions cover the waterfront of all sorts of political issues that have nothing to do with improving education for schoolchildren, such as supporting statehood for the District of Columbia, a “single-payer health care plan” (i.e., government run), gun control, ratification of the International Criminal Court Treaty and taking steps “to change activities that contribute to global climate change.”
The NEA fiercely opposes any competition for public schools, such as vouchers, tuition tax credits, parental option plans or public support of any kind to nonpublic schools. The NEA strongly opposes designating English as our official language even though such a designation is supported by more than 80% of Americans.
The NEA opposes home schooling unless children are taught by state-licensed teachers using a state-approved curriculum. The NEA wants to bar home-schooled students from participating in any extracurricular activities in public schools even though their parents pay school taxes, too.
The NEA wants additional (job-creating) services and programs — such as early childhood education — provided by public schools. NEA resolutions call for “programs in the public schools for children from birth through age 8” and for “mandatory kindergarten with compulsory attendance.”
NEA resolutions include all the major feminist goals such as “the right to reproductive freedom” (i.e., abortion on demand), “comparable worth” (i.e., government control of wages according to feminist ideology), full funding for the feminist boondoggle called the Women’s Educational Equity Act and censoring all masculine words such as husband and father.
The NEA even urges its affiliates to work for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA was declared dead by the U.S. Supreme Court 26 years ago.
The influence of the gay lobby is pervasive in dozens of NEA resolutions adopted by 2008 convention delegates. Diversity is the code word used for pro-gay indoctrination in the classroom.
The NEA’s diversity resolution makes clear this means teaching about “sexual orientation” and “gender identification.” The NEA demands that “diversity-based curricula” be imposed on preschoolers.
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RE: Homeschoolers and access to extra-curricular activities. In all the states where it has been adjudicated, otherwise qualified homeschool children cannot be excluded from extra-curricular activities simply because they are homeschooled. Such exclusion has been deemed unconstitutional precisely because the parents of the children pay taxes. Other tax supported services such as special education advisors also have to be supplied to homeschooled children whose parents are following the state laws on homeschooling (that means the parents are fulfilling the complusory attendance law of their state).