Laurie Higgins continues to show IL anti-equality movement's true agenda; says it's 'unfortunate' that schools hire gay teachers

« Go back a post || Return to G-A-Y homepage || Haul tail to next post »

02/14/2013

by Jeremy Hooper

I've focused a lot on the militant "ex-gay" advocacy that has come to define the Illinois Family Institute, the organization leading the charge to stop marriage equality in the Land of Lincoln. But now get this one. In a fear claim about potentially married gay and lesbian teachers, IFI researcher Laurie Higgins comes right out and admits it: she, speaking for IFI, thinks it's unfortunate that gay teachers teach kids at all. Take a look:

(*bolding is my own)
Public schools will be hiring teachers who are in legal “homosexual marriages.” These teachers will put photos of their homosexual spouses on their desks and talk about their homosexual spouses to their students. Such images and ideas coming from teachers whom children love and admire will powerfully shape the feelings and beliefs of young boys and girls, particularly when such images and ideas are reinforced countless times in other cultural contexts. Such images and ideas will undermine what is being taught at home.

Some will argue that schools are already hiring teachers in homosexual relationships, so the legalization of same-sex marriage won’t change anything. They are only partly correct. Although schools are, unfortunately, already hiring teachers in homosexual relationships, once the government recognizes homosexual unions as marriages, administrators and school boards—particularly in elementary schools—will have the social stigma that makes them reluctant to hire teachers in homosexual unions knocked out from under them. And this, of course, is the chief motivation for homosexuals to pursue same-sex marriage when they already have all the benefits and privileges of marriage through Illinois’ civil union law.
FULL: Illinois Family Institute

Gay teachers instructing in public schools? This was a battle we fought in the 1970s! And even then, we defeated it. Heck, even conservative icon Ronald Reagan helped us defeat it. It was that nasty then. It's even nastier now, in our more enlightened day.

But that's exactly it: Higgins and the IFI don't want us living in a more enlightened day. They admit they want to "change" us. They admit they want us out of public school employment. To be perfectly frank, they don't seem to want us around very much, at least as we truly are.

I keep having people ask me why, exactly, Illinois seems to breed an anti-LGBT movement that is just a little more aggressive than all the other states. I don't know the answer, and I don't really care to get to the bottom of it. I just hope the state General Assembly is paying attention!

space