-By Larry Sand

The very creepy sexualization of young children, a part of the teachers unions’ progressive agenda, goes on unabated.

In the past few years, teachers unions in the United States have gotten into the perverse business of sexualizing children. I first wrote about this phenomenon several years ago. In 2004, the National Education Association gave its prestigious Human Rights Award to Kevin Jennings, the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and the man who eventually became President Obama’s school safety czar. GLSEN is the group that presided over the infamous “Fistgate” conference held at Tufts University in Massachusetts in March 2000, where state employees gave explicit instructions about “fisting” and other forms of gay sexual activity to children as young as 12. The conference was secretly recorded and can be heard here. (Warning: The contents are extraordinarily vile.)

Then this past March, I dug up a story about an NEA “trainer of trainers” who at a U.N. conference claimed that oral sex, masturbation, and orgasms should to be “taught in education” to children as young as 11.

Currently in California, we have SB 48 being debated in Sacramento. This bill, supported in testimony by the California Teachers Association, if passed, would “require instruction (emphasis mine) in social sciences to also include a study of the role and contributions of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, European Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans, persons with disabilities, and other ethnic and cultural groups, to the development of California and the United States.” Just how is a teacher supposed to explain to a six year that so-and-so was a great inventor — and he was bisexual?!

And to bring us up to date is a bizarre story out of Oakland. Last week, with a $1,500 grant from CTA, a group called Gender Spectrum presented some rather interesting lessons over two days to the entire 350 student school. The specifics were reported by Fox News, which was invited to sit in on the lessons,

”Joel Baum, director of education and training for Gender Spectrum, taught the classes. In the kindergarten class he asked the 5- and 6-year-olds to identify if a toy was a “girl toy” or a “boy toy” or both. He also asked which students liked the color pink, prompting many to raise their hands, to which he responded that boys can like pink, too.

In the fourth-grade class, Baum focused on specific animal species, like sea horses, where the males can have or take care of the children. He suggested that even if someone was born with male “private parts” but identified more with being a girl, that was something to be “accepted” and “respected.”

Students in the class were given cards, which included information on all-girl geckos and transgender clownfish, to illustrate the variations in nature that occur in humans, too.

“Gender identity is one’s own sense of themselves. Do they know themselves to be a girl? Do they know themselves to be a boy? Do they know themselves to be a combination?” Baum said. “Gender identity is a spectrum where people can be girls, feel like girls, they feel like boys, they feel like both, or they can feel like neither.”

The question here becomes why are elementary school children as young as five being exposed to sexual concepts and anomalies which they are totally incapable of understanding and can be very frightening and confusing to them?

There are two answers. One is “social justice.” With their progressive agenda, teachers unions are doing their best to socially engineer acceptance of all kinds of lifestyles.

The second answer is darker. In a piece written for Queerty, an online publication which proudly claims to be in favor of advancing the gay agenda, editor Daniel Villarreal writes Can We Please Just Start Admitting That We Do Actually Want To Indoctrinate Kids?

The article very matter of factly states that, “I and a lot of other people want to indoctrinate, recruit, teach, and expose children to queer sexuality AND THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.” (Caps in the original.)

There were many comments to this very controversial piece and most were written by homosexuals who were very angry at Mr. Villarreal for delivering what they consider a crushing blow to the cause for general homosexual acceptance. The rest of the comments supported the main thesis of the article.

The bottom line is that straight or gay, there are those amongst us with a radical progressive agenda who are determined to advance it in any way they can. And what better way to advance an agenda than by indoctrinating children.

It is thusly incumbent upon parents to become informed about how their child’s school is handling subject matter having sexual themes. It also may be worthwhile to ask the CTA/NEA why they are so intent on exposing young children to a sexual agenda that can be very damaging to them. Don’t expect honest answers though. And don’t accept anything less.
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Larry Sand began his teaching career in New York in 1971. Since 1984, he has taught elementary school as well as English, math, history and ESL in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he also served as a Title 1 Coordinator. Retired in 2009, he is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues – information teachers will often not get from their school districts or unions.

CTEN was formed in 2006 because a wide range of information from the more global concerns of education policy, education leadership, and education reform, to information having a more personal application, such as professional liability insurance, options of relationships to teachers’ unions, and the effect of unionism on teacher pay, comes to teachers from entities that have a specific agenda. Sand’s comments and op-eds have appeared in City Journal, Associated Press, Newsweek, Townhall Magazine, Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and other publications. He has appeared on numerous broadcast news programs in Southern California and nationally.

Sand has participated in panel discussions and events focusing on education reform efforts and the impact of teachers’ unions on public education. In March 2010, Sand participated in a debate hosted by the non-profit Intelligence Squared, an organization that regularly hosts Oxford-style debates, which was nationally broadcast on Bloomberg TV and NPR, as well as covered by Newsweek. Sand and his teammates – Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution and former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, opposed the proposition – Don’t Blame Teachers Unions For Our Failing Schools. The pro-union team included Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. In August 2010, he was on a panel at the Where’s the Outrage? Conference in San Francisco, where he spoke about how charter school operators can best deal with teachers’ unions. This past January he was on panels in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Mateo in support of National School Choice week.

Sand has also worked with other organizations to present accurate information about the relationship between teachers and their unions, most recently assisting in the production of a video for the Center for Union Facts in which a group of teachers speak truthfully about the teachers’ unions.

CTEN maintains an active and strong new media presence, reaching out to teachers and those interested in education reform across the USA, and around the world, with its popular Facebook page, whose members include teachers, writers, think tankers, and political activists. Since 2006, CTEN has experienced dramatic growth.