“Give me the youth…”

What do a group of like-minded people do when they cannot convince society to agree with them?  How do they persuade society to not only acknowledge their values, but in the end to agree with those values?  

Look at the process of legalizing abortion.  Proponents first appealed to society, exaggerating the number of women dying from illegal abortions and claiming these deaths mandated legalizing abortion.  When that failed to get the needed support, they turned to the courts and got the desired outcome of legalizing abortion.   

But, they did not stop with the courts.  They recognized the risk of losing the right because so many people still disagreed with them.  So, they not only introduced their message into society, they also incorporated it into the schools, into the books, and into the minds of the youth; preparing a new generation with their values. 

And, they expanded their message from the claimed goal of saving the life of the mother to abortion on demand.  And it is demanded 1,300,000 times a year, teaching the youth abortion is more about convenience, more about avoiding responsibility.

Witnessing this success, gay marriage proponents are following the same path.  Society has not uniformly agreed with their beliefs and expectations.  So, they are following the abortion proponents to court and into the minds of our youth through the schools and books. 

This process is playing out in California, starting with a law banning gay marriage that voters could not be persuaded to change.  So, the gay marriage proponents went to the courts; and in 2008, the California Supreme Court ruled the state’s ban on gay marriage unconstitutional.

In response, California voters passed an amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage.  Once again gay marriage proponents asked the Supreme Court to overrule the voters.  But, the California Supreme Court upheld the state’s constitutional ban on gay marriage. 

Even so, the desired outcome may be no more than a generation away.  A school board in the suburbs of San Francisco informed parents that children in kindergarten through fifth grade will be required to attend classes teaching “tolerance and understanding” for “alternative” lifestyles; advancing the idea that those lifestyles are the same as traditional marriage and family.   

The school system carefully drafted the class materials to allow school district attorneys to claim the classes are not sex education; an important distinction because parents can voluntarily remove their child from sex education classes.  But, with this claim, the school district attorneys say the students will be forced to take the classes, parent’s rights and wishes set aside.     

A board member said, the community must “come together around issues of diversity, acceptance, and understanding of one another.”  In other words, the school system, not the parents, will decide the values the youth must accept.     

Other groups are using this same approach.  In Boulder, Colorado, an area of fifteen square miles surrounded by reality, the school board is distressed that some students might feel bad if they are not the class valedictorian.  So, next year there will be no class rankings, allowing all students to feel better about themselves.  Kind of warm and fuzzy, isn’t it; teaching the children the superiority of socialism.   

Special interest groups are permeating the schools, the textbooks, and the minds of the youth.  Maybe I am worrying too much.  After all it’s just a few classes, just a few textbooks, just a few words, just a few Jews, just a few…  “Give me the youth…, let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state” – Adolf Hitler. 

No, the people proponing the values discussed in this column are nothing like Hitler.  And neither are those opposing them.  Rather, both sides of these issues have well-intentioned, caring people who simply disagree with one another.  The quote is to illustrate the power of changing the values of the youth. 

And these changes, good and bad, happen one very small step at a time; nearly impossible to recognize until too late.  These are our youth, our responsibility, our future, our choice.

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