By Thomas Coy

TEACHERS BE AWARE! Your dues money will be used in efforts to legitimize same-sex marriage and same-sex civil unions.

CITIZENS BE AWARE! The National Education Association is going to use its political resources to attempt to overturn state constitutional amendments and laws that limit marriage to one man and one woman.

In a carefully worded business item brought to the 2009 NEA Representative Assembly, the NEA Board of Directors put the NEA on the front line of gay political efforts to undo the will of the American people, which has consistently upheld the ideal of marriage as between one man and one woman.

Part of the adopted business item reads “NEA will support its affiliates in opposing state constitutional and/or statutory provisions that could have the effect of prohibiting the state and its political subdivisions from providing the same rights and benefits to same-sex couples as are provided to similarly situated heterosexual couples. . . “

The NEA also gave itself the authority to use its resources to aid the gay political movement at the federal level in efforts to make homosexuality equal to heterosexuality. The authorization reads, “NEA will take such actions as may be appropriate to support efforts to (a) repeal any federal legislation and/or regulations that discriminate against same-sex couples, and (b) enact federal legislation and/or regulations that treat same-sex couples and similarly-situated heterosexual couples equally with regard to social security, health care, taxation, and other federal rights and benefits.”

In a related political move the NEA Resolutions Committee denied the request of the NEA Ex-Gay Educators Caucus to add “ex-gays” to a list of groups the NEA recognizes as worthy of respect, understanding, acceptance, and sensitivity in a diverse society. The list currently includes “gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people.”

The NEA has also repeatedly ignored the request of the Ex-Gay Educators Caucus to include ex-gays on the NEA Sexual Orientation and Gender Identification Committee. Currently, no ex-gays serve on any official committee of the NEA.

Ex-gays pose a serious problem to the gay political movement. Their very existence is empirical evidence that sexual orientation, particularly homosexuality, can be changed. Much of the success of the gay political movement has been based on the premise that sexual orientation is like a person’s race and cannot be changed. Ex-gays prove that sexual orientation is not like race and that sexual orientation is a behavioral pattern.

Ex-gays also undermine the gay slogan “gay is good.” Many of their testimonies tell of a gay life that was anything but “good.” Some ex-gays left the gay life because all it brought was despair. Other ex-gays unintentionally lost their homosexual desires through therapy that unraveled their childhood wounds of rejection.

By strictly partisan politics the NEA works with gay political organizations like the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), while ignoring the ex-gays in its own ranks. The ex-gay perspective believes that students who are confused about their sexuality and think they might be a homosexual need to know they have choices other than becoming gay identified.

The only way the gay bias of the NEA will change is if more conservative teachers become active in the democratically run organization. The Conservative Educators Caucus is currently the major voice opposing the liberal agenda of the NEA leadership.