Ex-Homosexual Hails Student's Stand For Truth
by Jim Brown
June 9, 2004
(AgapePress) - A former homosexual now living with AIDS is criticizing a California school district for permitting pro-homosexual activism on campus but refusing to tolerate the views of Christian students who object to the homosexual agenda.
The Poway Unified School District in San Diego, California, is being sued over its decision to suspend 16-year-old student for wearing a tee shirt that bears a Bible verse and the messages "Homosexuality is shameful" and "Our school embraced what God has condemned."
Local resident James Hartline, once a homosexual community insider, contracted HIV six years ago. He says he is troubled that homosexual activists today have infiltrated public schools with their agenda and are using children as pawns in their political movement.
Now the former homosexual turned Christian activist is speaking out against the homosexual agenda that many public schools seem to be not only embracing but even giving preferential treatment. In the case of Poway Unified, Hartline feels the school officials are employing an outrageous double standard.
"The school is allowing the Gay-Straight Student Alliance and GLISEN to come in and conduct political activism on school property" Hartline says, "and then when this student decides to express that same right that's being afforded to these other students by expressing freedom of speech on his tee shirt, he is exorcised out of the school, which is totally discriminatory."
Meanwhile, certainly no one from the homosexual community is coming out in defense of the Christian student's right to free speech or equal treatment, and the irony of this does not escape Hartline. In his experience, he says, homosexual activists are constantly crying discrimination, but then they turn around and do the same thing, discriminating on an even more severe level than the people they accuse of doing it to them.
The Christian activist commends Chase Harper, the Christian teen who is suing his school district over its censorship of his biblical views on homosexuality. "I don't know this student, but I'm really proud to hear that a young man of God who is still in high school has decided to make a stand for Jesus," Hartline says.
As he strives to stand strong in the midst of his own difficult situation, the ex-homosexual believer says he feels he is "of the same breed" as Harper and truly appreciates what the teen has done.
Although Christians should be accorded all the same rights and legal standing as every other citizen in the United States, Hartline notes that schools and other public institutions often become complicit with the homosexual agenda in censoring Christian viewpoints. In order to combat this, he says Christians have to "become very aggressive legally and spiritually, and take their Christianity out of the church and into the street" to confront the opposition.
