Attorney: Cancelled 'Diversity Day' Shows School's Intolerance for Truth
by Jim Brown
March 27, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A Wisconsin high school has cancelled its biannual "Diversity Day," an event designed to introduce juniors and seniors to minority perspectives and to expose the teen students to alternative sexual lifestyles. The school scrapped this year's event after a legal group encouraged inclusion of the perspective of former homosexuals in planned "Diversity Day" activities.
Students at Viroqua High School near La Crosse, Wisconsin, would have listened to two keynote speakers and a choice of three to ten panel discussions, which included talks on various religions and a presentation by a homosexual couple -- that is, the students would have, if Diversity Day had gone as originally planned. However, the Christian and "ex-gay" perspectives were to be left out of the scheduled events.
A concerned Viroqua resident contacted Florida-based Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit litigation and policy organization that works to promote religious freedom and traditional values. On March 9, Liberty Counsel sent a letter to the Viroqua Area School District Administrator, explaining that the censorship of the viewpoints of Christians and former homosexuals violated not only the First Amendment's establishment clause but also the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection.
The legal group sent another letter on March 14 to the District Administrator and the Board of Education. Two days later, the District Administrator confirmed in a telephone call that Viroqua High School's Diversity Day activities had been cancelled. According to the school, the event was called off after the homosexual couple slated to present said they would be uncomfortable speaking in the presence of someone with an ex-gay viewpoint.
Liberty Counsel attorney Rena Lindevaldsen says the school's actions are "just one more example of those who say they're promoting tolerance [being] the first ones to discriminate against the true message getting out about homosexuality, which is that people can change and you're not born gay."
Frequently across the United States, Lindevaldsen contends, school officials and others will respond to those who disagree with the pro-homosexual stance on sexual orientation issues by censoring the opposing message. "When the request is made to include the ex-gay perspective, they will shut down the forum, shut down the program, rather than allow students to hear that people are not born gay," she says.
The Liberty Counsel attorney says she does not buy Viroqua High School's claim that it was too late to include a speaker who opposed homosexuality in the Diversity Day events. In fact, she notes, "We offered up a pastor who was willing to represent the Christian perspective and had individuals ready and willing to jump right in to represent the ex-gay perspective."
For the school to have incorporated the Christian and ex-gay input would have been a matter of simply "finding a couple more classrooms to allow these people to talk," Lindevaldsen asserts. "But if you're going to have a 'Diversity Day' and it's only going to present the homosexual perspective, we are pleased that the choice then was to at least cancel the event rather than present a one-sided message."
The Board of Education was faced with citizen opposition to Diversity Day back in 2004, when a citizen petition was circulated in protest of the presence of speakers on homosexual and transgender issues. That petition was signed by 400 people and was enough to get Viroqua High School's Diversity Day cancelled that year. Nevertheless, the pro-homosexual event was reinstated after spring elections resulted in new members on the Board.
Unlike 2004, however, this time around the school officials were confronted with legal precedent. In pointing out the problems with the high school's refusal to include Christian and ex-gay viewpoints at this year's Diversity Day event, Liberty Counsel presented school officials with a decision from a federal district court in Michigan, which ruled a similar exclusion of viewpoints from a Diversity Day panel unconstitutional.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
