Bay State Boy's Beating May Be Linked to Dad's Stand on Homosexuality
by Jim Brown
June 19, 2006
(AgapePress) - - The young son of a Massachusetts pro-family activist was physically assaulted by fellow elementary school students on the two-year anniversary of same-sex "marriage" in the state.
On May 17, first-grader Jacob Parker was beaten up by a group of eight to ten kids on the playground at Estabrook Elementary School in Lexington. Just weeks before the assault, his father and mother had filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the school.
Last year, David Parker was arrested and jailed for refusing to leave the school until officials agreed to grant him the right to opt his son out of classroom discussions on homosexuality. The Massachusetts father believes the assault was incited by parents who are upset with his opposition to homosexuality.
"What we're concerned about," Parker says, "is actually the environment being created in the schools, where children, maybe in the normal course of scuffling, will translate the aggression that they may be hearing from parents and administrators to other children."
The pro-family advocate suspects the physical attack on his son may have occurred because parents and school officials are angry over his stand for traditional marriage in Massachusetts and have allowed these feelings to influence kids who attend Estabrook Elementary. Also, he notes, back issues of the "biased" Lexington Minuteman newspaper were placed on a table in the school library for children to read the local coverage of the lawsuit.
Parker feels the Bay State's schools employ a large double standard when it comes to protecting students from bullying and discrimination. If the assault against his son had been perpetrated on a child of homosexual parents, "lessons teaching tolerance and diversity or homosexual behavior normalization would be forced upon the young children," he contends.
"What we have in Massachusetts," the activist points out, "is large sums of money being earmarked for children being bullied from gay households or gay children." However, such funding really "shouldn't be earmarked and directed on that basis," he insists. "It should be for all the children -- not earmarked to protect just one particular segment of society."
Parker says his case against the Lexington schools is fundamentally about freedom of choice for parents to raise their children in the interest of their well being, health, happiness, and development as productive members of society.
While that society allows its citizens the freedom to cross "the God-given and nature-dictated boundaries" of gender, the Massachusetts parent asserts, to do so is a treacherous path to follow and is not the path of freedom he and his wife choose to offer to their four- and six-year-old children.
"We all want what's best for our children," Parker says, "although differences exist in how parents accomplish this goal." The freedom to define what is best for their own families and how to achieve these goals should extend to all parents, he contends, regardless of color, culture, religion, or sexual orientation, and this "parental sovereignty" should not be undermined by school officials or other external authorities.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
