Christian Educators Union Sees Many Teachers Leaving NEA Roll
by Jim Brown
July 19, 2006
(AgapePress) - - Some Christian teachers in the National Education Association (NEA) are turning to an alternative group to provide them with liability insurance and legal services in light of that powerful teacher union's endorsement of same-sex "marriage."
One day after the American Family Association (AFA) alerted its members that the union was getting set to endorse homosexual marriage, Christian Educators Association International (CEAI) reported receiving 5,000 more visits to its website than the group's daily average. Finn Laursen, executive director of CEAI, says many teachers are withdrawing from the NEA because they simply do not want to invest their money in an organization so blatantly opposed to their values.
"We have been receiving e-mails, phone calls, and a lot of interaction through our website with a level of frustration like I have never seen before," Laursen notes. "It almost seems like this open endorsement of same-sex marriage is almost the straw that broke the camel's back, if you will," he says.
The CEAI spokesman observes that, even in non-right-to-work states where the liberal union can negotiate a "closed shop," teachers with religious objections can either leave the NEA or remove their political contributions and pay what is called "fair share." But increasingly, growing numbers of conservative, Christian, and pro-family teachers are opting out of membership in the liberal teacher organization altogether.
Laursen believes NEA executives have been adamantly denying their support for homosexual marriage because they are concerned about hemorrhaging members who disagree with this and other liberal policies of the organization. "The conservative voice has been very quiet up till now," he says, but he believes this is changing.
"I think there is a rumbling out there that's saying enough is enough," the Christian education advocate explains. For that reason, he says, NEA officials "went into a position of denial, which is very difficult to do, when all of the material they have been sending out clearly was endorsing same-sex marriage, and even the final resolution that was passed endorsed that." (See related article)
The supposed "discrimination" resolution the NEA recently approved affects a section of its handbook ("Racism, Sexism, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identification Discrimination"), in which the union states that discrimination based on such factors as "... race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identification ...." must be eliminated. Although the NEA's leadership has repeatedly claimed the group takes no position on same-sex marriage, Laursen says, "I think that its members are just smart enough to figure that out."
Many teachers "have tolerated the NEA's liberal politics in the past because of the need for legal and job protection," Laursen asserts, "but they won't compromise their convictions any longer." As the NEA continues in its current direction, he believes more and more educators are going to be looking to alternative groups like his own for the services they have been getting from the liberal teachers union.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
