The Southern Poverty Law Center is failing to bring a strong enough action against the Anoka-Hennepin School Board. That failure not only results in continued poor conditions for LGBT students in the Anoka-Hennepin School District, but also for LGBT students in hostile school districts nationwide. If the SPLC, instead of holding tea parties, would actually go to trial against the Anoka-Hennepin School District, and win compensatory and punitive damages for the student victims, a strong and effective message would be sent to gay-bashing school boards nationwide.
READ:Â An Open Letter To All LGBT Students Of The Anoka-Hennepin School District
Those unfamiliar with the School Board-authorized gay bashing in Anoka-Hennepin may get an overview of the matter here.
The SPLC has been engaged with Anoka-Hennepin since at least May 24, 2011. And, it did actually file this lawsuit in federal court (the case is number 11CV1999). Guardians of student victims are named as Plaintiffs; the Anoka-Hennepin School District, School Board, Superintendent and other administrators are named as Defendants.
Read the pleading (link is PDF, a copy is below, and excerpt in the image above,) to learn of what allegedly was inflicted on the student victims; it is spine-chilling.
The problem is that instead of going ahead to trial, the SPLC has been having tea parties with the gay-bashing Anoka-Hennepin School Board. After at least six months of engagement in the matter, the SPLC actually was going to allow a “Controversial Topics Curriculum Policy” to replace the previous, reprehensible “Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy.” For gay human beings in public schools to be stigmatized as “controversial topics” obviously is not a move in the right direction. As of this writing, the next iteration of the Anoka-Hennepin School District’s codified gay-bashing is to have the euphemistic title, “Respectful Learning Environment Curriculum Policy.” Do not hold your breath, expecting for it to allow the teaching of the subject of Michelangelo’s love sonnets to another man. (The Michelangelo Sonnets were set as a song-cycle by the out gay composer Benjamin Britain. Here, you can hear them performed by Britain at the piano, with his gay male life companion Peter Pears tenor).
That the entire community of the Anoka-Hennepin School District has not yet been sent a strong enough message regarding the theocratically-based, bullying non-acceptance of gay human beings is manifest in insane bigots’ recent demands for the district to demonize gay people and to promote praying to Jesus for them to be “changed” into heterosexuals. Make these theocratic anti-gay bullies pay money for their violations of gay students’ constitutional rights, (right out of their local School Board’s tax-payers-funded budget) and just see if they continue to pull their nonsense.
The SPLC advertises its involvement in Anoka-Hennepin on its website pages with “Donate Now” buttons. Thus, it can exploit its involvement to ask for dollar donations, even as it is not going ahead with its filed lawsuit against the school to win so much as one penny for the victims named in the federal court pleading. Why was this lawsuit filed in a federal court, if the SPLC did not intend to go ahead to trial with it? Â If you had been a victim of horrendous gay-bashing and unconstitutional, illegal abuses in a public school, including criminal harassment and assault, would you want your attorneys to make money off your case, without winning a penny for you?
The SPLC — as happens — has dithered about whether to place the so-called National Organization for Marriage on its list of anti-gay hate groups.  Supposedly, the SPLC designates as a hate group an organization that perpetuates documentable lies against a minority. NOM’s founder and chairman emeritus Princeton Professor Robert George has built his career and fan base largely on telling lies against gay human beings. Speakers at NOM-sponsored hate rallies tell mobs of political gay bashers that homosexuals are “worthy to death.” So you can see where the SPLC would hesitate to classify NOM as an anti-gay hate group.
Some of the local Anoka-Hennepin groups with pretty names — for example, the Anoka-Hennepin Gay Equity Team — might be making it harder for the victims named in the lawsuit to see justice done. Katrina Plotz of the GET, for example, excoriated this reporter through Facebook for having criticized the SPLC in this petition. Plotz additionally harangued me for the petition allegedly containing things about Superintendent Dennis Carlson that, according to her, are not true. Yet, the SPLC law suit names Carlson as a Defendant, and if the SPLC case against him would go ahead to trial, the Court would sort out which evidence could be presented, and Carlson could be held accountable to the victims. Plotz and the Gay Equity Team appear to be standing in the way of that happening, by making excuses for the SPLC.
Anoka-Hennepin School District Complaint
http://www.scribd.com/embeds/81068939/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-kqdnz3nxwwflotrr6x9
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// ]]>New York City– based novelist and freelance writer Scott Rose’s LGBT– interest by– line has appeared on Advocate .com, PoliticusUSA .com, The New York Blade, Queerty .com, Girlfriends and in numerous additional venues. Among his other interests are the arts, boating and yachting, wine and food, travel, poker and dogs. His “Mr. David Cooper’s Happy Suicide†is about a New York City advertising executive assigned to a condom account.