A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured.

The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.

What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people’s characters — and that’s the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself — then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character’s race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Who knows how much J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)

Absurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it — and catching hell. Although the term “whitewashing” is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Novels about black or Asian characters have been given cover art that features white people.

Controversies over cover-art whitewashing, and other attempts by agents, editors and publishers to downplay or even eliminate minority characters, have roiled the world of young adult literature in recent years. The author Justine Larbalestier (who is white) wrote a YA novel, “Liar,” with a black heroine in 2009, but her publisher insisted on using a photograph of a white teenager for the cover. Larbalestier took their disagreement public and the ensuing scandal persuaded the publisher to back down. Ursula K. Le Guin, a revered science-fiction and fantasy author who has often chosen dark-skinned people as her protagonists, has had to put up with seeing them depicted as white in cover art and film adaptations for decades.

Publishers argue that they’re only trying to make sure their authors’ books find the widest possible audience. What they mean is that a certain percentage of white (or straight) readers will summarily conclude a book isn’t for them if the face on the cover fails to resemble their own. Sad to say, the publishers are probably right about that. While the readers in the Ohio State study didn’t get to choose the stories they read, many of them were deciding how much to invest in the protagonist and his experiences — how much to identify — on the basis of his sexual orientation or race.

Authors, fans and observers are rightly disgusted by the practice of cover-art whitewashing. It shouldn’t have to be that way. But some commentators on the controversy seem to think that if publishers act as if race or gender or sexual orientation isn’t a factor in what many people decide to read, somehow it will simply stop being a factor. This seems unlikely. If it were so easy to rid people of their prejudices, the world would already be a much pleasanter place. It takes regular exposure to different types of people in the course of everyday life — at school and in the military, the workplace and the neighborhood — plus a whole lot of time and peer pressure to wear bias down.

Well, it takes that — and maybe the magic of storytelling? The readers in the Ohio State study did become more understanding of gay and black people after they were (let’s not put too fine a point on it) tricked into identifying with them. This type of sleight-of-hand is something only a non-visual medium like prose fiction can pull off. It can firmly lodge readers inside an imaginary person’s head without ever showing them his or her face. In Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” for example, the narrator never explains that all the principle characters are black, and each reader will come to that realization at a different stage in the narrative. It’s Gaiman’s way of tweaking the very common readerly assumption that defaults all major characters to white unless their race is otherwise specified. (And sometimes not even then, as quite a few young fans of “The Hunger Games” demonstrated by being astonished when a supporting character, clearly described as black in the novel, was played by a black actress in the film.)

Of course, not all readers are white or straight, and the ones who aren’t deeply appreciate novels that advertise the diversity of their characters. It’s about time they got heroes and heroines who looked like them, and novels that speak to their distinctive experiences. They have been identifying with characters across the boundaries of race, gender and sexual orientation from time immemorial, and are masters of the art, but understandably they’d like to give their ninja skills a rest. Furthermore, there are also white readers who prefer variety in their fiction or are deliberately trying to correct the imbalances of the past.

Nevertheless, if you believe, as many Americans have since the days of the Puritans, that books ought to morally improve their readers, then maybe there’s a place for a little judicious whitewashing in the writing and publication of fiction. It has literally been demonstrated to change hearts and minds, at least for a while. That’s more than many consciousness-raising efforts — including righteous lectures delivered by the enlightened — can say.

Further reading

Ohio State University’s research blog on the study of the experience-taking while reading stories

The Booksmugglers blog on notable recent instances of book-cover whitewashing in YA.

Ursula K. Le Guin writes for Slate about the changes made to the race of major characters in the TV adaptation of her “Earthsea Trilogy.”

Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr compiling and discussing the response of some fans to the casting of a black actress as a supporting character in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel.

During the civil rights era, the leading conservative politician, Barry Goldwater, and the leading conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley Jr., along with most of their followers opposed federal laws banning racial discrimination. To their credit, they later admitted they had been mistaken; indeed, both Buckley and Goldwater supported gay rights late in their careers. But at the time that conservative support for a color-blind society might have made a difference, the leaders of American conservatism sided with the Southern segregationists. They claimed they did so, not because of racial prejudice, but because they feared federal tyranny — a weaselly stance that, in practice, made them side with white supremacist tyranny at the state level. If they had truly believed in their own propaganda about federalism, conservatives could have opposed federal civil rights legislation while campaigning for civil rights laws at the state level. They didn’t.

The civil rights revolution was followed by the sexual revolution. Here again, conservatives, as distinct from libertarians, were on the side of government repression. The mainstream conservative movement opposed the legalization of contraceptives and abortion. In this case, unlike in the case of civil rights, the American right did not even pretend to have constitutional reasons for opposing Supreme Court decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 (which struck down state bans on the use of contraception, including by married couples) or Roe v. Wade  in 1973 (which struck down state bans on most abortion). The mainstream right simply argued that conservative Christian beliefs about sexual morality should be incorporated into law. In other words, the very conservatives warning us about the dangers of “mobocracy” when it came to the welfare state had no objection to using the power of government to force their fellow citizens to live their private lives according to the teachings of Thomas Aquinas or the Book of Leviticus, as interpreted by semi-literate Southern Protestant preachers.

The conservative campaign against gay rights is equally impossible to justify, in terms of America’s Founding philosophy of natural rights. Unable to come up with any Lockean liberal reason why citizens of a democratic republic should be discriminated against, on the basis of their sexual orientations, conservatives are forced to cite the Bible or thousands of years of tradition. The whole point of the American Founding, however, was to establish a regime that was not based, like the pre-modern monarchies of  Europe, on revealed religion or ancient custom. In the words of Gen. George Washington in his circular to the states, shortly after victory in the American war of independence:

The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period, the researches of the human mind, after social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, the Treasures of knowledge, acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages and Legislatures, through a long succession of years, are laid open for our use, and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the Establishment of our forms of Government…

A theocratic or tribalist Right that argues for public policies by invoking divine revelation to some ancient prophet or immemorial custom dating back to “the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition,” is profoundly, radically un-American.
In the cases of freedom from racial discrimination and freedom from sexual repression, American conservatives have been solidly on the side of government repression of the powerless and unprivileged. The same is true with respect to workers’ rights, debtors’ rights and criminal rights.

To listen to their Jacksonian rhetoric, American conservatives are the champions of the little guy against the “elites.” But not, it appears, in the workplace or the bank. The American right is opposed to anything — minimum wage laws, unions, workplace regulations — that would increase the bargaining power of workers relative to their bosses.

And what about debtors? Genuine Jeffersonians and Jacksonians have usually sided with working-class debtors against upper-class creditors.  Not American conservatives.  They supported laws making it harder for families crippled by medical bills to declare bankruptcy. The Tea Party was mobilized in part by opposition to proposals to restructure the debt of homeowners who are “underwater” with their mortgages. And — best of all — the very same American right that wants to impose Catholic or  Old Testament sexual morals in the bedroom opposes Catholic and  Old Testament teachings about the need to limit usury.

Last but not least is the appallingly authoritarian conservative record in the realm of criminal rights. If American conservatives really believed their talk about the threat of government tyranny and government incompetence, they would unanimously oppose the death penalty. Nothing could illustrate arbitrary, despotic government power more than the possibility that execution might depend on the vagaries of jury selection or the incompetence of state-appointed legal counsel. And yet when it comes to the death penalty, American conservatives abruptly forget their qualms about state power in its most lethal form. The same conservative movement that claims that government cannot be trusted to run the postal system or administer Social Security insists that wise and flawless government never applies the death penalty to the guilty inconsistently and never executes an innocent person by mistake.

What would America look like, if conservatives had won their battles against American liberty in the last half-century?  Formal racial segregation might still exist at the state and local level in the South. In some states, it would be illegal to obtain abortions or even for married couples to use contraception. In much of the United States, gays and lesbians would still be treated as criminals. Government would dictate to Americans with whom and how they can have sex. Unions would have been completely annihilated in the public as well as the private sector. Wages and hours laws would be abolished, so that employers could pay third-world wages to Americans working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, as many did before the New Deal. There would be far more executions and far fewer procedural safeguards to ensure that the lives of innocent Americans are not ended mistakenly by the state.

That is the America that the American right for the last few generations has fought for. Freedom has nothing to do with it.

The caption is a superficial way to characterize an important development of thought that the president — along with the country — has been making over recent years. It is also entirely wrong. Like the mini-furor a couple of months back about the claim that Richard Nixon was our first gay president, the story simply ignores that the U.S. already had a gay president more than a century ago.

There can be no doubt that James Buchanan was gay, before, during and after his four years in the White House. Moreover, the nation knew it, too — he was not far into the closet.

Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of “Men Like That,” a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote:

I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.

Despite such evidence, one reason why Americans find it hard to believe Buchanan could have been gay is that we have a touching belief in progress. Our high school history textbooks’ overall story line is, “We started out great and have been getting better ever since,” more or less automatically. Thus we must be more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the 19th century! Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now.

This ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism. Thus chronological ethnocentrism is the belief that we now live in a better society, compared to past societies. Of course, ethnocentrism is the anthropological term for the attitude that our society is better than any other society now existing, and theirs are OK to the degree that they are like ours.

Chronological ethnocentrism plays a helpful role for history textbook authors: it lets them sequester bad things, from racism to the robber barons, in the distant past. Unfortunately for students, it also makes history impossibly dull, because we all “know” everything turned out for the best. It also makes history irrelevant, because it separates what we might learn about, say, racism or the robber barons in the past from issues of the here and now. Unfortunately for us all, just as ethnocentrism makes us less able to learn from other societies, chronological ethnocentrism makes us less able to learn from our past. It makes us stupider.

To think even for a moment about aspects of personal presentation other than sexual orientation forces us to realize that we today are not necessarily more tolerant. Consider facial hair. In 1864, with a beard, Abraham Lincoln won reelection. Could that happen nowadays? Is it mere chance that no candidate with facial hair has won the presidency since William Howard Taft — and he wore only a mustache? Indeed, since Thomas Dewey in 1948 no major party candidate with facial hair has even run for president, and Dewey wore only the smallest of mustaches.

Perhaps the presidency is too small a sample. Let’s add in the Supreme Court. Since 1930, 34 different men have served on the Supreme Court. All save Thurgood Marshall have been clean-shaven. (Lest readers think that Marshall’s tiny mustache might topple this argument, let me point out that during most of the last 82 years, 70 percent of adult black males have had some facial hair, yet the only three African-Americans to have served on the Supreme Court or as president have had almost none.) The chance that a random sample of 33 white males would have had no facial hair is something like (.9)33 or about .03, not very likely.

“Even” today, many institutions, from investment banking firms to Brigham Young University, flatly prohibit beards on white males. Brigham Young falsifies its past to make this rule seem “natural.” Its chief founder, John Maeser, usually wore a full beard and mustache. In front of the building bearing his name stands his bronze statue complete with full beard and mustache. In about 1960, however, perhaps earlier, BYU banned beards. Then in 1986, the university commissioned artist Ron Bell to paint a portrait of Maeser. Working from an old photograph, Bell did; of course, Maeser wound up bearded. So the administration asked him to remove the beard. “They didn’t want today’s students to believe they could follow suit,” in the artist’s words. He complied.

If this example seems too religious, consider the huge secular company Walt Disney Enterprises. The last time I visited Disney World, it still banned facial hair, although it quietly made exceptions for African-Americans with well-trimmed beards or mustaches.

In themselves, beards may not be signs of progress, although mine has subtly improved my thinking. Nevertheless, we reached an arresting state of intolerance when the Disney organization, founded by a man with a mustache, would not allow one even on a janitor. Moreover, before we trivialize these examples by thinking they apply only to facial hair, consider that Lincoln was also our last president who was not a member of a Christian denomination when taking office. Could a non-Christian like Jefferson or Lincoln be president today? It’s not clear.

All that said, President Obama’s change of heart about gay marriage remains significant. It does show increasing tolerance compared to our recent past. During the nadir of race relations, that terrible period between 1890 and about 1940 when white America went more racist in its thinking than at any other time, the U.S. also clamped down on beards, liquor (briefly) and, yes, homosexuals. As Jackie Robinson was not the first black player in Major League Baseball, but rather the first after the nadir, so President Obama is not our “first gay” president (Forgive me: I cannot seem to retype Newsweek’s silly headline without putting quotation marks around the words), but only our “first” since the nadir.

Remembering that James Buchanan was homosexual complexifies our national narrative, to be sure, but it is a complexity that we need. It prompts us to remember that terrible era, the nadir, when we all moved backward, not just the South. Not just organized baseball but also the Kentucky Derby, the NFL and even previously “black” jobs like railroad foremen got redefined “white only.” Communities across the North became sundown towns, barring African-Americans formally or informally. Even North Dakota outlawed interracial marriage.

Forgetting Buchanan’s sexual orientation helps us forget all the other national secrets we have packed into that closet with him. Ultimately, it prompts us to succumb to chronological ethnocentrism. If, however, we can rid ourselves of the fantasy that we are always getting better, then maybe we can create a nation that actually becomes more tolerant. Then we might — again — elect a real gay president. After all, just three months ago, Disney started letting white male employees grow beards.

These revelations are hardly news. At least six years ago, Garner’s New York Times obituary included a clear description of the two individuals (and the jealous lover) involved, including the winsome tidbit that the lover had been beaten to death in 2000, and that Garner had been arrested for assault at least twice.

People who challenge criminal laws are almost never candidates for on-screen portrayal by Tom Hanks. Consider Ernesto Miranda, of Miranda warnings fame. Miranda was arrested while still in the eighth grade, was in and out of reform school, and died in a knife fight at a card game at the age of 35. He was so clearly guilty of the offense at stake in Miranda v. Arizona that he was convicted again in a trial where the state could not even use the confession they had extracted without warning him. Norma McCorvey, the Roe of Roe v. Wade, abused both drugs and alcohol and had already produced two children who had to be raised by others when she agreed to challenge the law against aborting her third pregnancy.

And people who want to challenge sex laws often have to force the issue. After two abortive tries to challenge Connecticut’s centuries-old prohibition on birth control, a Yale med school professor had to open a flagrantly illegal birth control clinic and sit down waiting to be arrested. The result was the famed constitutional decision Griswold v. Connecticut. Like the laws against sodomy, prohibitions on adultery, fornication and, most recently, birth control work by intimidation rather than by lawful enforcement. If brought to the light of day by the dispatch of policemen into the bedroom, such laws quickly fail the test of basic principles of a liberal democracy. But, as the Carpenter book reveals, the fact of criminality made all same-sex relations perilous and suspect, while the law remained unenforced and therefore unexposed to the cold light of a constitutional test.

It was a devilish predicament, which the gay revolution faced again and again. When the police raided the illegal, Mafia-run bar called Stonewall in 1969, the New York liquor authorities had long since stopped threatening to pull the licenses of bars with a gay clientele. Yet the constant pressure of the police on the bars that catered to gays created an informal oppression that only ended when the Stonewall patrons rose up.  Indeed, long before Lawrence, a posse of gay activists in Los Angeles had to cook up a citizens’ arrest of six admitted sodomites in order to force the issue of the constitutionality of California’s sodomy law, in face of local authorities’ unwillingness to enforce the darn thing.

Lawrence and the rest didn’t have to be paragons of virtue. Comparing them to the Lovings is a categorical mistake. They weren’t asking, as the Lovings were, to be included in one of the most morally freighted, traditional institutions of social approval, marriage. They were asking to be left alone, a founding principle of any liberal democracy. When the time came for the gay revolution to take on the constitutionality of fortress marriage, activists correctly pursued a completely different course. No beer-swilling pornography collecting random plaintiffs for the uber-respectable Republican icon Ted Olson and his Democratic sidekick David Boies. The named plaintiff in the California gay marriage case,  Perry v. Schwarzenegger is a soccer mom who actually ran the state’s program advocating for children newborn to 5 years old.

Realizing that the gay movement was harvesting the appeal of their Cleaver-style family litigants, Rush Limbaugh recently tried to get some traction against same-sex marriage by pointing out that one of the iconic couples married when California allowed it was divorcing. In the American tradition of simple equality, if heterosexuals like the serial marriers Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich can avail themselves of the institution, gay and lesbian fiancés, however unappealing, should be able to do so as well. The gay movement has been brilliantly strategic in its choice of symbols in the marriage fight. But victory will surely be at hand when someone as raffish as John Lawrence and Tyron Garner can stop by the Elvis chapel and tie the knot.

But whatever one’s position on the legislation, the message is remarkable for its fierce anti-gay rhetoric, dripping with disdain and disgust for “homosexuals.” A taste (emphasis added):

Better named the “Homosexual Classrooms Act,” its chief advocate in Congress is Rep. Jared Polis, himself an open homosexual and radical activist. …

Require schools to teach appalling homosexual acts so “homosexual students” don’t feel “singled out” during already explicit sex-ed classes; …

In fact, it will set them up to ram through their entire perverted vision for a homosexual America. …

Sexual deviants being held up as models of virtue? If that makes you as sick as it makes me, you simply must join me in this battle for America’s children.

This is the sort of language one would expect to find in Ron Paul’s 80s-era newsletters the Standard has been so critical of.

Lots of publications rent out email lists to groups wanting to get a message across; that obviously does not imply an endorsement by the magazine. But it’s telling that in 2012 this kind of fierce anti-gay rhetoric is still considered within the pale at the Standard. I’ve asked the magazine for comment and will update if I hear back.

UPDATE: The Human Rights Campaign is condemning the email sent on the Weekly Standard list and calling on its members to voice their displeasure with Standard editor Bill Kristol.

UPDATE II: Standard publisher Terry Eastland tells Dylan Byers that the magazine’s “vetting system” broke down, and, “This is obviously not the sort of advertising that we would accept, nor will we accept it in the future.” But Kristol is apparently declining the opportunity to condemn the email as HRC wanted.

***

The full email:

Dear Pro-family American,

The Radical Homosexuals infiltrating the United States Congress have a plan:

Indoctrinate an entire generation of American children with pro-homosexual propaganda and eliminate traditional values from American society.

Their ultimate dream is to create a new America based on sexual promiscuity in which the values you and I cherish are long forgotten.

I hate to admit it, but if they pass the deceptively named “Student Non-Discrimination Act,” (H.R. 998 & S. 555) that’s exactly what they’ll do.

Better named the “Homosexual Classrooms Act,” its chief advocate in Congress is Rep. Jared Polis, himself an open homosexual and radical activist.

And it’s dangerously close to becoming the law of the land.

H.R. 998 already has 150 co-sponsors in the House!

And S. 555 already has 34 co-sponsors in the Senate!

That’s why I need you to act quickly — right away — to protect our nation’s youth.

I have prepared the official “Protect Our Children’s Innocence” Petition to Congress for you to sign.

Please click here to sign it right away so I can rush it to the Capitol with thousands more.

You and I must defeat this disastrous legislation.

You see, the Homosexual Classrooms Act contains a laundry list of anti-family provisions that will:

*** Require schools to teach appalling homosexual acts so “homosexual students” don’t feel “singled out” during already explicit sex-ed classes;

*** Spin impressionable students in a whirlwind of sexual confusion and misinformation, even peer pressure to “experiment” with the homosexual “lifestyle;”

*** Exempt homosexual students from punishment for propositioning, harassing, or even sexually assaulting their classmates, as part of their specially-protected right to “freedom of self-expression;”

*** Force private and even religious schools to teach a pro-homosexual curriculum and purge any reference to religion if a student claims it creates a “hostile learning environment” for homosexual students.

And that’s just the beginning of the Homosexual Lobby’s radical agenda.

In fact, it will set them up to ram through their entire perverted vision for a homosexual America.

My friend, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this is not a fight we can afford to lose.

That’s why Public Advocate is leading the fight against this immoral legislation.

This is a battle for the survival of American values and the fact is, there’s no time to waste.

The Homosexual Classrooms Act will turn America’s schools into indoctrination centers and its classrooms into social laboratories — and they’re pulling out all the stops to pass it.

You see, they’ve disguised the bill’s wicked purpose behind an innocent name: “The Student Non-Discrimination Act.”

The Homosexual Lobby knows that if the public knew the truth about their radical agenda, they’ll have no hope of success.

And their dangerously close to ramming their perversity into law.

H.R. 998 already has 150 co-sponsors in the House!

And S. 555 already has 34 co-sponsors in the Senate!

You and I need to take action right now to stop the growing momentum of this disastrous legislation.

I’ve developed a massive program to launch the second they try to push this bill through — mail, email, phones, and even radio and TV ads.

But that’s only possible with your support…

None of these things are cheap.  In fact, running a program of the size necessary to defeat this bill can get quite expensive especially with increases in postage and printing costs.

That’s why I need your generous contribution.  In addition to your signed “Protect Our Children’s Innocence” Petition, will you contribute $250, $100, $50 or even just $35right away.

And every dollar counts in this fight so even if you can only chip in $10 or $20, it will make a difference.

Unfortunately, this agenda is nothing new.

In fact, other countries like Britain are already experimenting with this kind of legislation, such as mandating public schools inject pro-homosexual content into every aspect of education.

Word problems in math classes are now to include homosexual characters.  History classes will document the “civil rights” struggle against the “oppressive” pro-family establishment.

And it’s even started to infiltrate our state governments.

In California, lawmakers want to “require schools to portray lesbians, homosexuals, transsexuals … as positive role models to children in all public schools.”

Sexual deviants being held up as models of virtue?

If that makes you as sick as it makes me, you simply must join me in this battle for America’s children.

Please sign the “Protect Our Children’s Innocence” Petition to Congress and then send agenerous contribution right away.  Your action will make all the difference.

And if all that wasn’t enough to convince you that action must be taken immediately, there’s more.

Many say that there will always be private schools and traditional homeschool families to teach traditional values to the next generation.

But the truth is, this radical agenda is NOT restricted to public schools.

Kevin Jennings, Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar,” has clearly stated that “every school, public, private or parochial has an obligation” to teach a pro-homosexual curriculum.

In fact, Jennings denounced school choice programs as “very dangerous” because they make it much harder to impose the Homosexual Agenda on our kids.

“Lord forbid a Baptist or Mormon school,” he added.

Jennings’ ultimate goal is for all curriculum in “kindergarten, and first grade, and second grade – every grade” be infused with a pro-homosexual slant.

Traditional values will be squashed and demonized as old fashioned or out of date, or even as bigotry.

You and I cannot let them succeed.

Please sign the “Protect Our Children’s Innocence” Petition to Congress I’ve prepared for you right away.

And along with your petition, would you please send a generous contribution of $250, $100, $50 or even just $35.

And every dollar counts in this fight so even if you can only chip in $10 or $20, it will make a difference.

Thank you so much for all you have done.

Sincerely,
Eugene Delgaudio
President,
Public Advocate of the U.S.

P.S. Radical Homosexuals in Congress have a plan to indoctrinate our children in schools — both public and private.

But Public Advocate is taking a stand.  Will you join me?

Please sign the “Protect Our Children’s Innocence” Petition to Congress I’ve enclosed.

And please, along with your petition, would you please send a generous contribution of $250, $100, $50 or even just $35 right away?

And every dollar counts in this fight so even if you can only chip in $10 or $20, it will make a difference.