President Obama now commands center stage following his formal announcement that, yes, he supports same-sex marriage. For perspective on how we got to this point, we should shift our sights to three days before the president’s announcement. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appeared on MSNBC, where he responded, “Yes, I do” when asked if he supports same-sex marriage.
Duncan’s support for same-sex marriage is not surprising at all. If he had said homosexuality were immoral, there would have been demands for his ouster.
But how have we gone from a nation where our first president, George Washington, admonished that religion and morality are “indispensable” to “political prosperity” to one, today, in which our president says “same-sex couples should be able to get married”?
On the marriage issue, the national transformation has been breathtaking. A new Gallup poll shows the nation evenly divided — 50 percent saying same-sex marriage should be valid and 48 percent saying it should not be. When Gallup asked the same question in 1996, 68 percent opposed legalization of same-sex marriage, against 27 percent in favor.
In just 16 years, the gap between those opposed and in support of same-sex marriage has gone from a 41-point difference to practically zero.
Our public schools are locally controlled, but the influence of the federal government is substantial. The Department of Education, per its website, “administers a budget of $68.1 billion dollars in discretionary appropriations” serving “nearly 16,000 school districts and approximately 49 million students.”
It’s not trivial that Duncan, the man who oversees this massive enterprise that molds the minds of our nation’s youth, publicly rejects the traditional definition of marriage.
Then there are the other major players, the teachers unions. The 2011-2012 resolutions of the largest one, the National Education Association, include support of same-sex marriage and sex education programs that appreciate “diversity of sexual orientation and gender identification.” The president of the second-largest union lives in an open lesbian relationship.
The president brandishes one of his favorite words in explaining his support for same-sex marriage: “Fairness.” Actually, this is about a very unfair fight between two competing moralities. As one court ruling after another has purged religious expression from our public spaces and schools, we have unfairly suppressed traditional values in favor of promoting moral relativism through government monopoly power.
California, for instance, has a new law mandating teaching gay history in public schools. A similar mandate to teach Christian history would be challenged constitutionally.
When Obama says he sees much of the growth in support for same-sex marriage as “generational,” with strong support coming from our youth, it should come as no surprise. Attitudes reflect education. We have created a world in which it is illegal to teach youth in our public schools traditional religious values, but it is not illegal to teach them competing values of nihilism, materialism and relativism. And these competing values are actively promoted.
As elsewhere, the main victims are poor, minority kids, often from broken families, held hostage in these public schools and prohibited from being taught the very values that could save their lives.
Is there a way out? I only see one. Universal school choice. Liberate parents and kids from government- and union-controlled schools. In a free America, parents who don’t share Arne Duncan’s values shouldn’t have those values forced on them.
Examiner Columnist Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education (urbancure.org). She is syndicated nationally by Scripps Howard News Service.
