FIC Blog

William F. Buckley, a Connecticut native rightly described as the intellectual father of the conservative movement, died last week.

Buckley was not one of the formative influences in my journey from left to right. I did not discover him–or his delightful magazine, National Review–until after that journey was complete. But once I did, it was further confirmation that I had taken the correct path. No where on the Left was there anyone who was capable of engaging opponents in as elegant and witty a style as Buckley did from the Right. It helped, too, that he was brilliant and almost always right.

One person who did influence me in the way Buckley influenced so many others, Richard John Neuhaus, had this to say:

Bill Buckley was a man of almost inexhaustible curiosity, courtesy, generosity, and delight in the oddness of the human circumstance. He exulted in displaying his many talents, which was not pride so much as an invitation to others to share his amazement at the possibilities in being fully alive. He was also, in and through everything, a man of quietly solid Christian faith. I am among innumerable others whose lives are fuller by virtue of the gift of his friendship. May choirs of angels greet him on the far side of Jordan.

Perennial third party candidate–and ardent Connecticut pro-lifer–Joe Zdonczyk has died: 

Joseph A. Zdonczyk, who ran unsuccessfully for governor four times on a platform of outlawing abortion, has died at 79 at a Wolcott nursing home after a brief illness…

As founder of the Concerned Citizens Party of Connecticut in 1975, Zdonczyk focused often on abortion, one of the party’s key planks. But he maintained that he was not a single-issue candidate, saying he was also opposed to the death penalty and embryonic stem cell research…

“Joe was passionate about the beliefs he championed, and he would defend and debate them with anyone and everyone,” Rell said. “He was a tireless campaigner, and he earned the respect of many.”

Every so often Joe would invite me to run on his party’s ticket. I always declined. Every so often I would suggest to him that his party make cross-endorsements. He always declined.

But we always understood each other to be on the same side in the great battles of our day and his death is a cause for sadness. He was one of the few who raised his voice in-season and out-of-season on behalf of those who have no voice. May those unborn innocents on whose behalf Joe advocated greet him with love at his final destination. Joe Zydoncyk, R.I.P.

Hearings have been held on the two controversial Planned Parenthood-backed sex-ed bills that I blogged about last week. From the New Haven Register:

Peter Wolfgang, executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, testified against the bill at a public hearing Monday, and also had concerns about New Haven’s teen pregnancy plan.

“What we favor is abstinence-only education. It doesn’t make sense to educate them on abstinence, and say if you choose not to go that route, here’s how to have sex. That actually encourages them,” he said.

From the Courant, regarding the first–quite heated–hearing on Friday:

Opponents of the bill met with skepticism from legislators.

Theresa Krankowski, director of St. Gerard’s Center for Life, a Catholic pregnancy center in Hartford, said comprehensive sex education was fundamentally incompatible with abstinence, which she said should be taught instead. Krankowski, who holds a doctorate in education, called teaching children about both condoms and abstinence “educationally unsound.”

But state Rep. Jason W. Bartlett, D-Bethel, said Krankowski was effectively suggesting that too much information can lead to bad behavior, and he noted that teens can also get information from the Internet. “Should I be submitting legislation that we not allow children to access the Internet because there’s too much information there?” he asked.

“Because teens have access to unhealthy things on the Internet, we should expose them to unhealthy things in the public schools. The only alternative is to ban the Internet.” Yes, the arguments from legislators supporting this bill were actually that lame–and worse.

More:

Another opponent, Valeria Barbier, a 20-year-old Trinity College student, said the bill could lead to teaching children about sex too early.

Barbier focused much of her testimony on Planned Parenthood’s support for the bill, and warned that the organization was attempting to drive up its “business” providing abortions by introducing younger children to topics like oral sex and masturbation. “They know condoms break, and they know that girls forget to take contraception regularly,” she said.

Ironically, the same hearing which saw legislators defending the nation’s largest provider of abortions also heard testimony on a bill that would create an educational program focused on genocide awareness. To the surprise of no one, the irony was lost on the Committee.

Planned Parenthood has held two recent events to promote a bill that would offer $1 million in incentive grants for school districts to offer increased comprehensive sex ed to teens. (The vaguely written bill, which will receive a public hearing on Friday, is here. A similar bill, which will be heard on Monday, can be viewed here.) Mary Ann Sprague of the CT chapter of Stop Planned Parenthood has sent us this report of the first event, held two weeks ago in New Haven:

Last Thursday, on the green in New Haven, on the corner of Elm and Temple streets, where all the city’s high schoolers get off and on the busses transferring to other busses, student volunteers, who are trained peer educators for PPC, called STARS, handed out condom “valentines” stating, ‘a must have fashion accessory, proper attire: required for entry,’ and waving banners that said ‘Honk if your safe,’ ‘Real sex ed saves lives,’ and ‘Teens deserve real facts,’ that call for more sex reports and condoms in sex education in public school ‘comprehensive health.’  Gretchen Raffa, a PPC community organizer asked teens not to share their last names and said, “Teens deserve information to keep them healthy and safe, and help them make responsible choices.”  PPC’s agenda is to subtly remind teens, their future clients, that when the birth control fails surgical abortion is also considered ‘responsible parenting,’ as opposed to the positive adoption message in Eduardo Verastegui’s movie ‘Bella.’  

PPC’s organized the event to raise awareness of The Act Concerning Healthy Teens, a bill introduced to the General Assembly Friday that would offer $1 million in incentive grants for school districts to offer increased comprehensive sex ed to teens.  This means increased access to biased Alan Guttmacher sex reports and increased access to condoms in grades 6, 7, 8, and 11 comprehensive health.

This aggressive move by PPC is in response to pro-abort, radical Gov. Rell’s refusal to sign for the Federal $345,000.00 abstinence-only funds in the states 2008-2013 budget and under the same state’s matching abstinence-only funds under the Department of Public Health’s grants.

I was present at the second event, a press conference held last week at the LOB by Planned Parenthood and AIDS activists. They said kids are not getting “the information they need” regarding sex and that this bill would somehow fix that. Several students spoke for the bill, saying that lack of facts leads to pregnancy and disease. “You have no right to withhold information from me that would allow me to protect myself,” said one.

One activist spoke of a program that has high school kids teaching 5th graders, which she says supplements the schools’ sex-ed program. She said that “comprehensive sex ed” should start early and continue through high school. She added that state guidelines require 80 hours per year of “health” for grades 5-12 and complained that Hartford’s middle schools were providing less.

One teenager, Zach, described himself as a “Planned Parenthood peer educator”—he apparently teaches at a regional high school in Woodbridge in association with the nation’s largest abortion provider. “As much as I enjoy answering my friends’ questions about sexual health,” said Zach—and a proponent of the bill sitting next to me started to laugh, until she realized Zach was not joking—”I can’t be everywhere.” And that is why he wants the bill passed. Spreading the abortionist-approved view of “sexual health” to his fellow teens is too big a job for any one “peer educator.”

The superintendent of schools in New London spoke strongly in favor of the bill, saying that he was “committed to opening the curtain of taboos” and that he would “fight back” and “push hard” against “fear” and “resistance.”

Rita Whitehead, a community organizer in New London, claimed that “99%” of parents in her town “want their kids to have comprehensive sex ed in the schools.” Which begs the question: If this is true, why don’t they just mandate it through their local board of ed? Why force the state to pay for what “99%” of New London parents supposedly want? One suspects that Ms. Whitehead is ever-so-slightly exaggerating New London’s support for this bill. “We will be targeting middle and high schools” she said. “Targeting” is indeed the right word for what they would be doing.

They saved the best for last, though—a totally over-the-top AIDS activist. “It amazes me that we have to fight for the right to be healthy,” he began. He said that kids cut themselves and kill themselves if the ones they love do not give them sexual education. He attacked the Church, saying that “no one tells you anything [on sex ed] because they want to protect their own point of view.” It is because of this, claimed the speaker, that people like him end up with AIDS as a result.

So children cut themselves and even kill themselves because their parents never discussed sex with them. And the last speaker got AIDS because the Church didn’t tell him about sex. These are the sort of press conferences at the legislative office building that you probably will not be reading about in the Hartford Courant.

Indeed, there were hardly any media at the press conference, and that may have been intentional—the thought of giving a million dollars to these folks to teach sex ed to our teenagers would surely have concerned the state if they saw what I saw. Running “comprehensive” sex ed through the state’s largest abortion provider is also sure to give pause to many.

The first bill will be heard by the education committee on Friday and the second one by public health on Monday. Watch your in-boxes for information on how to stop these bills.

No, I’m not the most tech-knowledgeable blogger in the world. But I do what I can. For instance, I’m just now making my first-ever attempt at “live blogging.” It’s 12:11 p.m. as I type this and I’m sitting in Room 2B of the LOB waiting for my turn to testify before the select committee on children. There are about 20 bills on the agenda today. I’m here on the fatherhood bill and the abortion counseling bill. I can’t promise the most sophisticated live-blog experience, but if anyone’s net-surfing this way, I’ll do what I can in the comments thread.

As first noted by the intrepid Judy Aron in our previous thread, the language of the original homeschooling bill has been mysteriously altered to codify the very violations of parental rights which we are fighting. Here is the latest from Judy:

Ok - here is the scoop - Both Senator Meyer and Rep. O’Neill discussed the problem today (Sunday) and apparently they both do not know how the wording of the proposed bill got changed,(it might have been in the bill clerk’s office) but they both support the original language, and so Senator Meyer said that the bill will be amended to state the original language. That is very good news. We will have to see what happens on Tuesday morning and we hope that everyone who planned to come and speak will support the original language and let the committee know that the bill as it currently is worded is unacceptable.

I will have a post tomorrow regarding this over at Consent of the Governed. Thank you for your patience with this situation.

Judy’s post is now up and can be read here. Watch your in-box for FIC Action alerts on what you can do to pass this bill in its original form.

In a related item, today’s Courant is running a front page profile of another outstanding homeschooling family: 

She has taught every subject at just about every grade level during the past 17 years, and has another 10 years to go before her last student is expected to graduate.

Janice Kopp never planned to spend so much of her life as a home-schooling mom, but that’s just what has happened.

“Early on, we just took it a year at a time,” said Kopp, who lives in Stafford with husband Dusty and their five children. “It’s been a long time, but it’s been worth it.”…

In Connecticut, an estimated 2,100 students are being home-schooled, according to the state Department of Education. That translates to less than half of 1 percent of the state’s approximately 580,000 public school students.

Statistics aside, Janice Kopp said she has witnessed a growing acceptance of home-schoolers.

“It’s just not as odd as it used to be to the general public,” she said. “I think probably almost everybody by now knows someone who is home-schooled.”

The Courant’s story also has some great sidebar items, one on “a typical day for a home-schooling mom” and one on tomorrow’s hearing:

Home-schooling advocates will be watching with interest when legislators hold a public hearing Tuesday on a bill that would change the way parents withdraw their children from public school.

The proposed law would require parents to send a certified letter informing their local school superintendent of their decision, and would mandate that the school board immediately “deem the child withdrawn from school.”

State statutes do not specify how children under 16 are withdrawn from a public school.

We are grateful to The Courant for its coverage of this important parental rights issue.

From Judy Aron’s blog:

Thanks to the support of State Senator Meyer and State Representative Anne Ruwet of the Select Committee on Children, the Parents Rights Bill proposed by Representative Arthur O’Neill has been raised in the Childrens Committee and will finally have a public hearing on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 at 9:00 a.m. in Room 2B of the Legislative Office Building. I urge all parents, and those interested in preserving a parents right to withdraw their child from public school, to attend this public hearing. I applaud the Childrens Committee in doing what the Education Committee seems to have been afraid, or unwilling, to do in the past 3 years.

Read the whole thing here.

FIC Blog has had occasion over the years to lament the sleazy anti-family billboards along our state’s highways. Gov. Rell has now issued an executive order halting new contracts to build or maintain billboards on state property and is submitting legislation to prevent existing contracts from being renewed once they expire. Gov. Rell apparently sees the same thing that many of our members–and particularly our female members–have expressed concerns about:

“You start driving around, and you see these things,” she [Gov. Rell] said. “You see some of these billboards, which are just a little too suggestive. I started thinking to myself, ‘When did this start?’”

Watch for more information as the governor’s proposed bill winds its way through the legislative process.

Anti-family activists will again be pushing a transgender special rights bill at the state Capitol this year. A Mar. 16, 2006 New Haven Advocate article describes “transgendered” people as “a group that includes transsexuals, cross-dressers, drag queens, hermaphrodites and others who defy gender norms.” The article also notes that “powerful gay and lesbian advocates”–who previously avoided the “trans movement” because it contradicted the “we’re just like you” pro same-sex “marriage” campaign–now support the transgender cause.

The Hartford Business Journal has a story on this year’s bill:

But not everyone is on the same page as [transgender advocates]. Opponents believe additional legislative provides special rights and over-reaching protection to transsexuals.

Family Institute of Connecticut executive director Peter Wolfgang said his group opposes the bill because it would tie the hands of boards of educations.

“We have our concerns over very young children being exposed to gender identity confusion,” he said. “Hypothetically, imagine if your child has a second grade teacher Mr. Smith and he comes back a month later after a sex-change operation as Mrs. Smith. The board of education ought to have the right to do something.”…

That [transgender special rights] push will continue later this month as Feb. 20 has been set aside for Trans Educational Forum and Lobby Day at the state capitol. Between 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., the coalition will have a forum at the legislative office building and some of its members will meet with legislators, in addition to rallying.

The targeting of Connecticut’s youth has become a major focus of our state’s pro same-sex “marriage” activists. The Family Institute of Connecticut is determined to see that our youth are served-and not confused-by our state’s educational institutions. But to take up that fight we must first understand the great influence our opponents already wield.

Feb. 13th, for instance, was “Youth for Marriage Equality Day.” According to Love Makes a Family, “students around Connecticut will once again take action” to promote same-sex “marriage.” Last year on this day students supposedly delivered to Gov. Rell 2,000 postcards asking her to re-define marriage. This year Love Makes a Family asked “gay-straight alliances in Connecticut” to contact them to receive pro same-sex “marriage” kits with “legislative action cards” that will again be sent to the governor.

“Gay-straight alliance” clubs are oftentimes at the heart of the anti-family infiltration of Connecticut’s public schools. As we see above, these student groups work closely with pro same-sex “marriage” activists–and they are supervised by school personnel who support that agenda.

One of the biggest annual events organized by these student groups is the “Day of Silence”–an attempt to further politicize our youth and to bring about the quasi-criminalization of traditional pro-family viewpoints. Last year–according to an April 17th Hartford Courant article–60 Connecticut schools registered for the Day of Silence. “Organizers say they aim to catch young minds and hearts at this early, delicate stage of the game,” reported the Courant.

Catching young minds at an early, delicate stage–in order to confuse them about matters of sexual identity–is indeed the long term strategy of our opponents. They have targeted the youth because they know that most of the public opposes same-sex “marriage.” Their only chance at a democratic victory is to “catch young minds” early and confuse them with anti-family propaganda.

Readers of FIC’s e-mail alerts know that we are forming a new pro-family youth wing that has already begun holding meetings. I have recently been the guest speaker at gatherings of Teenpac, Generation Joshua, Theology for Teens and various campus ministry groups and out of those gatherings has come the start of an alternative pro-family voice for our state’s youth.

If you are a high school or college student in Connecticut who shares our values and would like to be a part of the new FIC Youth Wing call our office at 860-548-0066.