Today's Family Focus - no tolerance?

Hoping to get students more engaged in history, educators in Louisville (Jefferson County) adopted a new approach called "Exploring Civics: Facing History and Ourselves." The class is a response to a 2008 Kentucky law mandating that schools develop materials that can be used to teach about the Holocaust.

The Family Foundation of Kentucky sneers that the schools are replacing civics education with tolerance and moans that “questions remain about who gets to define what ‘tolerance’ is for the students.”

On one of their many blogs, the Family Foundation of Kentucky asks:

Haven't liberals in the education field always denounced "making" kids responsible and imposing "morality" as a foundation for expunging all references to prayer and religion in our schools?

Talk to Action states:

The Family Foundation's salvo is a standard Religious Right ploy. Its leaders complain incessantly about public education being a failure. Yet when a school tries something new, they carp about that as well. Other than become academies for fundamentalist Christianity, nothing the public schools do will please the Religious Right.

This isn't imposing morality, it is teaching tolerance, not to mention historical facts. On their homepage, the Foundation says it is planning a series of "Save Marriage Initiatives" around the Commonwealth:

"The Family Foundation is pleased to present the "Marriage: It's Worth Saving!" seminars. These seminars will offer solutions for churches in an effort to stir up a Kentucky "marriage movement" - a concerted effort by the churches of Kentucky to lead in such a way that marriage is strengthened both inside and outside the church.

This one-day seminar is geared towards pastors and church leaders, marriage ministry couples, and community leaders that have a desire to see the marriages in their congregations and communities enriched and strengthened.

Come hear what you can do to make a difference . . . and network with those in your area interested in helping couples have strong, stable and satisfying marriages. And prepare to be encouraged in your own marriage journey!

Are you kidding? What a joke!

The Family Foundation of Kentucky hates anything that could be beneficial to the gay and lesbian community of Kentucky (LGBTI).

Same-sex marriage will be legal in Kentucky; Marriage Equality Kentucky (sponsored and coordinated by Kentucky Equality Federation) has already laid the ground work and has an army of volunteer, grassroots activists around the Commonwealth to bring the issue back to Kentucky's voters.

What really scares the Family Foundation of Kentucky is that they are losing the so-called "culture war." On a statewide level, Kentucky Equality Federation, Marriage Equality Kentucky, and Kentucky Fairness Alliance are pushing back! Louisville Fairness Campaign and Lexington Fairness are going the same on city/regional levels.

If educators want to known what tolerance is not, they should simply visit the Family Foundation of Kentucky's website.

In 2004 (before Kentucky Equality Federation was founded), Kent Ostrander of the Family Foundation of Kentucky was at the forefront pushing an amendment to the state’s constitution to ban gay marriage. Ostrander said he wasn’t “out to target gays and lesbians” but rather defending “true diversity” in families – “a mother and a father.”

When opponents of the amendment pointed out that the clause banning civil unions was extremely broad – banning recognition of any “legal status identical to or similar to marriage for unmarried individuals” – and could have unanticipated consequences, such as the inability of the state university to offer domestic partner benefits to faculty, Ostrander dismissed these objections as a scare tactic. “Those on the other side of this issue are raising the specter of a number of different scenarios that are not relevant and are at best speculation,” he said.