FED. JUDGE OK'D GAY-BASHING IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Though George Herbert Walker Bush's Republican party was already fiercely and maliciously anti-gay when Bush was elected U.S. President in 1988, the Republican party was not satisfied with the first President Bush's level of maintaining sexual orientation apartheid -- and thus at the 1992 Republican convention, where Bush was the nominee, Pat Robertson -- declaring open war on LGBT Americans -- criticized Democratic candidate William Jefferson Clinton by saying that Clinton wanted 1) to end the ban on gays in the military and 2) to appoint out gay people to his administration.

Pause for a moment to consider what it meant that a sitting U.S. President did not denounce and disown Robertson and his anti-gay hate speech. (Robertson today continues as one of the most malicious of all public gay bashers). Those unfamiliar with state-sanctioned persecution of gays in America should learn about Executive Order 10450, signed by President Eisenhower, which effectively banned "known homosexuals" from serving in government posts. The book and film The Lavender Scare provide historical background to the state-sanctioned persecution of gay human beings.

George H.W. Bush appointed Gerald E. Rosen (gerald_rosen@mied.uscourts.gov) to be a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. Readers should note that Rosen has been involved in some controversial cases involving Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, who notoriously permitted Assistant Attorney General Andrew Shirvell to carry out a stalking and harassment campaign against gay student Chris Armstrong. The reasons that Cox did not more swiftly act to protect Armstrong against the gay bashing Shirvell -- at the time an Assistant Attorney General -- remain unsatisfactory and unacceptable. Had Shirvell been stalking and harassing a student as part of an anti-Semitic campaign rather than as part of an anti-gay one, he most certainly would have been stopped sooner.

In 2003, Judge Rosen issued an Opinion and Order in the case Hansen v. Ann Arbor Public Schools. The Ann Arbor Public Schools in 2002 held a diversity week. Where LGBTers were a topic of that diversity week, the Ann Arbor Public Schools intended to educate the school community about the harms of ignorance-fueled anti-gay bigotry. One of the diversity week panels was to treat of "Homosexuality and Religion" with invited speakers explaining how strong acceptance values are compatible with religious belief.  A gay bashing Catholic student, Betsy Hansen, and her gay bashing Catholic mother wanted for Betsy to be included on the panel to allege that their religion authorized them to gay bash in public schools.

Ann Arbor Public Schools did not allow Hansen to change the topic of the panel presentation from acceptance to non-acceptance of gay human beings.  With Thomas More Law Center attorneys, Hansen sued on free speech and other grounds.  Judge Rosen dismissed part of the charges but found in the gay-basher's favor on certain free speech grounds. Where Rosen interpreted precedent law in favor of the gay bashers, he did so determining that Hansen's anti-gay hate speech presented no danger to LGBT students in the school environment. To illustrate why I disagree with Rosen's decision, I am paraphrasing written evidence in the case submitted by the gay-bashing Betsy Hansen, and recasting it to be against Jews instead of against gay people:
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"One thing I don’t like about Diversity Week is the way that Jews are being portrayed as having rights in public schools equal to those of Christian students.  Religion is a choice, Jews can choose to be Christians, and as everybody knows, Jews that don't accept Jesus are going to hell.  Anybody that chooses to be Jewish has made the wrong choice, and one that is very harmful to society. I completely and whole-heartedly support diversity, so long as it doesn't include teaching acceptance of Jewish people and ideas, which by definition are always wrong and disgusting."

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My guess is that had Hansen been dealing with an anti-Semite instead of a gay basher, he would have understood why students of the Jewish minority needed protection against such hate speech in a public school setting. Judge Rosen certainly ignored the extent and insane ferocity of ignorance fueled anti-gay hatreds in U.S. public schools and how those anti-gay prejudices had since the inception of the Republic negatively impacted sexual minority students. Rosen is now Chief Judge in the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, where the Thomas More Law Center has filed a pleading against the Howell, Michigan Public School District on behalf of the gay bashing Catholic Sandra Glowacki and two of her gay-bashing offspring. The Glowacki pleading is stuffed full of language defamatory of all gay human beings. Do not hold your breath expecting Judge Rosen  to agree that LGBT public school students merit protection from these monsters. The Glowacki case is assigned to Judge Patrick J. Duggan, who was educated at the Jesuit Xavier University in 1955, during the time that gay human beings were effectively banned from the U.S. government.