| Last Updated:
Mar 11, 2010 - 9:20:54 PM |
 | | The New (Augusta) Cony High School Building |
Cony High School in Augusta held its annual Diversity Day series of events on Monday, January 29. The day-long event was notable not only for what the public school taught, but also by an absence of a scheduled controversial spiritual figure.
The local Central Maine community was made aware of the events in a Kennebec Journal
news article published on Sunday morning, January 28
and in a follow up
report on the event published Tuesday, January 30
. In the articles, reporter Keith Edwards stated that the school planned to have both a learning activity featuring the transgendered Jen Ochmanski and a separate religious forum where a number of leaders of faith groups would describe their religions and beliefs.
The articles focused on the local transgendered young woman, who now identifies herself as a young man, Jeremiah Nazarkewycz. She was the guest speaker on the topic of “Transgendering” taught to the Cony High School freshmen (13 and 14-year-old boys and girls) in Monday morning’s opening series of sessions. From the article, Ochmanski, still a teenager herself, said that she “didn’t like to go to school much [his/her] senior year, in part because [he/she] wasn’t even sure, [himself/herself], how [he/she] wanted [his/her] classmates to refer to [him/her].”
Ochmanski is still legally identified as a female on her birth certificate, is undergoing hormone treatments to become more masculine, and has not yet ruled out undergoing surgery to become a male.
League Executive Director Mike Heath commented on his high school alma mater now teaching Central Maine children about transgenderism. “We live in bizarre times. Not too long ago every Mainer knew that sex change operations and witchcraft were as wrong as adultery and murder.” Heath explained, “It is impossible to understand what is happening because it is an inversion of reality. This is what makes it possible for deviant behavior and dark ideologies to be aggressively promoted as normal without effective resistance. It is irresponsible for adults to promote these ideas by presenting them without moral comment to impressionable young people who are maturing through puberty. Our Maine public school classrooms are looking more and more like the bar scene from Star Wars every day.”
 | | Muslim, Mormon, and Seventh-day Adventist Panelists |
Rev. Dallas Henry, the League’s President of the Board of Directors noted, “The history of Maine’s “Civil Rights Teams” [who organized Cony’s Diversity Day events] up to this point has clearly been that of promoting homosexuality. This Cony event has prominently broadened the field, however, to include teaching ‘transgendering.’ I am heartsick to hear of this promotion of sexual confusion.”
Despite the presence of the transgendered Miss Ochmanski, the Diversity Day events could have taken even a more unusual appearance if one of the scheduled religious forum panel guests had attended as planned. Mr. Edwards, the Kennebec Journal reporter, confirmed on Monday a rumor that among the invited guests was a representative of Wicca. Wiccans, by their own admission, practice witchcraft. He stated there was not a reason confirmed by the school as to why the Wiccan representative failed to show.
 | | Augusta Apostolic Church Pastor Nathan Willhoite and Chris Harper |
Women who practice Wicca are self-described as witches, while the men who practice it call themselves warlocks.
The religious forum representatives were from various belief systems. Represented at the forum were Buhddists, Jews, Muslim, and a number of groups who identify themselves as Christian including Mormons, Methodists, Spiritualists, Seventh-day Adventists, and the Apostolic faith. Absent from the panel were Baptists and Catholics, the two largest Christian denominations in Maine. The Christian Civic League of Maine, which has Baptist, Nazarene, Pentecostal, Advent Christian, Assembly of God, and several other denominations represented in its membership, was not asked to participate in the forum.
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