The RECORD

On March 28, 2005 he offered a sermon in defense of gay rights from the floor of the Senate. In 2007 he is championing another sexual disorientation measure. Republican Senator Dana Dow, representing Lincoln County, has introduced a bill that will recognize transgenderism, the latest "popular" cause of the gay left.

Cony High School featured a trangendered teenager as a workshop leader at a diversity conference once week ago. High schools throughout the state are being encouraged to highlight transgendering by the Attorney General. He created the model for diversity conferences in 2004 at the Augusta Civic Center when he included transgendering in a conference that included elementary school aged students.

The loud objections of constituents to his 2005 "sermon" didn't slow Senator Dow when it comes to "gay" rights. This session, only his second as a legislator, he is the lead sponsor on a bill that will force Maine's Secretary of State to recognize "gender reassignment" on a Maine drivers license.

In 2005 the RECORD reported that the Senate welcomed Dow's "Christianity." In a public place that is normally sensitive to the separation of church and state, Dow's evangelical credentials were welcomed by most in the chamber. The RECORD reported, " For once, there were no protests that the sacred principle of the separation of church and state was being violated. There were no condescending remarks, no mention of the 'Scopes Monkey Trial.'"

Outside the poisoned air of the State House, transgenderism is extremely controversial. A leading psychiatrist from Johns Hopkins University has lamented the institutions practice of sexual reassignment surgery. In 2004 Dr. Paul McHugh concluded, " that to provide a surgical alteration to the body of these unfortunate people was to collaborate with a mental disorder rather than to treat it."

Senator Dow's efforts, however well intentioned, can only result in more unfortunate Mainers collaborating with our government to encourage their "mental disorder." Everyone knows that transgendering is very sad. There is no reason to create laws that recognize it in any way, other than as the mental disorder that it is.

Dow's bill is yet to be scheduled for a public hearing. It will then receive a vote in committee and proceed to both the House and Senate for two votes. If it passes that gauntlet then it will arrive on the Governor's desk. The Governor can sign the bill, allow it to become law without his signature, or veto it.

The following press release was issued by Concerned Women for America today:

Lesbian activist Pam Spaulding's popular weblog Pam's House Blend is known for its outrageous and controversial content. In addition to promoting anti-Christian bigotry, the North Carolina-based Web activist's favorite pastime appears to be smearing pro-family leader and Americans for Truth president Peter LaBarbera with bizarre and hateful accusations and insults. However, House Blend's typically intolerant and obscene content may have recently shifted from the absurd to the criminally violent.

In what was, at the very least, an apparent attempt to intimidate and frighten LaBarbera, who is married with children, "House Blend" published his home address in a January 13, 2007, thread titled, "Saturday this and that." Shortly thereafter, someone identified as "Barry G. Wick" posted the following comments: "It's across from a park in an area with cul de sacs. I'd bet it's a residence ... and across from a park. Snipers take note." (emphasis ours)

"Wick" later seemed to suggest that shooting LaBarbera would amount to an act of self- defense: "Self-defense for gay folks isn't PC, is it? No, we have to be sure that we're victims all the time. ... When we start standing up for ourselves, we lose all the status of an under class. I refuse to be part of an underclass. I'm equal. And I'm gonna use any language, even outrageous language, to get my point across. ... I'm a citizen ... equal, proud, and willing to defend my way of life with my life. ..."

Later in the same thread "Wick" made his true intent clear: "If I were Azerbaijani and living in Russia right now, I'd want to advocate violence against skinheads ... [LaBarbera] and others like him ought to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what future awaits them from a cadre of selected defenders willing to give up everything in order to protect the lives of gay and lesbian citizens. The greatest thing ever to happen to the [Martin Luther King] movement was the Black Panthers. Americans were shocked by an open display of firearms and Black Pride ... Pushing back verbally ... or with selected action isn't dishonorable, it's necessary."

LaBarbera indicated that he has been in touch with both the FBI and the North Carolina Attorney General's Office. He's anticipating a full criminal investigation. "I'm a big boy. It's not so much that I'm worried about myself," said LaBarbera, "but the effect this could have on my wife and children ... that has me extremely upset."

Concerned Women for America is deeply disturbed by this apparent threat to Peter LaBarbera's life. Matt Barber, CWA's Policy Director for Cultural Issues said, "This is nothing short of cyber-terrorism. There should be a thorough criminal investigation, and if it's determined that a crime has occurred, the perpetrators should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law."

As of the time of this press release, the thread in question was still posted on Spaulding's Web site.

By Michael Heath

I suspect Mr. Harnett did not have a very good weekend. Mr. Harnett is the Assistant Attorney General who is in charge of the so-called "civil rights teams." He emailed me Friday morning. I published his email in the RECORD. Within hours of us publishing the RECORD he called and left a voicemail.

He sounded emotional on the phone and claimed that I am a weak man. He said that I fight my battles through you, our RECORD readers. He expected me to pick up the telephone and call him after receiving the morning email. He didn't want you to know what he wrote to me. There was no indication on the email that it was confidential. In his email he pointed out an error in my previous day's email regarding funding. We included his criticism of me, unedited.

Oh yes, he also mentioned that HIS voicemail box and incoming email was quite full. We've been getting our share of emails and calls. Please forgive me if I am not able to get back to every email, or respond to all the phone calls. Hopefully this publication will provide some answers.

I need to make a few observations about this developing story:

1. The League believes that the civil rights team project should be immediately defunded and shut down at the state level. We have believed this since the beginning. We have never supported this program.

2. I have met with Mr. Harnett and his boss, the Attorney General. I was informed of the fact that the civil rights team project "has nothing to do with sexual morality" and that "sexual orientation" is now the law, so I better get used to homosexuality being discussed by the children.

3. I am not afraid of Mr. Harnett, Mr. Rowe or anyone over at the State House.

4. I am afraid of a Holy God who isn't happy about adults providing "safe zones" for kids to discuss and affirm sex outside of marriage.

5. I reject Mr. Harnett's views regarding the value of celebrating "multi-culturalism" in the name of civil rights. Maine has a culture that is being undermined and devalued by people intent on redefining that traditional culture. Mr. Harnett seems to be among that group.

6. I did not contact Mr. Harnett last week and invite comment. His published email to me was unsolicited, apparently in reaction to the Cony story on "transgendering" that we published on Monday of last week.

7. The last time the civil rights team issue attracted public attention our ministry was viciously attacked. The sign in front of our building was destroyed, and our internet forum was hacked and ruined. We lost six months of work.

8. We don't hate people, and we don't create the problem. The problem started this time when a troubled 19 year old who needs counseling and spiritual help was included in a "civil rights team" event last Monday. School officials pretended she was a hero for choosing to become a man. She was there as a workshop leader to teach about "Transgendering." Last time the problem started when Mr. Harnett wouldn't allow me inside his statewide "diversity" conference where he was putting kids in touch with "transgendering." We asked to tape those sessions. We were denied.

9. We are posting the emails we receive on this, and other, matters.

10. I have asked Mr. Harnett repeatedly in the past few years for detail regarding the $250,000 that is spent annually. I have never received any detail beyond the overall totals. I have stopped asking. He is trying to deceive good people. Civil rights have nothing to do with holding workshops with Maine school children on Pakistani dance, yoga, withcraft and islam.

I feel bad, I really do.

My, what a morning we've had here in the office. First, we got an email from what appears to be the person who led the "Transgendering" workshop. I've published the item below. Jen, the email author, and Jeremiah are the same person. Then, we received a troubling email from the Attorney General's office. After you read this you'll have no doubt about why good people remain silent. The disdain drips from every keystroke. This sort of communication is intimidating to kind people. It happens to me so much now that it just energizes me. Anyway, you'll enjoy both these items as you head into your weekend. Remember, don't back down!

Here is the email we received this morning from Jen/Jeremiah. I responded with an offer to meet with Jeremiah. This individual spoke to thirty freshmen at Cony High School on Monday during their diversity day program. The day also included a Roman Catholic layman promoting Buddhism, a witch (who didn't show) and a Muslim. Here's the email:

-----Original Message-----
From: Jen Ochmansk [mailto:eichhoernchen127@yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2007 5:43 PM
To: email@cclmaine.org
Subject: transgender

I would just like to inform you that, your recent article intitled "Augusta Schools, teaches Transgendering" and "The Transgendering of Maine" was filled with lies. You can report about transgender, and how you are all against it. However you should do it with decency and facts. Not lies. I believe you need to rethink yourself. Go back and visit that first Jesus 101 class you took, and relearn the basic principle of Jesus', LOVE. NOT HATE. because that is what all your articles intail. HATE. And another thing, there was no Wiccan present. So for you to get all in a tissy over something that wasn't even present is very immature. While I am a God believing man, I support those who find something they believe in. As well as maybe you should get the facts on Wicca before bashing it, although I already know you won't, and you still will bash it, hence why I should not waste my time writting this email. I will ignore everything you write, but I know that Jesus still loves you no matter how much hate you spread. Maybe you might consider sitting down and talking with Jeremiah, and open your mind and heart.

~a lover not a hater.

Here is the email from the Assistant Attorney General. I stand corrected on the budget amount. I'm sure he is correct. I had the biennial budget in my mind. That is around $500,000. The human being referenced in this email is the same individual that sent the email above:

Michael,

I have long since realized that you never let the truth or the facts get in the way of what you perceive to be a good story or diatribe. I have also come to accept that you will never miss an opportunity to distort the work and purpose of the Civil Rights Team Project to suit your own agenda. However, I am repeatedly stunned that you publicize what you know to be bold faced lies and present them as fact. In your recent attack on a young transgender individual, a human being I might add, you state, and I quote as to be entirely accurate (a notion that you might consider):

The taxpayers of Maine are pushing this nonsense at the state level with $500,000 a year. The money is sent through the Attorney General's office and funds the "Civil Rights Team" department.

As I have shared with you on numerous occasions in the past, the current annual appropriation for the Civil Rights Team Project is $241,436.00. In the fiscal year preceding the current year, the appropriation was $239,911.00. If you have any doubts about the authenticity of those figures, feel free to peruse page A-76 of the Governor's Recommended 2008-2009 Biennial Budget. Despite this reality you continue to quote a figure that is over double the actual appropriation. Why do you do that when you know it is not true? I find that deeply disturbing. While a responsible writer seeks to get their facts straight before publicizing them, you choose to ignore them and repeat what you know is a false. I expect more from my 10-year-old son and my 12-year-old daughter and I am happy to say, they do not disappoint me.

I look forward to your correction and factually accurate reporting in the future, though I will not hold my breath on either score.

Thomas A. Harnett
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights
Education and Enforcement and
Director of the Civil Rights Team Project
Office of the Attorney General
6 State House Station
Augusta, Maine 04333
(207) 626-8897

By Charlotte Thomason Iserbyt

In 1990 our family bought a Greek Revival house in Bath, Maine, built in 1870 during the great days of sailing ships. The house contained demanding and beautiful books used in Bath schools at that time, a treasure trove that gave me total documentation that education in the late 1800s, which only went through 8th grade, was vastly superior to 12th grade "education" in Maine today. These college-level school books, as well as the Salina, Kansas 1898 eighth grade final exam, which the average Harvard graduate could not pass, supported conclusions I had reached over a period of thirty years as a researcher, school board member, co-founder (with Bettina Dobbs) of Guardians of Education for Maine (1980-1998), and Senior Policy Advisor in the U.S. Department of Education, 1980-1982. Those conclusions were that the creation of moral chaos and the "Dumbing Down" of America have been deliberate in order to move our ration toward the totalitarian, socialist government called for by Lenin and Stalin.

Citizens who know nothing of their country's history, its free economic and political systems, or of those alien systems such as democracy, fascism, socialism, and communism, who cannot read well, write or calculate, will accept whatever the highly paid "change agents" feed them in regard to "the need for change." Example: citizens' acceptance of free trade (NAFTA and GATT) which sounds so nice, but is really a socialistic, international "redistribution of wealth." If a citizen doesn't know what he has, how can he know or care when that thing is taken from him? The danger is not teaching our children American history and their rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was underscored by a recent survey commissioned by the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and conducted at 339 U.S.colleges and universities, which found that more than two-thirds of the students and administrators were unable to remember that freedom of the religion and freedom of the press are guaranted by the Bill of Rights. When asked what essential rights are protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, over one-quarter failed to mention freedom of speech, and over three-quarters did not name freedom of assembly or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Only 21% mentioned freedom of religion, and less than 30% mentioned freedom of the press.

How long will Maine citizens support the higly-paid education "change agents" in Augusta as they continue to bulldoze what was, prior to 1965, a good academic education system? All this is done under the guise of accountability (the dubious saving of money through consolation and/or regionalism-- which is communism) restructuring, revisioning, Guiding Principles, Maine Learning Results, and the present highly controversial international, lifelong, "School-to-Work" system which, by the way, is the same failed system used in socialist and communist countries.

The frightening tone of this latest un-American "Dumbing Down" agenda, which is an attempt at scare tactics, is expressed in the following question posed in the Select Panel Report.

"Will a global economy coupled with chemical and biological tools of warfare necessitate new forms of governance, citizenship and divisions of power? We cannot really know."

The latest "Select Panel Report" goes on to recommend the consolidation of Maine's 286 small school units into 35 large school units, necessitating the building of Taj Mahal-sized schools to serve not only students but the entire community, the type one sees sprouting up across the country. Did Maine taxpayers learn nothing from the disastrous results of the 1957 Sinclair Act which consolidated many of Maine's small schools in the Sixties?

What blew my mind in this Select Panel's Draft was the following blatant admission of what many taxpayers have been complaining about for a long, long time: "Maine has one of the most expensive public school systems in the nation and yet our results measured by multiple indices are flat through recent years."

Really? Why admit this now? Because they need a disaster, in the form of a crisis or scare tactic, in order to get taxpayers so upset they will cough up millions of dollars more for the next bound-to-fail (academically, that is) reform movement. We should all remember the failed National Commission on Excellence which resulted in the publication of "A Nation at Risk." "A Nation at Risk" was an attempt to con Americans into supporting the very restructuring which culminated in the controversial Pavlovian, lowest common denominator Outcomes-Based Education (OBE); America 2000; the School-to-Work Opportunities Act; and the highly controversial No Child Left Behind Act. This writer worked in the office which prepared the "Nation at Risk" report, and heard the late Secretary of Education T.H. Bell say, in 1981, at the first "closed to the public" meeting of the Commission, that "We need a crisis in order to move ahead with the radical changes necessary for education restructuring."

The change agents in Augusta, including our elected officials, have some nerve expecting us to pay for another round of reform which has nothing to do with traditional academics and your child's future upward mobility! Instead, it has everything to do with Pavlovian, robotic "training," and low-paying third-world jobs for the planned global economy. This is limited learning for lifelong labor! In "Human Capital and America's Future: An Economic Strategy for the Future," co-edited by David Hornbeck of the Carnegie Foundation of the Advancement of Teaching, one finds a shocking statement: "Employer beliefs about the superior capabilities of educated people turned out not to be confirmed in practice. Educated employees have higher turnover rates, lower job satisfaction, and poorer promotion records than less educated employees." Hornbeck's statement about the preference for dumbed-down employees is not to be taken lightly, since he is probably the principal designer of national education/"School-to-Work" restructuring programs upon which Maine's "revisioning" agenda is based.

The Select Panel report recommends "expanding school choice," and that does not mean traditional private school or home-school choice, but government-funded and controlled private education, which includes tuition tax credits, vouchers, charter schools and virtual computerized charter schools used by home-schoolers who are connected with the school district's central office! Charter schools are designed to provide job training in a "planned" (that is, socialist) economy.

The Select Panel Report recommends preparing leaders as "Change Agents." This writer was trained in 1976 to be a Change Agent, which included "identifying resisters," those smart taxpayers who resist controversial moral relativistic Dumbing Down programs being implemented in the schools. The first national heardquarters for Change Agent training, the National Training Laboratorie, was established in the Fifties in Bethel, Maine.

The Select Panel Report recommends laptop computers for grades 5-12, and calls for intergrating technology into student learning, teaching and living, and makes the very dubious claim that recent research demonstrates the students benefit from the use of technology.

The Select Panel Report recommends "Improving Teacher Quality by Monitoring and Coaching." This recommendation mirrors recommendations in the Carnegie Corporation's "A Nation Prepared: Teachers in the 21st Century," which says in part, "The practice of teaching must be influenced by, and evaluated, on the basis of research." Was the superior, inexpensive education in Bath, Maine and Salina, Kansas in the 1890s based on research? (This writer served as a Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education from whence all research for the "dumbing down" curriculae and values-destroying programs and methods emanated!) I pity the poor teachers and students being "monitored and coached," conditioned and experimented on like Pavlovian dogs!

The Select Panel Report recommends a longer school year, with a 20% increase in school time; half for professional development. The Select Panel Report believes that "dramatic change needs to occur in the governance and political organization of the system," a statement which reflects all the national restructuring reports of the Nineties. This is one scary proposal!

The Select Panel also "clearly defines school board responsibilities," a statement which is intended to "reduce and/or limit traditional school board authority and responsibilities."

Maine citizens must oppose this alien agenda, especially its call for another failed consolidation of our schools, and its recommedations for publicly-funded private education. This is not "free choice" at all, because it includes federally funded charter schools.

There is nothing new about the plan proposed in the Select Panel Report. This agenda reaches back to 1927, at least, when Dr. Augustus Thomas, Maine's Commissioner of Education, spoke to the World Federation of Education Associations (WFEA). Thomas said in part:

"...This means that the world must await a long process of education and a building up of public conscience and an international morality, or, in other words, until there is a worldwide sentiment which will back up the modern conception of a world community. This brings us to the international mind, which is nothing more or less than the habit of thinking of foreign relations and business affecting the several countries of the civilized world as free co-operating equals."

"As Maine goes, so goes the nation" applies equally in regard to education. Maine has always been a "pilot" state, a laboratory for the rest of the country for education change, from academics, to the work force training necessary for U.S. participation in an unconstitutional world government.

It is time for citizens of Maine to say, "STOP!... LEAVE US ALONE!"

The above-depicted report can by downloaded by typing the following into Google:

8FinalSPReportDraftSBE101205_000.pdf

Charlotte Iserbyt's well-documented history of American education, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America... A Chronological Paper Trail" can be downloaded FREE by typing the following into Google:

http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com