After the video presentation, host professor Ellen DuBois facilitated an audience question-and-answer session with her guests, actor Josh Brolin and producer Chris Moore, while Howard Zinn’s partner Anthony Arnove (whom Brolin credits for his own participation) paced the back of the theater.

Asked about his project’s intended use in K-12 public school settings, Mr. Moore answered:

We have a whole educational program. There’s a curriculum, there’s a whole educational thing. There’ll be a website that has tools, that’s searchable… There is definitely a plan.

That plan includes “The Zinn Education Project” which:

…promotes and supports the use of Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States and other materials for teaching a people’s history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. The Zinn Education Project is coordinated by two non-profit organizations, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

In “A People’s History,” Prof. Zinn declares:

Objectivity is impossible, and it is also undesirable… because if you have any kind of a social aim… then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.

Moreover:

Professor Zinn announces the overtly political agenda of A People’s History in an explanatory coda to the 1995 edition. Zinn explains to the reader that he has no interest in striving for objectivity, and that his history is ‘a biased account.’ Professor Zinn explains: ‘I am not troubled by that. I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be  a part of the social struggle. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself is a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.’

That subjective social aim and biased accounting, when used as the basis for student instruction, is inconsistent with state education codes, local school board policies and administrative regulations.

Public schools are required to provide varying points of view and deal with issues in a factual, rational, objective manner and in a spirit that clearly indicates an attempt to promote greater understanding. They are prohibited from engaging in viewpoint discrimination.

Teachers are both legally and ethically restricted from using their positions to forward their own political, economic or social biases. Teachers may express their personal opinions, but must first identify them as such and not express them for the purpose of persuading students to their personal points of view.

The Zinn Project’s other materials for teaching a people’s history are provided by its collaborators:

• Teaching for Change: a social justice organization that, “Encourages teachers and students to question and re-think the world inside and outside their classrooms, build a more equitable, multicultural society, and become active global citizens.”
• Rethinking Schools: an activist publication that claims, “Schools are integral not only to preparing all children to be full participants in society, but also to be full participants in this country’s ever-tenuous experiment in democracy. That this vision has yet to be fully realized does not mean it should be abandoned.”

A lesson plan, formulated by social justice teacher Bill Bigelow: “One Country! One Language! One Flag!” crystallizes the Zinn Project:

It asks students:

What does it mean to “pledge allegiance” to the flag? What would it mean to not pledge allegiance to the flag? [The Pledge bonds child and flag in a way that may inhibit young people from thinking critically about actions taken in the name of the flag…].

The lesson is designed to persuade students that the American Flag stands for an unjust nation whose history is one of repression, intolerance and shame, equating the Pledge itself to immoral ideologies and totalitarian regimes:

Why not lead kids in the original Pledge to the Flag, including the “One Language!” chant and the Nazi-like salute, and then lead a discussion about the politics of the Pledge?

State laws require public school days to begin with patriotic exercises intended to promote the understanding of the concepts of “pledge,” “allegiance,” “republic,” and “indivisible,” and understanding the importance of the pledge as an expression of patriotism, love of country, and pride in the United States of America.

On what legal, professional or ethical grounds can or should public school boards and administrators allow their teachers to provide instruction to students that is, in this case, specifically designed to subvert their state patriotic exercises statutes?

These teachers are already participants:

• “I love all the materials I received in the packet and have so far seen an amazing effect with my students … Thank you for letting me and my classes participate in this program!”
— Angela Hubbs, Junior High School Teacher, San Diego, CA

• “Thank you so very much for sharing Zinn’s materials with us. We badly need to get a message of advocacy and action into our communities and into our hearts. Your support makes this easier, in a fight that feels overwhelming …” — Nancy Jean Smith, California State University Stanislaus, Stockton, CA

This would explain the Arkansas fifth-grader that made news recently by claiming there is no “liberty and justice for all” in America as his reason for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance during his school’s daily patriotic exercises.

Hopefully schools will become more cautious before agreeing to institute such curriculum and lesson plans in their classrooms.

Howard Zinn is a famous educator.

Does what he and his Zinn Education Project collaborators and celebrities think will advance causes of humanity comply with the law, and is it ethical instructional material?

If not, then it is inappropriate for use in America’s public schools.

Enter Howard Zinn – an author, professor and American historian – who, with the help of Hollywood and the History Channel, intends to change the way our pre-K through high school children learn American history. His current curriculum suggestions, like introducing three-year-olds to the lynching of African-Americans, or quizzing seven-year-olds on which Presidents owned slaves, should be a red flag to parents.

Zinn has spent a lifetime teaching college students about the evils of capitalism, the promise of Marxism, and his version of American history – a history that has, in his view, been kept from students. His controversial 1980-book The People’s History of the United States paints traditional American history as a façade – one that has grotesquely immortalized flawed leaders and is based on principles that victimize the common man. In 2004, Zinn wrote a companion book entitled Voices Of A People’s History Of The United States, which includes speeches and writings from many of the people featured in The People’s History.

These two books have now become the basis for a new documentary, entitled The People Speak, to be aired December 13th at 8pm on the History Channel. The trailer portrays the documentary as a collage of compelling one-person readings, told through the words of “ordinary” people who have struggled throughout American history against oppression. Produced by Zinn, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Chris Moore, the documentary appears to be cloaked, ironically (given Zinn’s admitted socialist agenda), in many of the traditional ideas that were behind our founding. The verdict is still out on the doc, but it is not for the books that inspired the film as well as the educational initiative associated with it.

Perhaps due to their one-sided perspective of America’s past, Zinn’s history books have largely been limited to colleges and universities, until now. In the press release announcing the broadcast, HISTORY introduced a partnership with VOICES Of A People’s History Of The United States, a nonprofit led by Zinn that bares the same name as his companion book, to help get his special brand of history into classrooms.

Delving into Zinn’s nonprofit is where this story gets interesting, and the organization’s grade school educational ambitions concerning.

VOICES’ function is to provide live performances of readings from the book Voices of a People’s History as well as educational materials to schoolteachers. The nonprofit’s site provides teachers with resources, including a teaching guide that explains how to get students excited about Zinn’s history books. Their educational materials also includes the Zinn Education Project, a resource for teaching Zinn’s perspective of American history to – drum roll please – pre-Kindergarten through high school students! Included in the curriculum for pre-K students (that’s three and four year-olds) is “Rethinking Columbus,” which counters “the myth of Columbus.” In Zinn’s view, our pre-K children “need to hear from those whose lands and rights were taken away by those who ‘discovered’ them.”

Another teaching lesson for our three-year-old students is “One Country! One Language! One Flag!” that includes teaching ideas for “examining the history of the Pledge of Allegiance and the political milieu in which it was written.” The teaching plan suggests introducing our pre-K-ers to the lynching of African-Americans in the 1880s, and introducing the history of violence and discrimination against minority groups. It also proposes a discussion on an old “One Language!” chant allegedly used in classrooms up until 1942, and poses teachers with the question, “Why not lead kids in the original Pledge to the Flag, including the ‘One Language!’ chant and the Nazi-like salute, and then lead a discussion about the politics of the Pledge?”

This discussion is proposed for kids age three to seven?

Zinn also includes a youngster version of his influential book entitled A Young People’s History of the United States as an introduction to his untold American History. The publisher of the book highlights a review by the magazine Socialist Review, who proclaimed “Howard Zinn has adapted his People’s History of the United States for younger readers, but in no way do these books pull their punches. Zinn feels the younger reader is entitled to look at US history honestly.”

The background of the board of directors and advisers of VOICES’ can only be described as jaw dropping and begins to show a clear motive behind teaching this predominantly anti-American history at such a young age.

Made up of several notables including Zinn, Kerry Washington, and Marisa Tomei, all of whom make appearances in the documentary, the VOICES board also includes radicals who play a role in our public schools. Brian Jones, a New York teacher and actor, is a board member of VOICES and has also played the lead in Zinn’s play Marx in SoHo. You can see Jones speaking about Zinn and the play below, recorded for a performance in Greece, where he extols the benefits of this one man play as a tool to introduce people to Marx’s ideas:

Jones is also a regular contributor to Socialist Worker, International Socialist Review, and speaks regularly on the beneficial principles of Marxism, including this year at the 2009 Socialism Conference. He recently gave a speech on the failure of capitalism, proclaiming that “Marx is back.”

Sarah Knopp, a Los Angeles high school teacher, is also on Zinn’s Teacher Advisory Board. Like Jones, Knopp is also a regular contributor to International Socialist Review, Socialist Worker, is an active member in The International Socialist Organization, and was also a speaker at the 2009 Socialist Conference. Here is Knopp speaking about the benefits of socialism, how capitalism destroys lives, and how she advocates workers taking over their factories:

Is it becoming clearer why this group might want to teach children to think poorly of the American system?

Then there is Jesse Sharkey, a schoolteacher in Chicago. Sharkey is another of Zinn’s Teacher Advisory Board Members and, completely uncharacteristic of this group, is a contributor to… Socialist Worker.

This is the group that the History Channel is working with “to develop enhanced, co-branded curriculums for a countrywide educational initiative.” If readers choose to watch The People Speak, which we at BigHollywood encourage, keep in mind the context of the documentary’s creator and the pre-K to high school curriculum that the History Channel and VOICES could possibly create given the makeup of the board members.

I am not advocating that we spare our kids the harsh truths of American history, but I am suggesting, given Zinn’s far-left political affiliation, this project is designed to breakdown our vulnerable children’s views of American principles so that they can be built back up in a socialist vision.

Zinn’s one-man play Marx in SoHo provides an example of his attempt to reestablish the socialist ideology. The play, created in 1999, places Marx in New York after bargaining with the authorities of the after-life for a chance to come back to earth to clear his name. At the end of the cold war, Zinn felt that Marxism was unfairly discredited through being anchored to the fall of the Soviet Union. Through the play, Zinn wanted “the audience to see Marx defending his ideas against attack.” Those associated with the play have described it as an attempt to reestablish Marx’s philosophic and economic outlook – a philosophy that views capitalism as corrosive to the human condition. It doesn’t take a great leap to surmise that instilling in children a pessimistic view of the American experience could make his ideas more palatable.

Zinn’s socialist philosophy has definitely made its way into the documentary, including a speech by prominent socialist Eugene Debs. In his speech, which is a prose to the ills of the capitalist system, he speaks to a court that convicted him of sedition:

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man, who does absolutely nothing…to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

The promotional videos can be viewed here:

It is not surprising to me that there are groups sympathetic to Marx’s ideas throughout our country. What is surprising is that the most powerful persuasion machine in the world (Hollywood) and the History Channel would provide Zinn such a prominent soapbox to stealthily build a case for a destructive ideology to our children, and as a result mainstream his ideas with the magic of cool music, graphics, and celebrity. Groups that push Marx’s philosophy are like a virtual organism that will not die off even when stung by the undeniable historical evidence showing human behavior makes such a system unsustainable. If we let this virtual organism into our grade schools, it will take decades for our kids to unlearn the ideology.

And if there are any doubts of the intentions of Howard Zinn’s movement, I provide a quote of his in closing. When a reporter asked Zinn, “In writing A People’s History, what were you calling for? A quiet revolution?” Zinn responded:  “A quiet revolution is a good way of putting it. From the bottom up. Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives. It would be a democratic socialism.”

It appears that Zinn’s ilk have started the institutional phase of their agenda.

An Arkansas fifth-grader made news recently by claiming there is no “liberty and justice for all” in America as his reason for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance during his school’s daily patriotic exercises. 

Red Skelton could’ve taught him a thing or two:

– 

Of course, the Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that as long as such dissent is practiced in a non-disruptive manner a student is acting well within his Constitutional rights — his faulty reasoning for the dissent being irrelevant — and he may not be compelled to participate by either the school, or the state. 

Teachers and administrators are strictly prohibited from singling out such peaceful dissent for discipline, admonishment or public ridicule. 

Any teacher or administrator doing so should swiftly and forthrightly be subjected to reprimand or discipline including assignment to an appropriate Teacher Quality Enhancement Training program in order to mitigate any future injustices on their part. 

The Pledge itself takes all of fifteen seconds to recite — which is likely a main reason most states and public school boards ascribe it for compliance with their respective education codes, policies and regulations — yet the Pledge, as with standardized patriotic exercises, is designated to inculcate patriotic values upon our nation’s children. 

These values — i.e., love of and devotion to country — include American Exceptionalism, which secures even the Liberty and human rights to dissent against that very love and devotion. 

Contrary to popular opinion however, dissent is obviously not de facto the ‘highest form of patriotism.’ 

As Socrates warns the ages in Plato’s Republic:

“[D]emocracy has her own good [Freedom], of which the insatiable desire brings her to dissolution… the father grows accustomed to descend to the level of his sons and to fear them, and the son is on a level with his father, he having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is his freedom… the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction… above all in forms of government… The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.”

Is it an excess of liberty that incites a fifth-grader to irrational dissent against a pro forma patriotic exercise, and in the process tell his substitute teacher to “go jump off a bridge”?

Perhaps, but that is for his parents to decide, the Supreme Court moots further argument.

There is however a parallel issue that might be worthy of consideration:

Can state and local school boards compel teachers to lead the Pledge of Allegiance in their classrooms?

The Supreme Court held in Newdow v. Elk Grove 2004 that, yes, in fact they can:

Congress prescribed a Pledge of Allegiance, the State… required patriotic observances in its schools, and the School District chose to comply by requiring teacher-led recital of the Pledge of Allegiance by willing students.

Hopefully teachers unions and under-their-thumb school boards won’t exploit this latest attack against the Pledge as a destructive excuse to reject and undermine its original intent, i.e., allegiance to the American Republic in all her glory and the values inculcation thereof.

Hopefully as well, outside political advocacy groups will be barred as sponsors of so-called “Tolerance Through Education” programs that intrude outside Lawyer/Facilitators — without prior parental notification – into classrooms as a means of creating political correctness Pledges of Tolerance that students can be shamed to abide, while concurrently pressured to diminish the traditional Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America.

Whenever public schools ignore or revise long-standing Patriotic Exercises policy requiring simply the Pledge, or Star Spangled Banner, replacing those with near meaningless vagaries like “Appropriate patriotic exercises also include, but are not limited to, songs, poems, quotations and discussions related to the development of citizenship in a democracy” one begins to wonder whether rulebooks are any longer worth the paper they’re printed on.

What values should the required daily patriotic exercises in public schools inculcate in American students?

“A rose by any other name is still a rose.”

Liz is driving me to the 9-12 Westwood Tea Party.  I’m biting my fake fingernails because I’m one of the speakers and I don’t have a speech yet.

Liz: Do you have your speech all ready?

Me: No…I’m kinda nervous.  I mean, where do I start? Should I talk about:

1)  Obama’s last speech where he lied 13 times? Not even little sneaky lies you have to research, but big, bold, blatant lies!  ”My plan will not fund abortions, or insure illegals!”  Lie, lie, lie.

2)  The former Liberally-Biased Mainstream Media that is now a completed, fully-functioning Progressive Propaganda Machine?  Ignoring the Acorn tapes, and the Van Jones story! That’s called the lie of omission!

3)  Or, …hey, you know what I read?  I was flipping around in the Bible and since it’s 9 -12 I just flipped to Psalm 12 and it said the most perfect thing…about lying in the government!

Liz: Really?  Did you see Glenn Beck today?

Me: The protest sign in the Washinton D.C. crowd that said Ephesians 6:12?

Liz: Yeah!

Me: I looked it up!  And, right while I was reading it, Glenn Beck said, kind of apologizing, “I don’t usually do this…ya know, read the Bible on the air…but..

Liz: I know!  He read it!

Me: He read the Bible on the air!

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Ephesians 6:12
King James Version

Me: I wish I had a Bible.  I should read that Psalm 12 thing in my speech.

Liz: I think I have a Bible in the car…(she looks around and finds one in the glove compartment!)

Me: You do!

She has one!

I flip to Psalm 12 and read it out loud to her and my bored teenager in the back seat.

“Everyone talks in lie language;
Lies slide off their oily lips.
They doubletalk with forked tongues.

I’m tired of hearing, “We can talk anyone into anything!
Our lips manage the world.”

God, keep us safe from their lies,
From the wicked who stalk us with lies,
From the wicked who collect honors
For their wonderful lies.”

Psalm 12
The Message Version

Liz: You definitely have to read that!  It’s perfect!

We get to the Federal Building.  It is a beautiful California day.  Lots of American flags are flapping against the blue sky.  I do a couple handstands on the platform for my handstand photo collection.  I bump into my freedom fighting buddies.  We hug and admire each other’s signs.  I love the one where George Washington has the cartoon bubble over his head that says, “WTF?”

I have Liz’s Bible stuck in the waistband of my jeans because my hands are holding two protest signs.

I start thinking about whether or not to read the Bible in my speech.  Why am I afraid to?

This is not a Liberal crowd.  Liberals would not approve of Bibles being read in public.  They took them out of the schools and are trying to get “In God We Trust” and “One Nation Under God” taken off of our money, and out of the Pledge of Allegiance.  Speaking of The Pledge…What about that YouTube video?

–

If that doesn’t reek of Daniel 3:6 and Revelation 13:15 I don’t know what does!

Communists do not allow Bibles.  When I was a child, my Dad was writing a check to an organization that smuggled Bibles into Russia.   I said, “Why do they have to sneak Bibles?”  Dad said, “They’re Communist.”

Atheists do not like Bibles.

All decisions and most political issues all come down to whether you are FOR GOD or AGAINST GOD.

The reason Liberals-Communists-Atheists don’t like Bibles is because they do not want the competition.  “No man can serve two masters…” Matthew 6:24  You cannot worship God and the State.  You must choose one.

Very interesting that Obama has a new web site called serve.gov.  Or, Serve Government.
Reminds me of the Bob Dylan song, “You Gotta Serve Somebody/It might be the devil, and it might be the Lord/but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”

As I stood in front of the sea of faces, flags, and signs, I opened my mouth and let my heart speak.  I saw myself digging the Bible out of my waistband and holding it up in the air.  I heard my mouth saying, “I always took my freedom for granted.  My freedom to worship.  This is the next thing Obama is going to try to take away from us.  Newly appointed Mark Lloyd and Cass Sunstein’s agenda is to stop conservative/Christian talk radio and TV and Internet….”

At the end of my speech I said, “Psalm 12 says…”  Right then, I was given the “Wrap It Up” sign.  I paused for a second. I mumbled something about hoping in God and not a man.  Then, I left the podium.

I did not read it out loud.  I don’t know why.

First, though, they have to acknowledge that Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, Dick Durbin, Charles Rangel, Harry Reid and Charles Schumer, are not moderates, but, rather, leftists with a Socialist agenda.  Furthermore, they must recognize that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, CNN, the three major networks, the news magazines and the New Yorker, are not objective in their reporting of political events, and neither are Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher, in their commentary.  If these entities and individuals are not on the payroll of the DNC, they certainly should be.  They certainly put in longer hours than Howard Dean.

Step #1:  It is high time that every American be guaranteed the right to speak freely.  It is not reserved solely for left-wing college students who wish to take advantage of the first amendment to shout down conservatives.  At the same time, they must not construe the conservative’s right to dismiss them as arrogant idiots as censorship.

Step #2:  Affirmative action argues that African Americans and Latinos are intellectually inferior and are unable to compete academically unless other students are handicapped because of their race.  Interestingly enough, when blacks and Hispanic students are given these unfair advantages, it’s rarely at any cost to white students, whose rate of college admissions remains constant; instead, it’s nearly always another minority group, Asians, who pay the price.  This is what left-wingers refer to as leveling the playing field.

Step #3:  Liberals always claim to be in favor of higher taxes, agreeing with Bill Clinton that the government invariably spends money more wisely than those who actually earn it.  However, such prominent proponents of higher taxes as George Soros, Ted Kennedy and Mr. and Mrs. John Kerry, protect their own otherwise taxable income through trusts and offshore accounts.  Obviously, any American who believes higher taxes are a good thing can do the honorable thing by spurning all deductions and paying Uncle Sam everything up to 100% of his income.

Step #4:  Even the most secular of liberals seems to believe that Jimmy Carter is a saint.  The evidence for this seems to be that he has on occasion posed with a hammer in his hand at Habitat for Humanity building sites and is constantly walking around with a expression on his face that suggests he has just forgiven Pontius Pilate for betraying him.  This is the same fellow, let us never forget, who called Yasser Arafat his good friend and who has accepted untold millions of dollars from Arab cut-throats, who ask nothing in return except that he go on insisting that there would be peace in the Middle East if only those darn Israelis would disappear from the face of the earth.

Step #5:  Stop insisting that all wars are bad.  It only makes you sound daft.  Carrying signs that equate a U.S. president, any U.S. president, with Adolph Hitler is not only rude, but suggests you’re certifiably nuts.  Every president has left office right on schedule.  Aside from FDR, who just happened to get elected four times, not one of them has remained in office beyond eight years.  On the other hand, Hitler ran Germany for 12 years and only death and the allied forces brought that to an end; Stalin ran the Soviet show for 31 years; while that hero of the left, Fidel Castro, held the reins, not to mention the whip, for about 50 years.

Step #6: Repeat after me, “Separation of church and state” exists nowhere in the Constitution.  The first amendment does not require the removal of Christmas trees from the village green, the 10 Commandments from courthouse walls or “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.  All it does is forbid Congress from establishing a state religion, such as the Church of England, and anybody who tells you otherwise is a liar and, most likely, a card-carrying member of the ACLU.

Step #7:  Stop using the word “big” as a pejorative.  There is nothing intrinsically bad about big oil, big agriculture or big pharmaceuticals.  Overall, they do a very good job of keeping our cars on the road, food on our tables and most of us over 60 alive and functioning.  On the other hand, big government, which so many liberals simply adore, represents a usurpation of the allegedly inalienable rights of individuals.  A quick perusal of the Constitution should convince you that beyond declaring war, forging treaties, overseeing patents, printing money, running the post office, collecting taxes and protecting our borders — and a few other things that Washington doesn’t do at all well these days — the federal government has very limited responsibilities.

Step #8: Acknowledge that the United Nations is, in the main, an aggregation of venal diplomats who live high off the hog in New York City while representing the most corrupt and vicious regimes in the history of the world.  Only a fool or a diplomat would continue to suggest that this gang of well-dressed thugs possesses anything resembling moral authority.

Step #9:  Do not keep insisting that at a time when nearly all the large scale evil in the world is being perpetrated by Muslims that racial profiling is anything but a sensible approach to airport security.  During WWII, Swedish Americans were not suspected of performing espionage for the Axis powers and for a very good reason; namely, because they weren’t performing espionage for the Axis powers.  These days, their Swedish American children and grandchildren are not suspected of trying to blow up airlines, but the smarmy bureaucrats insist on pretending that they’re every bit as likely to be up to mischief as a bunch of 25-year-old Osama bin Laden look-alikes from Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Step #10: Stop trying to pretend that illegal aliens are the same as legal immigrants just so you can claim the moral high ground and accuse those of us who are opposed to open borders of being racists.

Step #11:  Once and for all, stop forgiving murderers.  Whether or not you’re in favor of capital punishment, only the victim of a crime has the right to grant forgiveness.  And inasmuch as the killer has deprived his victim of that ability, don’t take it upon yourself.  It doesn’t prove how compassionate you are, only that you’re as sanctimonious and as self-aggrandizing as, say, Jimmy Carter.

Step #12:  Stop bashing the U.S. military and the Boy Scouts.  The only reason you have the ability to shoot your mouth off is because men and women braver and better than you sacrificed life and limb for your right to do so.  As for the Boy Scouts, they are absolutely right to keep homosexuals from taking youngsters on camping trips.  While it’s true that many gays are perfectly fine people and that very few homosexuals are pedophiles, there’s no reason on earth to take unnecessary risks just so we can all prove how broadminded we are.  For what it’s worth, as decent as most Catholic priests are, I wouldn’t let them take youngsters into the woods, either.  It’s fine to be compassionate and understanding, but let the gays among us be understanding for a change and acknowledge that, every so often, common sense should trump political correctness.

And, finally, making this a baker’s dozen, Step #13:  Let us all agree that while being a woman, a black, a Jew, a Catholic, a Mormon or even a gay, for that matter, should in no way preclude anyone from being elected president of the United States, none of those things constitutes a very good reason to vote for someone.