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Calif. Teachers Backed Prop. 8

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Tuesday, February 10, 2009 10:15 AM Comments (0)

Here’s another battlefield report from the marriage “wars.”

According to an analysis undertaken by NPR, public school teachers, aides and counselors supported California’s Proposition 8 by a 2-1 margin, in terms of total donations.

In other words, teachers — the folks who every day dedicate their professional lives to improving the welfare of children, whose interests are so often ignored by those who advocate for same-sex “marriage”  — overwhelmingly voted with their pocketbooks last fall to amend California’s Constitution to enshrine the traditional one-man, one-woman definition of marriage.

The decisive preference of California’s public school teachers for legally defining marriage as a heterosexual-only institution might seem surprising, given that the state’s teachers’ union was one of the biggest backers of the homosexual lobby’s effort to defeat Prop. 8. The union contributed $1.25 million to the No side in the Prop. 8 campaign.

But as we noted earlier in this post, perhaps it’s not at all surprising that so many individual teachers have concluded that redefining marriage can’t be in the best interest of the California children they are teaching every day in their classrooms.

“I think that as public school teachers, we are with these young people every day, and we see the problems that they have — not understanding their sexual identity and their sexual roles, male and female,” Fred Vanderhoof, a sixth-grade teacher who has taught at Nelson Elementary in Pinedale, Calif., for the past 20 years, told NPR.

Same-sex “marriage,” the veteran teacher said, “is one more thing happening that is not going to help them. I think we teachers see that.”

Filed under california, marriage, proposition 8, same-sex marriage

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