... Many of us who believe that gays and lesbians should be free to pursue their personal lives free from discrimination have felt bewildered by our discomfort with and resistance to all of the homophilic programs that have suddenly invaded our children's schools. To use the language of the Left, though, we should "listen to our feelings."

Subconsciously, we recognize that these pro-homosexual programs have nothing to do with teaching tolerance, which is a virtue in a pluralistic society. Instead, the programs have everything to do with having the state substitute its goal of sexual, and therefore social, control in place of a parent's desire to inculcate his children with traditional Judeo-Christian values, values that focus on the inviolability of the individual, beginning with his body.

Examples abound of supposedly anti-discriminatory programs that, instead of focusing on tolerance, work to direct a child's sexual development away from the zone of privacy that is a hallmark of Western sexuality. Robin of Berkeley describes a group called "Gender Spectrum," which has the ostensible goal of allowing "transgender, gender bending, [and] gender nonconforming" children and teens to hang with each other and share their experiences. She rightly sees this not as an effort to promote tolerance, but as a way to make it "cool to dabble in polyamory and gender nonconformism," thereby "destroy[ing] the West by degrading traditional values."

Only four years ago, California narrowly escaped a legislative effort to pass a bill that would have required all California textbooks, starting in first grade, to include materials focusing on famous homosexuals -- with the focus not on the achievement that made them famous, but simply on the homosexuality itself. A parental outcry forced the legislature to retreat to something more in keeping with a free society, which is the requirement that children may not be exposed to material that is discriminatory to people based on their sexuality.

... The relentless Leftist obsession with homosexuality and variations on traditional sexual gender roles is deeply embedded in the Obama administration. Last year, a vigilant blogger exposed the fact that Kevin Jennings, Obama's "Safe Schools Czar," as part of his leadership role in the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network ("GLSEN"), aggressively promoted child pornography in the classroom. GLSEN's actions had nothing to do with creating a safe, non-discriminatory environment for young people with different sexual orientations and everything to do with using the government (i.e., public schools) to inculcate in children the notion that their bodies have no boundaries. A body with no boundaries, of course, is a body that can easily be decoupled from the individual's control and then ceded to the state.

While the gay agenda, which is cloaked in civil rights language that makes it hard to challenge, is the leading edge of the state's desire to control children's sexuality, Leftists also use the schools to manipulate heterosexual behaviors so as to destroy a child's physical boundaries. In England, parents were aghast to learn that a school was requiring its first-grade pupils to massage each other. In Iowa (Iowa!), one middle school has abandoned any pretense of traditional morality and, instead, is teaching its eighth-graders "how to perform female exams and to put a condom on a 3-D, anatomically correct male sex organ." The body is a tool, and nothing more.

Freud was right when he speculated that sex, perhaps because it is the least easily satisfied human need, may also be the most powerful physical need driving human beings. Freud, however, viewed sexuality through the spectrum of a given individual's desires. What the statists understand -- and have always understood -- is that our bodies are the first line in the battle between statism and individualism. If a person is allowed to develop a sense that his body is his own to control, he will never willingly yield to the demands of the state. Only by convincing its citizens that they have no personal autonomy, beginning with control over their own bodies, can a state completely subsume the individual to the bureaucracy.

So if you're getting an itchy feeling between your shoulderblades when you contemplate your child's hyper-sexualized reading list and gender-bending sex education curriculum, you need not fear that you have turned into a repressed, homophobic Victorian. Instead, there's an excellent chance that you are someone with a deep respect for individual freedom who resents the Leftists' efforts to co-opt your child's body as a necessary sacrifice to the State.

You guessed it.