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Friday August 4, 2006
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ACLU Forces Co-Ed Classes in Louisiana School Citing Gender Discrimination
"Unfounded notions like 'boys need to practice pursuing and killing prey, while girls need to practice taking care of babies' has no place in our classrooms": ACLU Executive Director
By Hilary White
BATON ROUGE, August 4, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – It seems the mere threat of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union is enough to force a school to alter innovative policies.
The Livingston Parish school board in Louisiana has agreed to drop its plans for a pilot project of sex-segregated classes after the ACLU filed suit, alleging the plans violated sex discrimination laws.
The ACLU filed a suit in Baton Rouge federal court in the name of 13 year-old student Michelle Selden.
"Psychological research demonstrates that on average, boys and girls are psychologically more alike than different," the suit claimed, by way of arguing against segregated classes.
"We are relieved school officials have realized they cannot ignore the law and sex segregate classes based on broad gender stereotypes about psychological differences between boys and girls," said Joe Cook, Executive Director, ACLU of Louisiana.
"Unfounded notions like 'boys need to practice pursuing and killing prey, while girls need to practice taking care of babies' has no place in our classrooms."
A major doctrine of the radical feminist movement – for which the ACLU has long been an advocate – asserts that there are no distinctive psychological differences between boys and girls.
Superintendent Randy Pope of the Livingston Parish school system in Louisiana at first told the Associated Press that the school’s segregation project is legal and there were no plans to change it.
The board’s decision to implement the project came after examining research showing the significant differences between the way boys and girls learn at the junior high school level. The plan was to teach the same academic material, but in different ways to accommodate different learning styles for boys and girls.
The Advocate reports however, that the school board reached an agreement with the ACLU to drop the plans on Wednesday. The school told U.S. District Judge Frank J. Polozola that they cannot afford the disruption to the school year that the suit would entail.
Emily Martin, deputy director of the ACLU Women's Rights Project, admits that this is the first time the lobby group has actually filed suit over the sex-segregation issue. In previous cases, Martin said, the mere beginnings of the threat of a suit by the ACLU was sufficient to convince schools to drop sex-segregation plans.
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
ACLU Founder a Communist Ideologue Bent on Uprooting Judeo-Christian Foundation of America
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/sep/05092102.html
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