Save Oregon from
Ginny Markell!

It seems that not everything was as rosy on Election Day as the re-election of President Bush and the gain of Republican seats in Congress. Republicans lost more seats in state legislatures than they gained. For all our elation about the direction of the federal government, we ought not forget the states and the people.

Conservatives must remember Tip O’Neill’s axiom that “all politics is local.” It is locally that our lives are most directly affected, locally where we have the greatest chance of personally having an effect on the political outcome.

It is in a local contest, in the little town of Clackamas, Ore., that one of the most crucial decisions in the country will be made within a few weeks. It is a school board appointment to fill a resignation vacancy, and it is the kind of situation that, whatever is decided, will have national consequences because of a particular person who is seeking appointment.

Her name is Ginny Markell. Ms. Markell is seeking appointment to the North Clackamas School Board as a mother and a high-school health teacher.

Ginny Markell has also distinguished herself as one of the most dangerous leaders in the American anti-family movement. Markell served as president of the National Parent Teacher Association from 1999 to 2001, and it was under Markell’s leadership that the PTA was fully transformed from a locally based volunteer organization to a nationally based political lobbying firm.

Under Markell’s watch, the PTA national dues were doubled to allow for increased government lobbying efforts. Lobbying by the multi-million-member PTA threatens to “do significant damage to parent’s interests in education even while they increase taxpayer funds for the public school establishment,” says PTA critic Charlene Haar.

Markell’s PTA was a particular advocate for sex education and an opponent of school choice and vouchers. On vouchers, Ms. Markell has said: “National PTA supports public money for public schools only, and will oppose all efforts to divert public funds to private and religious schools through vouchers, education savings accounts and other funding mechanisms, regardless of the euphemistic term applied to them.”

Markell joined members of the Clinton administration, including Secretary of Education Richard Riley and Tipper Gore, on a nationwide bus tour in 1999 to lobby for higher education spending and increased government funding of higher education.

Markell is most infamous for using the 2001 homosexual film “That’s a Family” as a resource in the PTA diversity training resource kit. The video, produced by Women’s Educational Media to directly educate public schoolchildren about homosexual families, used young children to describe what it is like growing up with two moms or two dads. To stifle controversy, Markell’s PTA insisted that it was not directly promoting the homosexual lifestyle. But as Donald Wildmon, who urged members of his American Family Association to contact the PTA about its video, stated, “The PTA is promoting a video that promotes the homosexual lifestyle. So how can the organization deny that it is also promoting homosexuality?”

At a White House screening of the radically anti-family documentary in December 2000, Ms. Markell stated, “As we move into a new time of acceptance and respect for differences, please be assured that the organization that I represent, and represent very proudly, will be at the front of the line. And the film that you’re going to see today is only the starting point for us to truly begin to understand our differences as we look at families.”

Ms. Markell has no reservations whatsoever about the aggressive application of the homosexual agenda to America’s schools.

Given all of that, parents ought to know that the PTA is now more decadent than ever. This summer, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays led a workshop at the PTA national convention.

No parent who cares about preserving traditional American values should be paying national PTA dues. And no school board member in the North Clackamas School District should approve of what Ms. Markell has done in influencing the direction of America’s public schools.

Markell’s defeat or withdrawal from the school board appointment process would be a milestone in favor of traditional values, the American family and quality education.

Contact North Clackamas Superintendent Ron Naso at [email protected]; tell Mr. Naso that Ginny Markell hasn’t served America’s parents, teachers or students, and she doesn’t deserve a spot on the North Clackamas School Board.