At last minute, MA House sneaks in "some" funding requirement for homosexual school programs in 2010 budget.

But no specific amount. Sell-out by politicians.

May 1, 2009

Late last Thursday night the leadership of the Massachusetts House of Representatives partially caved in to the homosexual lobby, which desperately wants to keep the state money flowing to programs in the public schools. Acting on one of the amendments filed by the gay lobby, they slipped an un-earmarked funding requirement into their Dept. of Education line item. The next day the full House approved the budget. The House version of the budget now goes to the Senate.

There is still no actual "earmarked" money for these programs. "Officially" we've held the line on that. But it's gotten slippery. Last year the homosexual lobby got $850,000 of tax money, and they could use this tactic to get much of that amount again.

As we've been reporting, for FY 2010 both the Governor's budget and the House Ways and Means budget completely removed that funding. But then the homosexual lobby filed two House budget amendments to restore it. This week they processed all the budget amendments. The House leadership had been getting angry calls and emails from pro-family people all week. But the homosexual lobby has been putting the heavy pressure on them also. This appears to be the compromise (or sell-out) that House Speaker Robert DeLeo (D-Winthrop) and his leadership team gave them.

Cracks open the door for getting the money restored

The House budget now requires that the Massachusetts Commission for GLBT Youth be given some money from the state's education budget. But it did not specify how much money. Nor did it raise the total amount in that line item to make up for this new requirement, since there are several other things listed in that item.

Thus, this would appear to be a defeat for the homosexual lobby. But that is misleading. It gives them a legal mandate to funnel money to their programs at any time from the Department of Education's budget. And it opens the door for an actual amount to be earmarked when the budget goes to the Senate over the next few weeks.

An outrage to parents and citizens

There is no reason that ANY taxpayer money should be "required" to be spent on homosexual programs in the schools. And especially not now. Last week the state announced it was up to another billion dollars short of tax collections. The House voted to raise the Massachusetts sales tax by 25% to try to stem the tide!

It's gotten so bad that on Saturday, Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman Sen. Steven Panagiotakos (D-Lowell) told State House News:

"We're in an economic crisis unlike anything we've seen since the Great Depression. Our budget will have at least a billion dollars less in revenue to use which means there could be thousands of layoffs both in the public and non-profit sectors, as well as a reduction or loss of benefits and services to many of our citizens."

This headline in Saturday morning's newspaper basically said it all.

But with all that, House Speaker Robert DeLeo - who by now knows exactly how parents feel about this - was still willing to sell out your children to the homosexual lobby. Something is really wrong here.

Here are the two budget items . . .

For those of you who'd like a little more detail, Here's how the budget items look right now. You can also go to the Legislature's website for more on this.

Every year the homosexual lobby funnels their money into their programs by dividing it up and putting parts of it into two budget items - one going through the Dept. of Education and the other going through the Dept. of Public Health. Last year the two amounts totaled $850,000. Here's where they stand now:

(Note that they use the phony labels of "support safety" and "suicide and violence prevention". In fact, these programs have little to do with those topics.)

What's next

Our work certainly isn't over.

The budget now goes to the Senate Ways and Means Committee. They wil start with the House version and come up with their own version of the budget. Then it goes to the full Senate which can amend it. During that time, anything can be changed. And it's a bit of a dangerous situation. Although the Ways and Means Chairman, Sen. Panagiotakos, is "reasonably" pro-family, the Senate President, Therese Murray, is an extreme pro-homosexual advocate. But on the other hand, there is enormous pressure to "downsize" the spending, which will work in our favor.

After the Senate comes up with its version, any differences between the House and Senate versions are "resolved" in a conference committee. That's where a lot of mischief can take place if we don't keep up the pressure. All kinds of things can get changed. Rules and constitutional law are a relatively unknown concept in the Legislature, as we see all the time.

After that it goes to the Governor. Any line items the Governor decides to veto are then sent back to the House and Senate for possible override.

We don't want ANY wording in the budget at all requiring ANY funding for these programs. That's our position. We're not in any mood for being "moderate" on this issue.

And right now we still have the momentum on this issue. But we need to fight hard. These legislators must hear us loud and clear. This can be won.