Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh keeps up his misleading claims in service of his anti-gay agenda in a Feb. 6 article about a lawsuit against a sex education curriculum in the Montgomery County, Maryland, school district.
Unruh claimed that the curriculum "teaches students homosexuality is innate." But he doesn't tell the full context in which the reference appears -- as a Washington Post article noted, the judge who ruled to uphold the curriculum "said the school board's use of the term 'innate' was defensible, noting that it was couched in a much broader definition of factors that determine sexual orientation."
Curiously, Unruh does not use the word "conservative" anywhere in his article; he describes the Thomas More Law Center, which brought the lawsuit against the school district, only as a group "whose work is funded by donations," even though its causes -- "abortion, pornography, school prayer, and the removal of the Ten Commandments from municipal and school buildings" -- are indisputably conservative.
In keeping with the pattern of his WND reporting, Unruh quotes opponents of the curriculum at length but keeping statements attributed to supporters or school officials to a bare minimum, and he makes no apparent effort to contact school officials to give them the opportunity to respond to the opponents' claims.
Bizarrely, Unruh attributes information in the article to "the Portland, Ore., Examiner." Why is Unruh using an Oregon website for information about a story in Maryland? In fact, there is no such publication as the Portland Examiner; the Portland website is merely a city-themed portal -- of which there are many -- for Examiner newspapers that are located only in San Francisco, Washington and Baltimore.
The Examiner article from which Unruh apparently cribbed doesn't go into much detail about the "innate" question, but it points out what Unruh didn't -- that the lawsuit was brought by "a group of Christian conservatives." While Unruh pulled the more inflammatory quote from a member of the school board saying, "To the other side, I say get out of town, shut up, quit costing Montgomery County taxpayers money for litigation, and we're right and parents believe we're right," he doesn't acknowledge the school board member's other statement, that the opponents "speak for a minority. ... Many do not even live in the county."
(Updated to reflect Unruh's inclusion of the more inflammatory of the school board member's quotes.)
