Susan Ryan-Vollmar editor of Bay Windows attempts a heart-to-heart — parent-to-parent — with Massachusetts infamous anti-gay dad: “An Open Letter to David Parker”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the situation, Parker didn’t like that gay-parented families were included in the curriculum at the school his children attend. Last spring he went to the school to confront the administration and express his objections — he ended up getting arrested. This incident is a favorite among anti-gay groups who love to spin it to alarmist levels by victimizing Parker, presenting it as an example of how parents will be punished and jailed if they don’t conform to the homosexual agenda. The more reasonable explanation is that Parker refused to leave the school when the administration would not agree to his demands of changing their curriculum. When he did not leave, he was arrested for trespassing.

Now there are claims by the extreme right that his first-grade son was a target of an assault at school, which occurred on May 17th, the second anniversary of the day Massachusetts started handing out marriage licenses to same-sex couples. When I first heard about this from various “family values” newswires, the pre-meditation part just didn’t add up. Bullying in first grade isn’t sophisticated enough to happen on a political anniversary. If bullying is going to happen, what seven-year-old has the impulse control to wait days or weeks to do it on a particular date?

Here are the under-exposed details of the “incident” according to Ryan-Vollmar’s article:

[T]his month you let Brian Camenker, a fringe anti-gay activist, publish lies on his website about a playground incident your eldest son was involved in. You let Brian publish your son’s name. And you yourself have made claims about the school yard scuffle that both your son and his friends know to be untrue.

Your son was hit by another child on the playground May 17. Brian is claiming that “[i]t cannot be accidental that this happened on May 17 — the two-year anniversary of same-sex ‘marriage’ in Massachusetts — a day when emotions were particularly high among certain activists.”

Yet your son, the child who hit him and other children who witnessed the fight, told school officials the whole thing happened over an argument about who would sit where during lunch in the school cafeteria.

Brian hints that the child who hit your son was not punished by saying that no one “involved” in the incident was “suspended from school.” Yet you know that the boy who hit him wrote a letter of apology to your son and was suspended from recess for two days.

And in a statement published on Brian’s website, you describe the fight between your son and his friend as a “premeditated, well planned and coordinated” assault. If you really believe your son was the victim of a “premeditated” assault, then why did you recently let him have a playdate at the house of the boy who hit him?

Meanwhile, the spin on the story has moved to hysteria far beyond Massachusetts. An article in the Hawaii Reporter, for example, says the child was “dragged and beaten on the playground” by “eight to ten children.”

Here is the site Ryan-Vollmar mentions in her letter. There are some photos there, too. Interesting how families coming together in the name of inclusiveness and equality are labeled as attending an “anti-David Parker” demonstration.” Here’s a direct lift of one of the photo captions:

Children holding signs at anti-David Parker demonstration, September 2005. The kids’ signs have particularly insidious messages: “Support ALL Our Children, Families, Schools” and “Anyone Can Go to School.” Note that these imply that David Parker does not support all children, and that he believes that not everyone can go to school. This is the angry mindset these people have, and they’re transmitting it to young children.

He saw the same sign in the photo that I did: “Support ALL Our Children, Families, Schools”
Insidious messages?? Angry Mindset??

And they say queers are the drama queens.

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NOTE: Unfortunately, there is a very active PFLAG father who has the same name. I’m sure David Parker, the proud father of a transsexual child would not want anyone to get them mixed up.

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