Report: School District Spending $10K To Send Kids to Gay Pride Parade
Maintaining biblical values when it comes to marriage and sexuality, Celebration Church has been a long-time renter of space at the Austin Independent School District’s Performing Arts Center in Austin, Texas, where they hold their Sunday church services.
According to the Austin-American Statesman, AISD will now be using revenue generated by the rental of the facility to offset the cost of transportation for students to attend an upcoming Austin Pride Parade, as well as other LGBT-related activities.
“The district will put $10,000 of the rental fees generated by Celebration Church toward funding its participation in the annual Austin Pride Parade and other LGBT districtwide activities,” the American-Statesman reported.
Jacob Reach, the Austin district’s chief of staff, said that AISD’s core values are that of “equity, diversity, and inclusion” and that they will ensure all of their students “have a welcoming environment.”
“We felt our inclusion of Pride week was a good choice,” Reach said, according to the American-Statesman. “Every year, the organizers of that event have struggled to find donations, money and support to be able to include AISD students and teachers in this event. So we were able to set aside for them so they don’t have to go out and try to raise the money.”
The school district’s solution to funding the trip comes in the wake of outrage against the district by local LGBT activists.
“Celebration Church believes that being gay or trans is an abomination,” one protester wrote in a Facebook post. “LGBT youth have been abused by ideas like these for too long, in churches and schools all across the U.S. It’s really no surprise that AISD has put making a profit above the people and our safety.”
That comment was in reference to the $182,000 in rental revenue the district has generated from the venue since September, the American-Statesman reported.
The LGBT activists were most likely referring to the statements made on Celebration Church’s website, which read, “We believe that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God.”
Initial protests that condemned AISD for allowing the church to rent a space caused the district to reconsider their contract with Celebration Church.
However, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office warned that if the arrangement were broken, they could be in violation of the First Amendment as well as Texas state law, the American-Statesman reported at the time.
That’s when AISD decided to counteract the worldview of the church with the will of gay activists, announcing their $10,000 allocation for the transportation of kids to a local Pride parade.
According to the American-Statesman, the church removed their strong, written beliefs from their website and updated them with a more simple affirmation that marriage is a “lifelong covenant between a man and a woman” and that the church “does not endorse or condone” sexual intimacy outside the realm of marriage.
Outside of the outrageous issue of AISD pushing the LGBT agenda on the children, it’s truly a shame that a church — an institution defined by their biblical beliefs — felt compelled to change their long-held stance because of the vitriol and pressure coming from local LGBT rights activists.
Christians need to look to Jesus Christ in controversial times like these — the savior of the world who perfectly combined transcendent truths with unconditional love.
Christians cannot afford to back down from fights in the ongoing culture war or more schools and organizations like AISD will continue to push these agendas onto society’s most innocent and unsuspecting.
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