Family Advocate Wants Children's Book on Same-Sex-Parent Penguins Put on Ice

Family Advocate Wants Children's Book on Same-Sex-Parent Penguins Put on Ice
By Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
November 27, 2006

(AgapePress) - An Illinois pro-family group is protesting an elementary school's decision not to restrict students' access to a picture book in the school library, a story about two male penguins who "adopt" a baby penguin as their own.

Shiloh Elementary School in metro East St. Louis, Illinois, is embroiled in a controversy over the book titled And Tango Makes Three (Simon and Schuster Children's Publishing, 2005). The picture book is, according to School Library Journal, "based on a true story" and tells of two male penguins living in a zoo who share a nest and "want to become parents."

In the story, a sympathetic zookeeper decides the two male birds "must be in love" and gives them a fertilized egg to care for, which the two "fathers" nurture until it hatches into a female chick. It was when one Shiloh parent was reading the book to her five-year-old daughter and encountered the reference to the two male penguins being "in love" that the debate over the book's inclusion in the elementary school's library began.

That mother and other East St. Louis parents see And Tango Makes Three as an unwelcome effort to introduce school children to the idea of homosexual parenting. They have called for the book to be moved to a section of the library reserved for materials addressing mature issues. Also, the parents are asking that children to be required to obtain parental permission before checking out the controversial book.

However, school superintendent Jennifer Filyaw maintains that limiting children's access to And Tango Makes Three would amount to censorship. As a result, the school official has opted not to accommodate the parents' requests, and the book remains available to young children without restrictions.

But David Smith, executive director of the Illinois Family Institute (IFI), claims the children's book is not being censored, as it is readily available at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores as well as on Amazon.com. He feels Shiloh Elementary School should not be introducing young children to what he calls "new social experiments" when their parents clearly object to this.

Smith is convinced there is a clear agenda behind And Tango Makes Three. "It's acclimating young children to the idea that family could be anything that you want it to be," he contends.

The cutely illustrated kids' story suggests that parents "could be two moms, could be two dads, could be three moms and three dads, and not just a mother and a father," the IFI spokesman says. Children of 4 to 8 years of age should not be exposed to such ideas, he insists.

"The school has a responsibility to the taxpayers to teach the children the basics of education," Smith asserts. "Teaching them new social experiments or trying to acclimate them to new social experiments is just not in [the schools'] purview," he says.

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