Parents Clash over Gay Curriculum Proposal
A bill by Mark Leno would require textbooks to include gay history and portray it “in a positive light”
After a lesbian student at Jesse Bethel High School in Vallejo joined with the American Civil Liberties Union in 2008 to accuse the local school district of discrimination, district officials agreed as part of a settlement to show films and assign homework depicting same-sex families, beginning in elementary school.
But one night last November, more than a dozen parents, rallied by community religious leaders, attacked the school board, asserting that their rights were being violated because they had no control over whether their children received such lessons.
“No one should take my right to tell me what can be shown to my child,” Cookie Gordon, a mother of two, told the board.
The clash was one of several related controversies at Bay Area schools. Polls show that the public’s stance against same-sex marriage is softening, and education about gay issues has expanded dramatically in recent years around the country, but experts suggest that the battle over what should and should not be a part of public school curriculums has just begun.
Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor of human development at Cornell University, said that the question of gay men and lesbians in the military was now over the hump, and that same-sex marriage was getting close to getting over the 50 percent mark in terms of popular support in California. But the issue of school curriculums, he said, “hits at something that’s far more difficult, and that’s children.”
California is poised to take a step sure to sharpen the debate. A bill introduced in December by State Senator Mark Leno, Democrat of San Francisco, would require all of the state’s history textbooks to include figures and events in gay history and portray them “in a positive light.”
To the many educators and gay rights advocates like Leno — one of the first two openly gay men elected to the Legislature — the need for the law is as self-evident as it is urgent.
“People oppose and fear the unfamiliar,” Leno said in an interview. “When grade-school students understand the arc of the L.G.B.T. movement over 40 years, that otherness begins to dissipate. That’s desperately needed right now.”
Educators point to several recently publicized suicides by gay teenagers as evidence that anti-gay bullying needs to be addressed head-on, in part by integrating gay studies into the curriculum.
Political observers believe that with Gov. Jerry Brown in office, Leno’s legislation is likely to become law. A similar measure passed the Legislature in 2006 but was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Senate Education Committee is expected to take up the bill, the first of its kind in the country, this spring.
Conservative groups have promised to fight the Leno bill.
“These controversial issues don’t belong in the classroom, no matter how many times people vote on marriage,” said Karen England, a member of the State Central Committee of the California Republican Party. “The homosexual activists have repeatedly been pushing for more and more in sexual curriculum when our kids can’t read or write.”
For parents like those who attended the Vallejo board meeting in November, it is a question of their right to control their children’s education. State law does not allow parents to remove their children from particular lessons that are part of a set curriculum.
At the meeting, a mother angrily waved a crossword puzzle assigned her 9-year old daughter that included the word “lesbian.” (The clue: “Two women who love each other in a romantic way.”)
The parents were backed by Pastor P. Daniels Jefferson, the popular leader of the Vallejo Faith Organization, an influential evangelical Christian umbrella group. Jefferson said that while he opposed bullying, Vallejo’s Christians felt that their voice was being suppressed.
“When you call us haters, or bigoted, or unintelligent because we believe in God’s word,” Jefferson said, “that’s hate, that’s bigotry.”
Jefferson said Leno’s bill was another step in what he labeled a long-running gay political agenda to “queer” the schools. He called the next 20 years the “most critical” period in the state’s debate over gay rights. “Today’s children are tomorrow’s voters,” Jefferson said, “and, believe me, nobody’s stupid. People know that.”
In 2008, some of the most powerful television advertisements broadcast by the campaign for Proposition 8, the California ban on same-sex marriage, evoked images of children’s being taught same-sex marriage in school without parental knowledge.
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