Effort to Repeal California Gay History in Schools Officially Fails
Back in July, California officially passed SB 48, a bill which required the state of California to include the contributions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people to our nations in its textbooks. Since California is the biggest market share of textbook buyers of any US state; this is a big deal; it could significantly influence the curriculum in textbooks nationwide. Of course, initiatives to reverse the bill’s passage started immediately — but repeal efforts faced an uphill battle. As of Wednesday, the repeal of SB 48 has finally failed.
Groups that opposed SB 48 were circulating a signature intended to demand a vote on the bill and call for its repeal. They needed 505,000 signatures by Wednesday, and they didn’t have them. Even more telling as far as how unfeasible a repeal apparently was, “Traditional Values Coalition spokesman Benjamin Lopez earlier said the groups had decided not to file regardless of whether they reached the threshold.” That doesn’t mean everyone’s given up, however. Some are convinced that the petition was effective in sending a message, if not actually accomplishing what it set out to do.
Brad Dacus with the Pacific Justice Institute, which spearheaded the ‘Stop SB 48’ campaign, says whether they rounded up enough signatures or not — it won’t stop their efforts. “We’re convinced that this sends a loud signal to the legislators in California that if they’re going to adopt this kind of anti-parent, anti-family legislation, they can expect to hear about it one way or the other,” said Dacus.
The plan now seems to be to punish Democratic legislators for passing the bill the next time they’re up for reelection, bringing up the issue in terms of a lack of family values and “respect for parents” as a vote draws nearer. At the same time, some are planning to go back to the drawing board with a petition strategy, creating a ballot proposition that would deal in general with children being taught curriculum of any kind in school that their parents didn’t endorse. (Although California has a law that ballot initiatives have to stick to a single subject, so that might be tricky.)
It’s a nice coda to what’s really a pretty long story. In 2008, Prop 8 passed in large part because voters were goaded into a misguided fear that legal same-sex marriage would somehow lead to “gay marriage being taught in schools.” In 2011, a law is passed that confirms those fears as much as any actual real-world legislation will, and its most vitriolic opponents can’t manage to drum up even a full petition to try to oppose it. Having SB 48’s safety won’t fix everything, and it can’t ensure safety at school for queer kids or respect for their families. But for queer kids in California and maybe across the nation, it can at least give them something to be proud of.
Anti-Gays Find “Repealing CA’s Gay History Mandate” Quite Challenging, Not an Easy A
California serves more pupils than any other state in the nation and does so with the lowest per-student expenditure in the country — about $9,000 per student on average, significantly less than states with similar costs of living such as New Jersey and New York, who spend approximately $17,000 per student. California is also one of the most unequal states in the country for education resources distribution, with poor schools often getting by on $6,000 per pupil while richer areas support up to $20,000 per student. Teachers’ salaries similarly vary at a 3 to 1 ratio around the state, with low-salaried teachers more likely to be serving low-income students, students of color and English-language learners. California is amongst the three most segregated states for Latino students. Some of the poorest districts operate with up to 50 percent uncredentialed teachers and astronomical staff turnover rates. California is the only state in the country who hires principals and special ed teachers who lack experience or preparation.
California also ranks amongst the nation’s lowest for academic achievement and in the bottom ten percent for class size, staff/pupil ratio and library quality. Almost one-third of California’s ninth grade students drop out before high school graduation.
With all those concerns facing the parents of California’s schoolchildren, it’s hard to know where to begin. Education activists are undoubtedly working hard to fix California’s system, but where should we ordinary citizens be devoting our advocacy and attention? What issues really matter most?
Well, according to several major advocacy groups in the region, we should all be turning our most critical eye to SB-48, a law passed this year which would add “LGBT people” to the list of minority groups California schools are expected to include in its social studies curriculum.
We first told you about the effort to overturn SB-48 back in July. Over the past few weeks, Stop SB48 has been amping up their campaign and pro-equality groups have been weighing in on the probability of their success. For starters, here’s one of Stop SB48‘s new PSAs:
Yes, it’s that same old song again! According to leading groups who allegedly do things like “focus on the family,” “protect kids” and “preserve marriage,” SB-48 will turn children into red-hot flaming homosexuals who kiss their first cousins in chicken coops. These groups also claim SB-48 will cost taxpayers extra money, because it takes special ink to write LGBT people’s names and textbooks weigh more when they have LGBT people in them.
Think about how much simpler this all was two hundred years ago, when the only thing anyone could learn in history books were the achievements of straight white men who wore wigs and shot people with rifles! Those books were so cheap to make! It was like making a pamphlet, basically.
Ladies and gentlemen, The Protect Kids Foundation:
California Senate Bill number 48, now tracking its way through the legislature, would change the teaching of core academic subjects into a “celebration” of gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual lifestyles. This profound change in the basic education of children would be mandatory, without involvement or opt-out rights of parents.
Next up we have ConcernedParentsUnited.com. What do you think SB-48 will do, Concerned Parents? Is it:
+ Violate the innocence of 9 million California children, starting as young as kindergarten.
+ Borders on psychological abuse by promoting gender confusion, experimentation, and undermining rightful parental authority.
+ Sexualizes all school materials unnecessarily.
+ Normalizes homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism, still Gender Identity Disorder by the APA.
+ Omits known dangers of homosexual lifestyle — especially for men who have sex with men.
Yikes! Stop SB48 also mentions to its followers that “children as young as five” will be taught to not only “accept” but to “endorse” homosexuality, bisexuality and “transgenderism.” This could lead to dangerous side effects like unity, empathy, and kindness.
Family Research Council’s friend-of-the-KKK president Tony Perkins is starring in PSAs on the subject, to which Equality California has released this reaction video (which falls a bit flat in my opinion):
[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiQ96NNRLwY’]
However, last week the director of Equality California, Roland Palencia, said if a repeal was on the ballot, we’d probably lose. Specifically:“the prospects are not good if this gets to the ballot. I am not under any illusion.” He pointed out that “this is the seminal, core issue they always get us for, so they have the advantage on this so far” — which was my first reaction, too. I mean, they basically campaigned for Prop 8 by arguing against SB-48, even though at that point it didn’t exist!
EQCA’s communications director, Rebekhah Orr, told journalist Rex Wokner that EQCA’s strategy for fighting against the HSB48rs is to paint the group as “the extremists that they are.” She also points out that Stop SB-48 is using “the same sound bites they’ve been playing for 20 years” but “we have no illusions about the monumental task before us… we’re going to need to do much more robust pieces of research, and we will not be able to say anything definitive, certainly, until we’re done with that.”
But what’s the reality of the Stop SB-48 movement on the ground? Well, the effort to Restore the Heterosexual Innocence of America’s Most Precious Moments Initiative is hitting some snags in their mission to raise anti-gay awareness and collect 504,760 signatures before October 12th, thus nailing the SB 48 referendum a spot on next year’s ballot:
….so far, Mormon and Catholic church leaders and conservative groups who spearheaded the Proposition 8 campaign have not joined the effort to qualify the gay history referendum for the June 2012 ballot, leaving less-experienced Christian conservatives to lead the charge without the organizational prowess and funding to hire paid signature gatherers.
Political operatives say they can’t recall any citizens’ initiative that made the state ballot without professional petition circulators in almost three decades.
“If someone wrote a million-dollar check, we would be guaranteed to get this on the ballot,” said Pacific Justice Institute President Brad Dacus, whose legal aid firm wrote the proposed measure and is co-sponsoring the signature-gathering effort. “That’s not the case at this point… We are counting on people in churches and communities and families making the extra effort to get it done.”
If Stop SB48 doesn’t manage to get the referendum on the ballot, that would be in line with some recent developments on The Other Team’s side – like that NOM’s campaign to raise $100,000 has failed and that a new study shows that many Millennial Evangelicals support same-sex marriage.
Why the lack of support for Stop SB48? Well, anti-gays haven’t ever had a problem with devoting excessive resources to legal issues which have no actual tangible impact on themselves at all, but it’s worth mentioning that the Evangelicals who generally support these campaigns — the denominations with the strongest anti-homosexual views are Evangelical Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons – are notorious for not enrolling their kids in public school to begin with (18% of Californians are Evangelicals — the second-most represented religion in California after Catholicism — but only 2% are Mormon or Jehovah’s Witnesses).
As far back as 2002, Focus on the Family’s founder James Dobson told his followers during a Focus on the Family Broadcast:
“I’ve been on the air here with Focus on the Family for 25 years; it’s the first time I’ve said this. But in the State of California and places that have moved in the direction that they’ve gone with the schools, if I had a child there, I wouldn’t put that youngster in the public schools… I think it’s time to get our kids out.”
That same year, on The Sean Hannity Show:
“I said let me simply say, not for everybody, but if it were my child in California, where they’re teaching homosexual propaganda, starting with kindergarten, 5-year-old children sitting on the floor, hearing about adult perverse behavior, I would get my kid out of there.”
“Same sound bites they’ve been playing for 20 years”? Check!
When Proposition 82, the “preschool for all” initiative, hit the ballots in 2006, the far-right trotted out similar arguments about the “far-leftism” of public schools and the importance of separating School from The State. It is estimated that some 75% of homeschooled children are of the Evangelical tradition (which, sidenote, is sometimes problematic for non-denominational homeschoolers just looking for accurate textbooks to use with their children).
probably no gay history in this textbook
In fact, when The Pacific Justice Institute isn’t arguing against SB-48, they’re pushing for homeschooling rights. Furthermore, the “education” section of Focus on the Family‘s website doesn’t mention SB-48 — it’s focused on “school choice” advocacy, a.k.a. the rights of parents to take their kids out of public schools that allegedly support homosexual agendas. Focus on the Family’s California chapter isn’t blasting anything about SB-48 on its front page, either. The Family Research Council supports Stop SB-48, but devotes its webspace to economic issues, something involving Netflix and Walgreens, and allowing clergy to participate in the 9-11 memorial.
Is it possible that Stop SB-48 is suffering from The Boy Who Cried Wolf syndrome? Perhaps after years and years of those same sound bites, it’s difficult for even Stop SB-48’s potential fundraising base to see how this round of homosexual indoctrination is any different than the billion that allegedly came before it. Parents who heeded Dobson’s call in 2002 and in 2006 to pull their kids from public schools have already taken action, after all. The deal with their relationship to CA’s education system was sealed far before SB-48 came along.
Sacramento political Consultant Wayne Johnson, who has extensive experience with ballot initiative campaigns, told Forbes.com that “with the same-sex marriage ban tied up in the courts, a presidential election on the horizon and many Christian parents with children in private schools, conservative groups with the most cash and experience may sit out this fight.”
At the end of the day, SB-48 is one of the few positive steps California has been able to make towards a more supportive, inclusive and progressive public school system. Next up? Let’s try to ensure that every pupil in California gets a new textbook at all:
When California kids go back to public school this year, most will have old textbooks. In fact, the state won’t even order any new ones at least until 2014, thanks to budget cuts.
“We’re talking about five years here. For school-aged children, five years is a long time. Today’s fourth grader will be entering high school in five years,” said public school lobbyist Peter Birdsall.
The budget cuts to education are so deep, Sacramento is allowing school districts to use this year’s $330 million earmarked for textbooks to pay for other things.
Now that’s what I call a crisis for California’s schoolchildren.
‘Stop SB 48’ Campaign Doesn’t Want US History Books to Tell the Truth
My first college course was History of American Women. It proved to be a powerful experience. I dug through primary sources and wrote research papers. I voted for Hillary Clinton. I cried when she conceded (for a while). I became a women’s studies minor, and then a women’s studies major. I began to seek work on various feminist topics and made contributions in my community, and internationally, to women’s rights.
This one history course changed my entire life. It inspired me, but it also bewildered me. Why had nobody mentioned these women to me before?
I want to paint rainbows inside of every textbook. I want every history lesson to be about someone like you. Because it’s impossible that American history lacks a gay person. So why not learn from them?
what if every lesson was just a little bit gayer? Or, a little more accurately representative of gay people?
This question is more important than ever in California, where SB 48, a bill requiring California public school textbooks to include the contributions of LGBT Americans, is facing opposition. The bill was signed by Governor Jerry Brown just two weeks ago, freeing countless stories that had previously been silenced and untold. The true narrative of our country. The entire epic. Starring everyone. Even someone like you.
We’ve been following SB 48 since April because it’s a huge deal. Two important notes:
+ The bill may help undo some of the damage of Texas’ pretty much opposite standpoint on textbooks. (Texas has a very conservative approach and set of standards.) The two states are the biggest textbook markets in America and, with SB 48, one of them will be inclusive of LGBT peoples.
+ Because California is the ultimate, largest, totally biggest market for textbooks, though, this bill will have a large impact on the rest of the country, period. Texas or not.
History helps us to gain a cultural and social understanding of our world. It provides us with a context for our life experiences, and it’s a guidebook for the future. What’s been done? What hasn’t? What should have happened? Why did they produce Sex and the City 2? These are important questions. History can answer many of them.
But Stop SB 48, a campaign being run by “a coalition of pro-family organizations, parents, students, teachers, and more,” is hoping to repeal the law in California, citing that SB 48 “undermines the traditional family” by forcing children to “study materials that tell them their families’ values are wrong.”
The campaign’s stance that SB 48 is “fiscally and academically irresponsible” is especially special:
+ It forces schools to review and replace their curriculum at a time when this money should be used for other purposes.
+ It requires a selective treatment of history by requiring that only events that reflect positively on people in the LGBT community may be discussed.
Basically they want to pretend that you don’t exist and never have. They want to rewrite history. Again.
Stop SB 48 is already on the web and Facebook, and has recently filed paperwork to start the petition drive for a ballot measure. If they receive 504,760 signatures, they’ll be adding a ballot measure in the upcoming elections this November.
Regardless of the rhetoric, Stop SB 48 is, of course, not actually attempting to “protect” or “preserve” our history, but to ruin it. Traditional American history textbooks have always told the story of someone else. Not me. Not people of color, not women, not queers — someone else. Not only is this alienating, it’s also wholly inaccurate — a fact I hadn’t necessarily grasped until that life-changing history course. SB 48 is important because the history of LGBT Americans is not “gay history,” it’s American history. It’s a full, uncensored, narrative of our country and the truth about who created it — at every step and in every way. I want everyone to know who raised hell, who didn’t, and who waited until the last minute.
It’s our history and it deserves to be saved.
CA Gov Signs LGBT School Textbook Bill, Making California Textbooks Opposite of Texas Textbooks
getty images model reading a book about gay people (probably)
California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law today SB 48, the controversial bill which will require California’s public school textbooks to include the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. This is a big deal that we’ve been discussing for a while now as we’d all like to imagine a world where everyday Americans know more about gay history than what was covered in Milk. It’s an even bigger deal because, as we talked about last week, California makes up 13% of the textbook market which is the largest market share of any individual state. Does this mean that “as goes California, so goes the nation?” Maybe. More on that in a minute.
Governor Jerry Brown‘s statement on the historic bill:
“History should be honest. This bill revises existing laws that prohibit discrimination in education and ensures that the important contributions of Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life are included in our history books. It represents an important step forward for our state, and I thank Sen. Leno for his hard work on this historic legislation.”
Mark Leno, the Senator who introduced the bill, had this to say about it:
“This will benefit all students by better informing them of the civil rights movement of the LGBT community. Denying them the fact of this historical chapter denies students a better understanding of their fellow classmates who may be a part of this community.”
This is hardly the first measure passed to require inclusion of minority groups in public school textbooks. The SF Gate reports: “By signing the measure, the governor adds LGBT Americans, along with disabled Americans and Pacific Islanders, to an existing list of groups that must be included in social studies instruction.”
However, the inclusion of disabled Americans and Pacific Islanders represents really only a fraction of the numerous diversity requirements imposed upon textbook manufacturers, at least in California.
See, on the other end of the ideological spectrum we have Texas, the second-largest textbook market after California. In March 2010, the Texas Board of Education “approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.”
Renowned educator Diane Ravitch wrote in The Daily Beast following that decision in Texas:
Given the strong conservative hold on the elected state board in Texas, it is not surprising that the board demands that its textbooks are patriotic and respectful of religion. Given the strong liberal character of California politics, it is not surprising that its state guidelines demand equal time and respectful representation of gender groups, ethnic and racial groups, and all minorities.
In 2006, The Wall Street Journal did a feature story about the guidelines for diversity in textbook imagery, which framed these requirements as reflecting “censorship” and “political correctness gone awry”:
McGraw-Hill’s guidelines for elementary and high school texts require the following: 40% of people depicted should be white, 30% Hispanic, 20% African-American, 7% Asian and 3% Native American. Of that total, 5% should be disabled and 5% over the age of 55. The Harcourt Education unit of Reed Elsevier PLC requires its elementary textbooks to include about 50% whites, 22% African-Americans, 20% Hispanics, 5% Asians and 5% Native Americans as well as 3% disabled.
The Journal also concluded that “the purchasing decisions of these major customers (California, Texas and Florida) can make or break a textbook. California, which is 35% Hispanic, is the nation’s biggest market and its adoption process sets the pace for the country.”
These liberally-associated “political correct” mandates have drawn their fair share of criticism (issues around Muslim representation in school textbooks, for example, have been particularly heated), some warranted and some not.
Back in 2003, many critics were already up in arms about new standards of political correctness for textbooks which allegedly prohibited things like depicting African-Americans as story villains, American Indians with long braids, men as lawyers/doctors or women as doing household chores. At that time, Sue Stickel, the deputy superindendent for curriculum and instruction at the California Department of Education said:
“I think our textbooks should, to our greatest capacity, be free of any type of stereotyping. We need to make sure that all ethnicities are represented. We need to make sure that both males and females are represented. We need to make sure that our materials cover the full gamut.”
Despite cries of censorship, Fox reported that “textbook publishers admit they are in a bind. They say if they don’t adopt the changes made by large states like California and Texas, they would suffer severe economic consequences.”
So which way will the country go? Will California set the new standard, or Texas?
Both initiatives are ostensibly pursuing the same standard – ensuring that the material our children learn about the world from represents The Truth About America. The real issue here is of course, as always, that no one can agree on what that truth is. It seems safe to guess that to the people involved in textbook curriculum in the state of Texas, the most “honest” history of America really is one of patriotic values and Christian principles bringing democracy into the world, and that the alternate story about our nation’s founding that includes imperialism and genocide just isn’t the way it happened. They want their kids to learn the real deal, not a “fabricated PC version” – which is what this bill in California really does seem like to them. That’s why opponents have called the bill “absurd” and “indoctrination” and claimed it’s an attempt to lure children towards homosexuality – because when you truly don’t believe this version of history is real, there doesn’t appear to be another explanation.
And that’s what the big deal is – for most of our nation’s history, that stance was virtually unanimous. It’s huge that gay kids will finally be able to see that they have a lot of incredible predecessors, and that straight kids will learn that gay people both exist and are deserving of respect.
But it’s also huge that there are people who have worked to make this happen – who have stood up to say that this is the truth about our nation, that gay people and their contributions to our culture are part of the real America, and that it’s important to acknowledge it. It reflects a shift that’s about more than just educational policy; it means that people are now seeing something that for most of history they fought to avoid having to look at, and that something is us.
Why Gay History Could Make History In California
Back in April, bill SB-48 was introduced in California; it would require standard curriculum to include education about gay and lesbian role models in social science textbooks. Now, months later, it’s passed the State Assembly and California Governor Jerry Brown has 12 days to either sign or veto it.
Of course, like anything involving queers in the school system, the bill is the subject of much controversy. Its opponents claim that it’s dangerous material for children to be exposed to:
Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, a Republican from Twin Peaks, said he was offended as a Christian that the bill was being used to promote a “homosexual agenda” in public schools. “I think it’s one thing to say that we should be tolerant,” Donnelly said. “It is something else altogether to say that my children are going to be taught that this lifestyle is good.”
Supporters of the bill appear to be more offended as human beings that so many gay kids in schools all over the country are killing themselves, a problem that really can get a lot better with more measures like this. When kids see themselves reflected in reality around them, they’re less likely to want to disappear; when straight kids see that gay people have had a huge impact on our nation’s history, they’re less likely to torture their peers.
There’s also the factor that – as we talked about back in April – California is basically the most important state this could possibly be happening in. Despite being only 2% of the states in the union and roughly 12% of the US population, California made up 13% of the US textbook market in 2009, and had at least 6.2 million children in public school. The buying power of the state of California can easily influence the content that gets put into textbooks that will end up being purchased all over America. California has been the site of several groundbreaking and progressive new achievements for queers, and especially queer kids – for instance, LA County is the pioneer of a multimillion dollar pilot program aimed at supporting homeless gay youth. California’s size and influence give supporters of these measures hope that they are more likely to happen in other states, as well.
California is facing a major budget problem, though, and so far much of Brown’s time as governor has been spent trying to close the gap. California is still reeling from the budget crisis that occurred during Schwarzenegger’s time as governor. SB-48 would require California schools to include this educational material in their curriculum as soon as the 2013-2014 school year; for a governor whose only hope of success is tightly controlling spending, passing SB-48 is a serious test of where his priorities lie. Opponents of the bill will likely criticize it as an unjustifiable expense during the 12 days of heavy lobbying on both sides that is certain up ahead.
It’s also interesting that this battle is going down in California for another reason – school curriculum was a major issue in the vote on Prop 8, even if it was a totally misinformed controversy. Part of Protect Marriage’s campaign for Prop 8 in California was the insistence that without it, children would be “taught gay marriage” in schools. Prop 8 opponents derided this as a scare tactic and distraction from the real issue; this was accurate, as there was no language whatsoever in the bill on same-sex marriage in California about school curriculums. Their only ammunition was a single lawsuit in Massachusetts, where marriage has been legal since 2004, in which one pair of parents was upset that their child was read a book about two princes getting married in the classroom. The book and the lawsuit were completely unrelated to marriage equality, and the lawsuit was dismissed, and subsequent appeals have failed. That didn’t dissuade people like this gentleman, however. Nor did it stop Protect Marriage from running this charming PSA, either:
[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7352ZVMKBQM’]
The progress of SB-48 three years later has no direct link to Proposition 8, but it does seem ironic that same-sex marriage still isn’t possible for Californian couples while a major part of the reason it was denied to them may become a reality.
There’s no word on how Governor Brown will vote; his office has given no comment one way or the other. Brown is a Democrat who was supported by Equality California during the gubernatorial election; EQCA has met with him twice now to urge him to pass the bill. It passed the Assembly 49-25, a fairly large margin, but a similar bill was vetoed by (Republican) Governor Schwarzenegger in 2006. This time the bill is championed by a number of openly gay lawmakers and California officials – for instance, Assembly Speaker John A. Perez, or Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who says that “I don’t want to be invisible in a textbook.” Hopefully, their voices will be heard, so that children across the state (and maybe eventually the country) can hear their own stories told.
California Schoolkids, Adam Lambert Are Winners This Sunday Funday
CALIFORNIA:
Seemingly against all odds, the bill that would require social studies curriculum in the state of California to include gay history and role models is moving closer to becoming a reality. This week it passed the state Senate, and now heads to the general assembly, where it is widely expected to pass.
We’ve talked about this bill before; how amazing it would have been to see people like us in the pages of our history books, or to even be allowed to know that those people existed. Openly gay senator Mark Leno, the sponsor of the bill, has explained it like so: “This selective censorship sends the wrong message to all young people, and especially to those who do not identify as straight. We can’t tell our youth that it’s OK to be yourself and expect them to treat their peers with dignity and respect while we deny them accurate information about the historical contributions of Americans who happened to be LGBT,” he said.” Countless studies have proven that the more gays that straight people know and are familiar with, the more likely they are to empathize with their struggles and support them instead of viewing them as a threat. If kids were able to see how much of our country’s history is based on the contributions and hard work of gay as well as straight people, it could go a long way towards a generation more open and accepting of queer people than any before it.
Perhaps most surprising and most gratifying, however, is that this is all happening in California. During the Prop 8 campaign, much of the Yes on 8’s information and messaging was outright wrong – a popular lie that millions of Californians really believed was that without Prop 8, their children would be “taught homosexuality” in their schools. In actuality the language of the marriage equality legislation related only to, you know, marriage, but huge numbers of voters went to the polls sincerely unaware of that.
And we all know how that worked out. Prop 8 is still in a sort of seemingly endless legal limbo, in which it seems unlikely to last much longer but couples still can’t marry. But in the meantime, this bill – the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive and Respectful Education Act – might actually happen. Voters’ greatest fears – that marriage equality would somehow erode their own families and way of life – hasn’t come to pass, and never will. But their fear that their children might leave the public education system knowing that homosexuality exists, and that gay people are just as real as they are? That’s looking very possible right now. And that’s great. Because knowledge isn’t something we should ever be afraid of, and knowledge of their own place in history is something everyone deserves.
ADAM LAMBERT:
It seems like everyone has something to say about the J. Crew Toenail Painting Incident. Unsurprisingly, Adam Lambert’s response is spot on. “Gender confusion?” he tweeted to his nearly 1 million followers. “I don’t think it’s that deep – children should have full freedom of expression. It’s everyone else who’s confused… If society didn’t work so hard to reinforce gender role stereotypes we would have a much more well-adjusted & open-minded future generation.”
LILO, COACHELLA:
It turns out Coachella was this weekend and I didn’t get to go, but Lindsay Lohan did! I feel like huge floppy hats were really in or something.
KOBE RESPONSE:
If you haven’t read gay former NBA player John Amaechi’s open letter to Kobe Bryant in response to the gay slur he used on the court last week, it’s inspiring and worth your time. “A young man from a Los Angeles public school e-mailed me. You are his idol. He is playing up, on the varsity team, he has your posters all over his room, and he hopes one day to play in college and then in the N.B.A. with you. He used to fall asleep with images of passing you the ball to sink a game-winning shot. He watched every game you played this season on television, but this week he feels less safe and less positive about himself because he stared adoringly into your face as you said the word that haunts him in school every single day.”
LADY GAGA AT NEWNOWNEXT:
Hey what did you think about Gaga’s new single, “Judas”? Well then, what about her NewNowNext Awards acceptance speech?
BISEXUAL JESUS NOVEL:
James Frey is most famous for making Oprah mad and writing a partially fabricated memoir. But now he’s writing a new book where Jesus returns to Earth as an openly bisexual man who dates a prostitute and otherwise proves himself to be the opposite of what the religious right would imagine him to be. It sounds interesting, at the very least!
MICHIGAN DOMESTIC PARTNERSHIPS:
Michigan benefits for domestic partners have so far survived a vote trying to repeal the policy. “A proposal to rescind the policy failed to receive the required two-thirds vote in the house of representatives Thursday. Sixty-six members voted in favor of repeal, eight short of the number needed. A repeal measure had passed the senate by the required margin.”
GAY BRITISH KISS-IN:
Two men at the John Snow pub in London had the worst first date ever. At first, the date was going so well that they kissed, at which point the pub kicked them out. The pub’s actions led to a kiss-in that caused the bar to close and lose a night’s revenue. The couple has a second date planned.
ANITA BRYANT:
Don’t ask me how, but I found this video of Anita Bryant being hit in the face with a pie. You’re welcome.
KITTENS:
Also, duh, kittens. #weareallmadeofkittenshadows
OTTERS:
California Textbooks Might Include Gay Role Models, History
ALAN TURING
The first gay person I ever learned about in school was Alan Turing, the computer scientist and philosopher, and it was only because one of the more offensively straight boys dressed up as him for something I’m pretty sure was called Philosophers Friday (I went as John Locke). He slicked back his hair and hit on all the other straight boys dressed as male philosophers, which everyone found hilarious. If he hadn’t, the fact that Turing had to agree to be chemically castrated to avoid prison after being charged with gross indecency and later committed suicide wouldn’t have come up, because who learns about gay people in school?
And that was in a semi-liberal Canadian high school. Same-sex marriage would have just been legalized. One of my friends took her girlfriend to prom and was very politely completely ignored by the administration. There was a Gay-Straight Alliance and people mostly left everyone in it alone.
But except for Turing and, a little while later, Oscar Wilde, gay people weren’t really talked about — or if they did, no one really mentioned that they were gay. It just wasn’t a thing. I didn’t start learning about people in history who were gay until I started reading about gay history for fun, which a lot of people don’t do. Especially if they are straight or in places (geographical or personal) where being an out gay person or reading about out gay people just doesn’t feel like an option. Or, um, if they have lives.
Right now in California, a new bill would make learning about gay and lesbian historical figures a standard. SB-48 would require that all social science textbooks include “a study of the role and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans … to the economic, political and social development of California and the United States of America, with particular emphasis on portraying the role of these groups in contemporary society.”
One of the main goals of the bill is to reduce anti-gay bullying. In an interview with the L.A. Times, Senator Mark Leno, who introduced the bill, said:
“In light of the ongoing and ever-threatening phenomenon of bullying and the tragic result of suicides, it seems to me that better informed students might be more welcoming in their approach to differences among their classmates. Students would better understand that we are talking about a civil rights movement.”
While similar legislation was proposed in 2006, those backing the bill hope that they will be more successful with a Democrat as governor. And because California is a major textbook purchaser, publishers frequently tailor content to meet its demands, which means that other states might end up using the new materials as well. Additionally, the changes would not be forced on existing materials, but would be added in the next scheduled series of revisions, due in the next few years.
Several right-wing religious and parental groups are upset about this like it’s their job. The California Catholic Conference, the First Southern Baptist Church, and the Thousand Oaks Christian Fellowship have sent letters calling the changes “absurd.” The Concerned Parents United has published a sample letter, which I am not going to link to, arguing that including references to the sexual orientation of historical figures won’t reduce bullying because “we can teach our children to be kind to others without prompting unnecessary discussion about alternative sexual practices.” It also argues that such materials would be “indoctrination,” that “parents want their children taught academics in school — not a social agenda which may be contrary to their morals and beliefs,” and that people should be able to “opt out of being exposed to such materials” in the same (unfortunate) way they can opt out of sex education.
It’s easy, sort of but not really, to see where they’re coming from. Looking at history from more than one angle and acknowledging the validity of the non-old-dead-white-guys-in-power perspective only started to happen relatively recently. But now, it’s common academic practice. Arguing that it’s indoctrination is just silly.
And arguing that it won’t reduce bullying is just inaccurate. Last fall, teachers at a school in London claimed to have more or less eliminated anti-gay bullying after adding gay people to the history curriculum. According to the London Evening Standard,
“Music teacher Elly Barnes said she developed the lessons with colleagues five years ago, after she became concerned about pupils using “gay” as a derogatory term. […]
‘Many schools haven’t even begun to deal with homophobia,’ she said. ‘Some still think being gay is illegal in parts of the country. By looking at famous LGBT people in history, we’ve changed opinions and we have had a number of pupils come out. We have also changed the language used in the school. I used to hear the word gay used all the time as a derogatory term. Now we hardly hear it.'”
Virginia Strom-Martin, a lobbyist for the Los Angeles Unified School District, said, “We are trying to provide for those students that feel disenfranchised, some role models.”
Role models would be nice, especially ones less depressing than Turing; reducing anti-gay bullying would be even better. Last week, the proposed bill passed a party-line vote 6-3. And hopefully it will keep passing, and a generation of queer kids will finally grow up knowing that someone has been here before them to fight some of the battles.