ARTICLES

They Have an Agenda That Would Shock You

School Homosexual Education Bill and What It Means

BY BARTHOLOMEW JAMES

The threat of a veto by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has compelled the modification of a bill in the legislature that would have mandated the alteration of school textbooks to include the sexual orientation of some historical figures. Authored by openly lesbian state senator Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), senate bill 1437 would have required "the inclusion of age appropriate instruction in social sciences on the roles and contributions" of people who "are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender to the economic, political, and social development of California and the United States," according to the bill's text. Depending on the definition of "age appropriate," the new curriculum could have been taught in kindergarten through 12th grade classes, and would potentially have had ramifications beyond California due to the state's influence with national school textbook publishers.

Introduced in February, the bill was vigorously opposed by pro-family and religious organizations, including the California Catholic Conference and the Sacramento-based Campaign for Children and Families, which asserted that the measure "would transform California public schools into transsexual-bisexual-homosexual indoctrination centers." In May, the senate education committee debated the bill and took public comment. Speaking in support of the bill at the hearing were representatives from the California Federation of Teachers and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a New York-based organization that "strives to assure that each member of every school community is valued and respected regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity," according to the group's mission statement. The Network claims to have 40 local chapters around the country. Andrea Fazel, program director of the San Francisco-East Bay Network chapter said that her experience as a high school teacher and facilitator of a support group for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer/Questioning (LGBTQ) students prompted her to support the legislation. "As a teacher, I saw first hand how an inclusive curriculum can change how students see themselves and their place in the school community," she told the committee members.

Following Fazel, 17-year-old Marina Gatto read a prepared statement to the senators. Gatto said she is a senior at Mercy High School, a Catholic college preparatory academy in Burlingame. "I'm sure you've all heard the saying that children cannot learn tolerance unless their exposed to views that differ from those they learn at home," she said. "Having two lesbian moms, I try to educate my peers about the diversity and beauty of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community." But, she explained, her task is hard for her when there is an absence of LGBTQ people in the school curriculum.

A number of groups spoke against the bill, including a large contingent of Slavic Christians, which Kuehl said had been bussed in for the hearing. "The churches bus them in whenever there's a bill about gay people," she said. "I guess they came to America to engage in discrimination." The hearing became colorful, if not confrontational, when a man who identified himself as "Pastor Randall Taylor, representing all true Christians," voiced his opposition to the bill. The chair of the committee, Senator Jack Scott (D-Pasadena), immediately asked Taylor if he had the ability to know who true Christians were. Taylor replied that he did, and Scott asked how they would be identified. When Taylor responded, "the Bible," Scott's tone became sarcastic. "The Bible, I see. And you're the sole interpreter of the Bible. Thank you very much," Scott said as Taylor returned to his seat, and several committee and audience members chortled.

The California Catholic Conference took a less confrontational approach than Taylor. In a letter to legislators, conference executive director Ned Dolejsi warned that the measure would undermine the rights of parents to transmit their religious and moral beliefs to their children, result in more parents choosing to opt-out their students from a social science or history class they find morally objectionable, and compel some parents to withdraw their children from public schools for alternative schooling. "Our opposition to it is that it represents an unnecessary and radical revision of the state's core curriculum to serve a limited special agenda," Dolejsi said. "It's a concern to us from the standpoint of the general issue that textbooks don't need to be altered to be politically correct." Kuehl said she didn't take issue with the conference's approach in opposing the measure. "The lobbyists from the Catholic Church are quite respectful; they come up and say, 'we're opposed to the bill,' and that's it. I have no objection to the way they handle it," she said.

The measure also represented an attempted end run around the standard government curriculum revision process, normally administered by the state's board of education and department of education. Curriculum and textbook modifications are normally implemented beginning with a curriculum framework committee at the department of education, which proposes changes or additions and then puts out a draft document and receives public comment. A final version is then forwarded to the state board of education, which makes the ultimate decision whether to include the change in state schoolbooks. "We have a process," said Dolejsi. "The state has academic people looking at the appropriate criteria for inclusion of different aspects in the social studies and historical curriculum for the state of California, and apparently the legislature now wants to step in and once again micromanage that process."

Tom Adams, executive director of curriculum frameworks and instructional resources for the California department of education, said that curriculum changes mandated by the legislature are rare, the last one having been in 1997, when a requirement for mandatory education on the Great Irish Famine of 1845-50 was legislated into the state education code. Adams also confirmed that California textbook content can impact other states as well. "California itself is ten to 12 percent of the national market on instructional materials; we're one of the biggies in the process," he said. "So that's why when [California] says, 'this must be in textbooks,' it's going to affect all the books in this state, and it may have a spillover effect into other states."

Governor Schwarzenegger had similar concerns that the legislature was attempting to shortcut the normal textbook-content revision process, according to deputy press secretary Sabrina Lockhart. "We're nationally recognized for our approach to selecting curriculum standards," Lockhart said. "And the governor has vetoed similar bills because we're considered a national model because we have a very balanced approach to teaching social studies and history, and there is a curriculum commission that sets and reviews textbook standards before they go to the state school board for adoption. The governor wants to make sure that everybody's voice is heard and that we don't single out one segment of a population." Lockhart said Schwarzenegger didn't take a formal position on the bill, but in May the governor's director of communications told the media that Schwarzenegger would veto the bill if it reached his desk because school curriculum should include all import historical figures, regardless of sexual orientation, and that the legislature was attempting to micromanage curriculum.

Kuehl evidently got the message and has removed the textbook revision section of the two-part bill -- which includes a separate component amending the education code to prohibit school instruction, instructional material, or activities that reflect adversely on persons because of their sexual orientation. "There was a lot of push back, mostly from the administration," Kuehl said. "I had conversations with the governor's staff, and he has sent out letters to people who wrote in favor of the bill, saying that he doesn't like the micromanaging aspects of it." Before it was amended, the bill was approved in the senate by a 22 to 15 vote, mainly along party lines, with Democrats supporting the measure. The modified bill will move on to the assembly, and Kuehl hopes that the scaled back version will placate the governor. "It was a two-section bill, and now it's a one-section bill," she said. "We would at least like to salvage the anti-discrimination part."

San Francisco-based Catholics for the Common Good also opposed the Kuehl legislation, and Mary Grayson, a member, has been watching the bill with particular interest. Three years ago, Grayson's daughter Laurel was enrolled as an eighth grader in a public school in Sonoma County. The teaching staff included two lesbian women who were in a relationship with each other, and a teacher's aide who was openly gay. In addition, two of the students at the school were the adopted children of lesbian parents. "Some of the kids were aware of who their parents were, and they were saying unkind things to these kids. 'My daddy won't let me play with you, you can't come to my house,' that kind of thing," Grayson said. "And they wanted very badly for that to stop for their children."

The homosexual parents and teachers approached a school counselor to discuss how homosexuality was perceived among the students and in the classroom, and they persuaded the counselor that the school should hold a "diversity day," which Grayson later learned was essentially a coined phrase among teachers and administrators for a number of programs in grade schools and high schools. "And what people would typically see at a diversity day were representatives in single, or a group of lots of different components of society. They would see an African-American, they would see a Latino, they would see someone in a wheelchair, they would see a Goth, they would just try to cull from what they perceived as misunderstood groups of people and have them present themselves to the school in a way that stated, 'I really am just like you, there's just a small difference, please don't hate me or disrespect me just because I'm a little bit different. And they included homosexuality," she said.

The school counselor sent out a letter to parents disclosing the diversity day plans and purpose, including that the event would deal with the issue of homophobia. Grayson said a number of parents immediately got together to get more details on what was going to be presented and to which grade levels, since the school encompassed kindergarten through eighth grade. Parents wanted to know if their kindergartners were going to be sitting there listening to someone go on about being a homosexual, Grayson said. Many parents also took strong issue with the use of the word homophobia. "The word homophobia was offensive to a lot of people, and we tried to help the school connect with the idea that because you may not agree with homosexuality for whatever reason, you're instantly labeled homophobic, which is a non-existing psychological condition, although it sounds like one; it's just made up," she said. "And it carries with it an image of someone who is uninformed, ignorant, possibly violent, and just generally hateful because they don't accept homosexuality as normal."

Although the school did rein in its use of the word homophobia, the plans for diversity day went forward, and the parents learned more about the specifics of the event. "They were going to bring in an outside group, a small volunteer troupe of teenagers who would present their version of social awareness issues; and those teenagers, in presenting those different issues, would say, 'I am the kid of a single parent, and people tease me and give me a bad time' -- that sort of thing," Grayson explained. "And then one of them was going to step up and say, 'I'm gay, and please don't tease me or give me a bad time or hate me because I make my choice and you make yours.'" The school administrators essentially ignored the parents' other concerns, including the age-appropriateness of the material.

"Our concerns were what business does a child up to a certain age have hearing about this? They don't even understand the meaning of the word homosexual, and if they come home expecting that to be defined for them, it' s going to be very hard and confusing for their parents to explain what that means. There were children for whom it was just too early to be presented with this," she said. "We felt they were being incredibly irresponsible in doing that, and it didn't give us a whole lot of faith in their ability to take care of these children. And they could care less what anyone's religious beliefs were and how this might offend those beliefs."

Grayson and other parents had several meetings with the principal and school staff that went nowhere. "That was incredibly frustrating; we just hit right up against a brick wall," she said. "We also found out that the counselor and those [gay] teachers and parents, although we were involved in meetings over and over again repeatedly with them trying to find some common ground, they refused to back down. The [gay] parents would present these very emotional arguments and say, 'I'm tired of my child coming home in tears;' and it was tough to respond to that." Grayson and other parents pointed out that some children will always find a reason to tease other children and that their own kids had come home upset over personal insults before. But other parents, who were initially neutral on the issue, were gradually won over to the diversity program. "They were buying the whole idea that 'if I don't accept this, then I'm homophobic,' and they were swayed by this idea of, 'well, the children are suffering, therefore this program is completely legitimized; if any child is suffering, then we've got to do something, and these people seem to have the right answer, so let's go ahead.'"

Diversity day eventually went off as planned, and Grayson and several other parents either opted out of the activity or held their children home from school that day. Her daughter finished up her last year at the school and, after Grayson learned that all of the schools in the area also had diversity days and that at the high school level, diversity day included an expanded and enhanced homosexuality component, she had had enough. "We looked into the private schools, and Laurel's options there weren't great, they didn't fit for us; so we decided to home school. And she's been home schooled ever since," she said.

Three years later, Laurel will graduate from high school in her junior year and is already taking community college classes.

Grayson sees Kuehl's bill as part of the same homosexual agenda and a form of social engineering. "I believe that what they're trying to do is to mold those minds, and I think their end game is to have children grow up saying, 'there's nothing wrong with homosexuality,'" she said. "Despite what my priest says, despite what my pastor says, despite what my parents say, there is nothing wrong with this." And since parents, by law, have to send their kids to school, some parents aren't able to consider alternatives. "I think that there will always be people who can never begin to think about alternative education because they can't afford to do it financially; they need school as a kind of daycare, they need their children to go somewhere during the day because they have to work," she said. "You send your children off to school, trusting in these people, but you're handing your children off to people who may not be trustworthy -- they have all sorts of motives and an agenda that would shock you. That they can put this into history books is even scarier, because children begin learning and taking history lessons at an early age."

Interviews for this story were originally conducted for Our Sunday Visitor.

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