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"This bill doesn't say that you have to be in favor of the gay rights movement, it doesn't say that you have to be a part of it. All it says is that you have to be educated. I think there's nothing wrong with education."
— Marina Gatto (pictured left), a 17-year-old high school senior, testifying on May 3 before the Senate Education Committee in support of a bill that would require California's textbooks to include the contributions of GLBT people to the state and nation's history.
"This conversation belongs in the bedroom and not in the classroom.”
— Karen England, executive director of the Capitol Resource Institute, a Sacramento-based "pro-family" group, testifying before the same committee.
“Let's talk about sex…” — Salt and Pepa, musical duo. |
Sex. It's one of the few things that separate the fight for GLBT equality from the civil rights struggles of groups that came before. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. Us? We have sex.
Had Gertrude Stein a “pro-family” twin, that sibling might have looked at Stein's life accomplishments and influence and still have said, “A bulldagger, is a bulldagger, is a bulldagger.”
While it's safe to assume that the vast majority of America's great historical figures enjoyed sex, what they did or didn't do in their bedrooms (and who they did those things with) rarely overshadows their greatness. I suspect that even Strom Thurmond's place in public school textbooks won't be severely tainted by that fact that he led a life of hypocrisy after fathering a child with his family's maid, a woman who belonged to a race of people he very publicly thought inferior. Apparently he thought she was superior at something.
But regardless of the accomplishments and contributions of GLBT persons to our own communities or even to the world, we will always be seen by some as people who are first and foremost sexual — not because our sex lives are always connected to our accomplishments, but because our sex lives serve to negate our accomplishments.
That little fact is not, as some might believe, our cross to bear as “homo-sex-uals,” because there are plenty of people who can appreciate our contributions without picturing us naked and on all fours. Rather, it's a strategy used by some to keep us in a sub-standard place in society — an effective and time-honored strategy.
Few things upset Americans more than sex — any kind of sex — in their politics or in their religion. But gay sex trumps all upsets. Remember all those Catholic priests who molested young boys? I'll bet you still believe they're pedophiles and hypocrites. Nonsense. They're gay, silly! Pay attention.
The GLBT community as a whole is a unique victim of the sex-is-evil strategy because unlike heterosexuals that are discredited and smeared after lengthy investigations for having inappropriate sex (SEXUAL NIGHTMARE DU JOUR HERE), gay people are discredited by virtue of simply being gay. Like toys that come with batteries, we come with sex. The scandal is included!
So, it was no surprise that when lesbian California Senator Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) introduced a bill (SB 1437) that, in part, would require school boards to adopt textbooks that include materials that accurately portray the contributions of GLBT persons, the sex spin hit the fan.
Introduced in February, and amended once in March and again in early May, the education-focused anti-discrimination bill was transformed into a sex-education and anti-“traditional family” bill, courtesy of all the local homophobic blatherers. A debate that should have immediately centered on truth and accuracy in education, instead took a turn for the bedroom via … unisex bathrooms?
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