Though it didn’t appear to happen much, even former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had his moments of moral and political clarity. He struck down a law in 2006 that would have prohibited any negative portrayal of homosexuals in textbooks and other instructional materials. And now it is time for Governor Jerry Brown to strike down a bill very similar to the original version of the bill the philandering Schwarzenegger struck down. Effectively, what this bill does is to force the California public education system to include the societal contributions of homosexual, bisexual, and transgender persons into social science textbooks, while prohibiting any negative portrayal of anyone within this these groups. The bill will purportedly highlight the positive aspects of such sexual orientations.
First, let me say that this is not educational, but political, and that this is identity politics plain and simple. The goal of this legislation, in a climate of state bankruptcy and failing public schools amongst the worst in the nation, is to commandeer the public school system and use it as a propaganda machine to move society away from tolerance of homosexual behavior to an open celebration of homosexuality as all that is right and good. California has long been a “live and let live” state, but this is not good enough for gay activists. They must take their message to our children and force their views onto innocent, unsuspecting minds in violation of what their parents may want to teach them otherwise. Every parent should be afraid, because this would be mandated material not in voluntary sexual education courses, but in the curriculum itself. Thus all children would be affected.
The most insidious provisions of this bill is the fact that nothing negative could be printed about anyone in this specific population. This means that if someone gay makes a great contribution to society, their sexuality must be paraded for the purpose of promoting their sexual preference, which would more than likely be completely immaterial to their accomplishments. But if this same person were to do some heinous, well-known crime that was sexual in nature, this could not be included in any historical reporting. Just think of how this would skew and revise history. For example, Harvey Milk, who has his own holiday in California, had a sixteen-year-old lover, amongst other young lovers. Harry Hay, an early leader in the LGBT rights movement, had young lovers. The beloved poet Oscar Wilde was involved in the Victorian underground of gay prostitution, which involved young boys. As important as these facts would be to the history of the gay lifestyle, they could not be included in California textbooks because they would reflect negatively on the gay community. Would it be fair that one group gets such special treatment?
Let’s be clear. The entire idea of this legislation is to desensitize Californians to the idea that there is anything whatsoever wrong with the homosexual lifestyle. Californians deserve the right, as a matter of cultural or religious practice, to reject the normativity of the homosexual lifestyle, even while believing that homosexuals (and all other persons) should have the same rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Not wanting the homosexual lifestyle to be promoted or presented in a patently biased manner within the public school system is simply a matter of allowing parents to retain their rights to teach their values to their children as they see fit, and is neither discriminatory nor “hating” in any way. Identity politics have no place in the school system, and if SB 48 is signed into the law, it will be a political assault on every parent in California that sends their children to the public school system. Governor Brown should veto this bill with Godspeed, as did his predecessor on a similarly insidious and misguided bill.
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