Why Some Of My Best Friends Are Filthy Sodomites
There are several good articles in today’s Pioneer Press Online, about the hostile environment gay teens still face in school every day. Even in the best of situations, where school administrators really want to make sure those kids can get a decent education, it is still difficult.
That last article, is particularly good because it touches on the "soft bigotry" of silence…
One way to enhance a culture of school tolerance is to include gay characters and themes in the academic curriculum, said Shannon Sullivan, executive director of the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, a statewide non-profit group dedicated to ensuring the safety of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students.
Students who are gay or who are questioning their sexual identity will see themselves reflected in the curriculum and will feel more connected to their school which should have a positive impact on their academic achievement, she explained.
But of course, this is what the religious right calls pro-homosexual advocacy. Never mind that they call teaching evolution pro Darwinism advocacy too. And as in their attacks on science education, the Fundamentalists demand that if you are going to teach about homosexuality, then to be "fair" to "both sides" you must teach the controversy…
Last spring, for example, the Deerfield parent group North Shore Student Advocacy, opposed the inclusion of the Pulitzer prize-winning play "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," on the optional reading lists of some advanced placement English classes in Township District 113. (Deerfield and Highland Park High Schools are part of this district.) Set at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the play focuses on political and social themes of the time.
Lora Sue Hauser, executive director of the parent group, declined to comment for this story. But Laurie Higgins, who taught in the writing center at Deerfield High for eight years before leaving recently to become the director of the division of school advocacy at the Illinois Family Institute, a fundamentalist Christian organization, weighed in.
Higgins said she opposes the inclusion of the play in the curriculum because the text is so "beyond the pale" in terms of its "obscene language" that there was widespread opposition to its teaching among faculty from both sides of the political spectrum.
But it isn’t just the sexually-explicit play that Higgins challenges. She said she is against the inclusion of any literature on the reading list for a public high school that affirms homosexuality as normal unless there are other books on the reading list which question that assumption of normalcy as well. The notion that homosexuality is biologically-determined is controversial and unproven, Higgins explained.
It’s only controversial because teaching the facts about human sexuality makes Fundamentalists pop their corks. The evidence that sexual orientation is as much a biological fact as handedness is comprehensive and overwhelming. But these are people who reject out of hand any scientific discovery that contradicts a literal reading of Genesis. "Unproven" to them really means "unbiblical" and that is not something that is open to proof. They don’t care about the science. They spit on science and laugh.
The strategy here is simply to punish gay kids one way or another. If the adults in their schools won’t make them feel ashamed to be living, then the strategy is to prevent the adults from saying anything good about them, and in that way maintain the climate of shame. The lives and accomplishments of heterosexuals can be taught, but the lives and accomplishments of homosexuals must not be mentioned. What it is for opposite sex pairs to love, honor, and cherish can be taught. Whatever it is that same-sex pairs feel for one another cannot be told, cannot even be alluded to, because the very existence of same-sex pairs cannot even be mentioned. Homosexuals are simply too disgusting to even think about, let alone talk about. The purpose is to alienate gay teens from their peers, and hopefully, make them keep on hating themselves.
One more thing: The following leaped out at me from within the article on A Culture of Tolerance. This is the same Laurie Higgins who was quoted above…
Laurie Higgins, who taught in the writing center at Deerfield for eight years before becoming the director of the division of school advocacy at the Illinois Family Institute, explained her position. She said she has compassion for gay and lesbian people and even has some in her life whom she loves, but she cannot condone their behavior which she views as immoral.
Some of my best friends are… We are in that stage now in the struggle. Since the fight over Proposition 8 I cannot count the number of bigots I’ve seen yap, yap, yapping in print that some of their Best Friends are gay. Once upon a time they felt completely free to tell the world what sick, twisted, depraved monsters we are. Now they have to mouth platitudes of how many gay friends they have first, before going on to explain why they’re twisting the knife in our backs. Or in this case, kicking school kids in the face. How they must hate us all the more, for making them do that.
