According to this piece that ran as the first story on Tucson’s own KGUN9 news today at 6pm, a local junior high school teacher has struck a blow for the Secret Gay Agenda. Here’s the gist of it:
The teacher is apparently going to be disciplined for his actions.
His actions being, of course, the dissemination of information that is essential to the survival of the gay population of the school.
But of course, the lives of the gay students don’t matter. What matters is that the precious ears of the straight students might be defiled by hearing the dreaded words “homosexual” “gay” and “lesbian” in a non-derogatory fashion. Never mind that one in four of gay teens will attempt suicide. Never mind that anti-gay epithets are the most common form of verbal bullying in schools, or that every single gay student in that school hears anti-gay slurs every day of his or her school career. Never mind that gay kids are in desperate need of information about their sexuality, and probably can’t turn to their families about it. The important thing here is the straight kids, and that they might hear that being gay is not abominable.
Of course, we don’t know a lot of facts after reading that story. We don’t know, for instance, where the 58 kids came from; were they just a bunch of health classes, or were they kids who had voiced an interest in this subject? We don’t know if all presentations scheduled by all the teachers in the Tucson school district have to be cleared by the Board, or if it’s just the presentations on subjects which the Board sees as controversial. We don’t know if any of the students, or any of the parents of any of the students, complained. Which is about par for this particular TV station’s news department.
The presentation wasn’t by a fly-by-night organization; it was by Wingspan, a well-respected group in the Tucson community, who have an enormous amount of experience in giving outreach presentations. The QueerVoice pamphlet was for Southern Arizona’s safe haven for gay, lesbian and transgendered youth, whose mission statement reads: “Queer Voice seeks to assist Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender youth with support and information so that they can make safe and healthy decisions for life.” And yet, all of this means nothing to a school board member who would shield students from even the mention of the word “gay,” except for when it’s hurled as an insult.
But I want to thank the teacher that was brave enough, and foolish enough, to try and educate these students about this subject. Perhaps he had more confidence in the sanity of the system than he should have, and judged that the time of rampant homophobia in the schools was past. Perhaps he didn’t think through the possible consequences of his actions in a rigidly inflexible educational enviroment. Until I hear differently, though, I choose to think that he just cared enough about his students, all his students, to bring this issue to their attention so that they might have an easier time dealing with their lives, despite the risk to his career. Perhaps he just didn’t want to see some of his students kill themselves over something that a little education could have helped them with enormously.
I hope he fights this. I hope he can convince the school board that the only thing he’s guilty of is educating children, of teaching them to be better, healthier, more tolerant human beings. I don’t have much hope that things will turn out that way, and I don’t have any hope that KGUN9 news will cover it if they do; it’s just not sensational enough.
