Glenden BrownOne of these things is just like the other
What does the Utah legislature’s annual attack on queer students have to do with a fight in Arkansas to remove books from school libraries? The answer is everything.
Yet again, the rocket scientists in the legislature have decided that gay-straight alliances must be bad for students and have decided to write a law that would ban them. It’s so heartening to realize our legislators have decided queer students should be attacked, marginalized and stigmatized. The language of the proposed bill, HB236, allows schools to ban clubs if the principal decides they cross the boundaries of socially appropriate behavior. In the time I attended a rural Utah public school the principal’s definition of socially appropriate was au courant for 1890. I suspect many public school principals are the same. Under the language of the bill, a principal could decide a video game club or rpg club is socially inappropriate and ban it. The key issue for legislators is banning clubs that deal with human sexuality. Greg Hughes offered the money quote:
“I don’t know how you can have a term that describes someone’s sexuality and say it is not in that realm,” he said.
Hughes would rather see tolerance clubs or anti-discrimination clubs, removing the gay specific terminology.
The concern that high school students might discuss sexuality is based on the notion that it is inappropriate for young people to discuss sexuality. This is another matter in which adult fears about adolescent sexuality are dictating unhealthy and damaging policies, policies that will ultimately fail to produce any benefit for gay or straight adolescents.
When I first posted about sexuality education, a reader commented that her fear was that her children would be “sexualized” ahead of time. This speaks to the (inaccurate) idea that children are born into sexual latency and that adults should prolong this sexual latency as long as possible. This false conceit leads to a conspiracy of silence around sexuality - a silence that teaches body shame and gives misinformation (babies come from the stork, or under cabbage leaves - btw who things up this crack pot shit?). In this model of thinking, introducing children to matters of sexaulity is inherently damaging because it ends their sexal latency before they’re ready.
Which is where the connection with the Arkansas parents’ comes in.
Laurie Taylor is the mother of two school age children. She lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Like most parents, she cares about her kids’ education. So, when she discovered the school library had a sexually explicit book, It’s Perfectly Normal, aimed at elementary age students, she did what any concerned parent would do: she went to the administration and asked that it be removed, along with two other books with similar themes.
I’m familiar with It’s Perfectly Normal and think every family should have a copy, as well as copies of Changing Bodies, Changing Lives. The hoopla was just beginning.
Once other parents learned what these books contained, many joined with Laurie in asking the school to take action. The public outcry was great. A parents’ rights group was formed, “Parents Protecting the Minds of Children,†with dozens of parents joining the cause.
The name of the group exemplifies what I’m discussing - the parents believed they needed to protect their childrens’ minds. Not expand them, not fill them with fact, protect them. The article continues with bathetic stories of parents groups’ failing at getting books banned.
A federal judge in Fayettteville has recently ruled in a similar case that restricting access of library books only to students who have obtained parental permission infringes upon the First Amendment rights of the students.
This adverse ruling means that in all likelihood, in order to prevail in this matter, the case will have to be taken all the way to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals –and perhaps to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The topics parents find offensive include almost any references to sexuality - orientation, specific activities, - and any swear words. The notion that children will be corrupted by mere exposure to these things drives most if not all attempt to censor school libraries, the home school movement, and very often the desire of parents to put their children into private religious schools. Call it part of fundamentalism’s war on modernity.
As anyone who has spent any time around children knows, we are sexual beings from birth. We inhabit sexual bodies and experience the world through our bodies. For clarity, sensual is probably a better word than sexual - simply because in our society we hear the world sexual and thing sexual intercourse, not skin hunger, touch, biological gender, gender identity, sexual orientation and intimacy; I prefer the term sexual so I’ll use that. When young children explore their bodies that is “sexual” in the sense of learning about the physical self. Parents often see such exploration as sexual in the same way they think of masturbation rather than simple self knowledge. As children grow into adolescents, their manner of exploration matures with them - discussion, comparing themselves to peers, measuring themselves against society, and yes, varieties sexual exploration - making out, dating, hand holding, (hopefully) age-appropriate forms of sex play.
The rights of children and adolescents to accurate information about sexuality is being contrasted to the rights of parents to keep their children ignorant. A group called Mission America recently published an “expose” on GLBT community center youth groups where students are exposed to homosexual adults and where apparenlty anything could happen. Such articles exploit and exaggerate parental fears that children will come to harm and trade in harmful stereotypes about queer people as sex addicts and predators. The ultimate absurdity is Greg Hughes’ comment that GSA should be known as tolerance clubs - in essence he is admitting students are going to talk about human sexuality, he just wants them to be dishonest about it.
Desperate attempts to keep children from learning accurate information about sexuality (such as that found in It’s Perfectly Normal) will fail - not because children will get good information but because they will get inaccurate information and proceed to make the bad decisions parents are most afraid they’ll make. Keeping young people in the dark about sexuality doesn’t keep them innocent. It keeps them ignorant.
Whether it is banning GSAs or censoring books, the goal is the same - to prolong a mythical sexual latency and keep kids “pure.” In the end, allowing adults’ fear and neurosis about sexuality to dictate and limit young persons ability to access information and peer support will only result in one more generation coming to adulthood with body shame, misinformation and lack of choice. It’s time we as a society do a better job for our kids.
January 24th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
This drives me crazy that we have to fight these battles EVERY SINGLE YEAR! It’s depressing to know how gay issues and abortion are used to mobilize people — we could combat that with a little education, which is precisely why people fight the education. They’d rather be ignorant and passionate than logic and evenhanded.
January 24th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
It’s interesting to see our legislators try to come up with clever ways to violate our right of free speech without being blatantly unconstitutional. If only they devoted that much thought to the bread and butter issues.
January 24th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Without taking a stance on this particular issue, let me make a related observation. This post is an excellent example of why many parents choose private schools and why many others would like vouchers so they too can afford a private school. The anti-voucher crowd insists that we need our communities to socially invest in the public schools. But if parents try to influence the public schools, they risk being villianized and marginalized. Maybe even slapped down by a judge as cited here. No wonder they want out. Shouldn’t we respect the choices (there’s that word again) that parents make about what information children should have and when?
January 25th, 2007 at 9:13 am
How you raise your children without abuse is at the discretion of parents not the school or a club, or anyone else. You may not like the outcomes of this method of child rearing, but it isn’t our right to force it. No matter the perceived benefits
Humans are born killers, but we do not teach them how to butcher chickens and animals, unless we as parents want them to learn it and then the parents decide when, if possible. Same is true of sexuality, there is a time and place, and parents get to decide. I know all manner of evisceration of creatures, a necessity if you are to eat them, but it is pretty ghastly and can disturb minds not ready for it. Can we have a club for that in school?
Gay children certainly should not be elevated, in fact all these clubs should be banned altogether, and the focus of school should become raising our children out of 30th place in international scholastic testing. Yes, the vaunted 30th F****** place. They give ribbons for that don’t they? The Also Ran Ribbon.
They can have a Gay/Straight Club at the Gay parents house where consent and privacy are the least you could do for kids, as opposed to using them as fodder for an agenda. Teach them to read for Gods sake, or do math. 30th place in testing, maybe first place in knowing all the ways to do it. What a joke! Get this social garbage out of schools. There is plenty of time to discover your sexuality, but only a few years to imprint the mind towards success in intellectual endeavors. When you are 18 and can’t read you are f****d, but at least you will know how to f*** in every position and orientation imaginable. Useless.
January 25th, 2007 at 9:15 am
and if you don’t put much stock in academic testing, be assured that our competitors do.
January 25th, 2007 at 10:20 am
Bradley - you ask “Shouldn’t we respect the choices (there’s that word again) that parents make about what information children should have and when?” Well that raises all sorts of interesting questions doesn’t it?
IE:
“We’re devout Mormons and when you teach Utah history we don’t want you to teach about hte Mountain Meadows Massacre because it shows Mormonism in a bad light. We’ll teach it at home.”
“We believe our religion is the only true religion and we don’t want any mention of other faiths in public schools because our children might believe other faiths are valid if they hear about them.”
“We’re White Southerners and teaching about the history of slavery in the US will make our ancestors look bad so you shouldn’t teach about slavery or the Civil War. We’ll do that at home.”
“We’re young earth creationists so we don’t want you teaching about dinosaurs or geology in a way that would make our children question our belief.”
The ruling in question argued that children and young people have first amendment rights. Yes, it was a rebuke to the parents but are you prepared to argue that children have no rights not granted them by parental permission?
January 26th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
I’m a volunteer in the public school system, and I’m in my early twenties, to give you an idea of where this is coming from.
Our students at this particular school have both a 4% rate of parenting (not pregnancy, not miscarriage, not abortions, not adoptions, but PARENTING, so you know there are PLENTY more pregnancies happening) and some of the lowest test scores in the nation. Focusing only on the second problem makes both of them worse, Miss Knapsack Nuke. These kids need so much more help in elementary school to help them with their academic skills that there’s not a whole lot we can do by this time to really improve things, to be perfectly honest.
And they are making choices with their sexuality that could ruin their lives, probably because their parents AREN’T teaching them age-appropriate information (i.e., they’re assuming that any information at all isn’t age-appropriate because they’re in denial about what they did at that age and what their children are already doing). I owe it to those kids to provide them with healthy, age-appropriate information, and I would argue that by the age of about fifteen, ALL information about sexuality is appropriate because that’s when they’re getting themselves into trouble by NOT knowing that information and having the emotional resources–the self-confidence, self-respect, and independence–to stand by their decisions. When there’s so much shame surrounding the subject, they can have all of the information in the world and not have the conversation with their partner(s) and friends because they’re too scared of rejection, the ultimate death in the teenage mind.
No. I don’t want to leave it up for parents to decide when kids should have that information, because I owe it to these kids to keep their best interests in mind, not to nurture their parents’ misguided assumptions about innocence.
January 26th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
You are allowed that manner of idiocy in America Glendon.
When it come to the question it is obviously decided, children have rights, but your right to “inform” is not legislated.
It is a terrible thing the 4% parental rate you claim. In elementary school, teaching sex education?, never changed a thing about sex for me. I knew the vast majority of the implications by age 1o. Ever considered that many of these girls want their children?
I lived near a Russian village in Alaska, all the girls bore children at 13, 14, a cultural norm,, 4 by 18, the family living under the womans parents roof, until they saved money to build their own home. Nobody ever gain said that. A lot like Mormons I know in this cultural way. Still going on. They knew all they needed to, it appeared. I guess you people are the replacement for Americas washed up family structure. Won’t solve the problem, I reckon.
Testing is an indication of what you have comprehended, bad testers aside, what you are telling me is that our school system is so screwed up, about all you can teach these kids is how to have sex properly and keep themselves safe. That is not aspersion on you or teachers, yet something I find extremely PATHETIC! Testing gets you the high tech jobs, wealth, in other skills, nobody hires a pro football player without knowing if he can run the 40 in 4.4 seconds, and test taking should start young. With no implications, like a game.
Focus on 30th place in international testing. what is the top 10 are doing that we aren’t? I can assure you there are no gay/straight clubs in the mix. Whatever it is, figure it out.
January 26th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
I thank God every day my parents weren’t as prudish and ignorant about sex as as the status quo in this town. This Victorian attitude about sex is so out of place in our reality.
I think what my parents did worked best. My mother (a child psychologist) started telling me about the birds and the bees when I was four (long before I cared). When I was about 6, I told a seven-year-old neighbor where how babies were made. He didn’t believe me a ran home and told his Mom.
My Mom got a pretty angry phone call. Thats when I first understood what a prude is.
I started dating around 14 and suffered relentless questions from my Mom.
“No Mom, I’m not having sex. No Mom we’re not petting.” By the time I was sixteen I was (like most) was doing everything BUT penetration. Mom was shoving rubbers at me. I was scared shitless of “ruining” my life, or someone else’s.
The danger and responsibly of intercourse was such a dark shadow I wouldn’t even use rubbers. Not safe enough. I waited until I was eighteen.
Not telling kids about sex early and often is (from my experience) criminally STUPID.
January 26th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
As I mentioned, we appear to have that right(stupidity) in America, on so many levels.
How stupid is it that pelosi won’t impeach bush? Do you all need a class to get this underway? I’ll come up to Salt Lake and TEACH it!! Impeach him and end the war. He said he is the Decider when it comes to Iraq. So fire his ASS! What do you stand to gain if you don’t? More DEAD?
Even Rosie comes to the same conclusion, some democrat propose impeachment, so at least you have someone to point to that isn’t, wasn’t, pregnant with either STUPIDITY or APATHY!