While riding a bus to school one morning, a child of one of my neighbors heard another child call yet another child a “faggot.”
My neighbor viewed that with alarm. So did the local PTA. Having heard one too many stories like that lately, they did the sort of thing modern suburban parents do when confronted with a sticky social issue. PTA members showed a movie and held a discussion and went away convinced that kids wouldn’t call each other names. So far, so good.
That was last spring. Since then, the incident has escalated. A community-wide forum has been announced and the proverbial stuff has hit the fan. Word is out that the forum organizers want to “teach homosexuality” in the public schools.
I used to just report stories about loony suburban parents. Now I am living in a loony suburb.
Suddenly, my little suburb has joined the great, modern “cultural war.” From the red hills of Georgia to the barrios of New York City and the Chinatowns of California, a diverse array of social conservatives have banded together to oppose any favorable reference to gays or lesbians in public schools, even if the goal is only to put an end to vulgar anti-gay expletives.
My county’s largest community newspaper quoted a leader of the area’s Latino Parents Association as saying it was “very dangerous” to “accept” homosexuality in the schools. It also quoted the president of the Maryland chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union as accusing homosexual advocates of trying to silence others who believe homosexuality is “illegal, immoral, unnatural and unhealthy.”
As John Mellencamp once sang in ” Ain’t that America?”, unpopular groups can always work their way into the “in” crowd as soon as they find an even more unpopular group to ostracize.
Anyway, then the newspaper’s editorial board weighed in to scold my neighbors for failing to put someone on the panel who would “provide an exegesis of why the world’s great religions are uniformly opposed to homosexuality.”
Oh? I looked up the word “exegesis.” I found out that it means an explanation or critical interpretation of a text. I then looked up one major religion’s recent exegesis on homosexuality–a parental advisory from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
In a pastoral letter released in September, the bishops said homosexual orientation is not freely chosen and that parents must not reject their gay children in a society full of rejection and discrimination.
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“God loves every person as a unique individual,” the letter said. “Sexual identity helps to define the unique person we are. God does not love someone any less simply because he or she is homosexual.”
Whether one agrees with the bishops’ letter or not, the editorialists in my community are wrong on at least one point. All of the world’s great religions are not “uniform” on this question or on much of anything else beyond the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The Catholic Church, for one, holds the sensible position that it can condemn homosexual activity without condemning homosexuals. That double-edged message is too complicated for some people to carry around in their narrow minds. But, kids, with proper parental guidance, don’t have much of a problem with it.
Most of us parents are reluctant to talk to our children about tolerance for homosexuals, whether or not we approve of homosexuality, because most parents of us are reluctant to talk to our children about sex. My own parents, for example, never did get around to talking to me about it, so I picked up most of my information the way most of my friends did–from my friends. As a result, most of the information was wrong.
Lately, I have been listening to my son and his friends. I was surprised at what they already knew, despite their only being 3rd graders, and at how much was wrong. They don’t know much about sex and, thank heaven, don’t really want to know much–yet. But they do know about relationships and, on a rudimentary level, about sexual stereotypes.
On the positive side, they know, for example, that one of the boys on my son’s soccer team has an openly gay adoptive dad. They know that another boy in the league has two lesbian moms.
But, on the negative side, they have learned that two girls who hold hands with each other should be called “fags” or that a boy who wants to dance or play piano instead of playing softball should be called “sissy” or worse.
It is not enough for teacher or parents to just say “stop” when a kid uses an ugly word against another kid. We also need to educate.
We need to explain why such attacks are unacceptable. We need to explain why people deserve more than tolerance; They deserve respect as fellow human beings, fellow beneficiaries of the golden rule.