The School Board Meeting

Last night, the board of the Alameda Unified School District finally voted on whether to adopt a controversial addition to its anti-bullying curriculum. "Lesson 9" adds some vocabulary, reading material and teaching guidelines for explaining to K-5 students that LGBT families are families, too, and that kids should not be teased because they have two mommies or two daddies. One might ask why an anti-bullying curriculum exists in the first place and whether it has replaced, say, spelling, but that ship sailed a long, long time ago.

The superintendent recommended that the board adopt the new lesson as part of the curriculum at the request of teachers who wanted some guidance and common ground in nixing playground bullying in which children call others "gay" or "fag." Teachers already felt comfortable addressing bullying on the basis of other protected class status, such as race or religion, but needed some backup in talking about sexual orientation issues. To me, this makes perfect sense. A generation from now, our culture will be able to honestly address prejudice based on sexual orientation but, as the community reaction has made clear, these days homosexuality is still tough to talk about for some reason.

That community reaction has been splashed across the pages of the local newspapers and barely contained in several hearings leading up to last night's vote. Although I did not attend those sessions, I decided to go to the board meeting last night to see what would happen. It was painfully boring, but still somehow an interesting process to have seen for myself.

Naturally, before any discussion of the issue that had packed the board chamber at City Hall to overflowing, there was an hour's worth of tedious agenda items to get through. Middle schoolers presented slide shows, student board members were recognized, reports were given, all while the polite attendees waited for the promised vote. Each side was to have 15 minutes to sum up its arguments; just as this process was to begin, the cops kicked out a random group of attendees into the overflow room, including yours truly, due to the concerns of the fire marshall, that iconic civic spoilsport.

We went quietly and remained quieter yet as we strained to hear the speakers' messages, garbled over CCTV. The overflow room seemed about 1/3 pro-curriculum and 2/3 Muslim, which for some reason meant monolithically anti-curriculum. A couple of the men carried signs that said "Alameda Muslims against LGBT," about which I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and interpret to mean "against the LGBT curriculum," which they've simply made slightly pithier by omission. That's what that means, right?

The opposition spoke first. A Muslim woman spoke about the bullying and teasing endured by Muslim girls in the public schools of Alameda when they wear the hijab. She told of one little girl who was particularly tormented by a classmate, who kept pulling her headscarf, and about how some of the parents in the local Muslim community don't feel comfortable enough with English to know what to do about this treatment. And therefore, she concluded, the board should vote down the curriculum.

Just to sum up that brilliant argument, because Muslim students in Alameda schools are sometimes unfortunately bullied because of their observation of their religious beliefs, gay students or students from gay-parent families should not have a curriculum that addresses anti-gay bullying problems. Huh? Wait, maybe I can translate this one: because your lifestyle is an abomination according to my religious beliefs, and your proposed curriculum does not specifically address my children, or respect my desire to teach my children religious intolerance and bigotry, fuck you.

This was more or less the message of a black pastor who spoke for the opposition, too. The other speaker was a lawyer who essentially said that if the school board passed this curriculum, a bunch of angry parents were going to sue the bejesus out of the already cash-strapped district for not providing an opt-out provision, allowing parents to protect their children from having to have this horrible lesson of peace and tolerance. Another wonderfully American way of saying Fuck You.

So, I'm not against the fuck you, if people would just sack up and say what they mean. How refreshing would it be for someone to say, "Yes, I am a bigot, that is my right, and it is my right to teach bigotry to my children, because that's the way Jesus or Mohammed or who-fucking-ever would have wanted it, so suck on that!" The Muslim woman claimed that the kids in her religious community would be forced to admit their prejudices during the lessons about how it's OK for Billy to have two mommies, which would subject them to even more bullying.

This is an interesting point and I won't dismiss it out of hand. Naturally, it is a legitimate concern for members of conservative religious communities that their children be treated fairly and with sensitivity in the public schools. No one who is not an asshole would dispute this. I am kind of an asshole, and I do not dispute it. In fact, I believe this kind of pluralistic fair treatment to be the very cornerstone of American democracy.

Which is why the woman's point of view and, apparently, that of many other members of her community, not to mention many others in the larger Alameda community, is so abhorrent to me: it violates that basic tenet of our democracy. How dare you make a point of demanding fair treatment for your own children while turning around and denying equal treatment to someone else's child?

One might reasonably argue that, by not including other protected classes in the curriculum, the board itself is guilty of this behavior. Reasonably, that is, until you actually look into why Lesson 9 came about in the first place, think about it for a hot second, and stop being a fucking idiot. Teachers felt that they had the tools and vocabulary necessary to make religious and racial tolerance a key aspect of the anti-bullying curriculum already, because those kinds of prejudice are so well known, understood and relatively easy to counter and teach about. What they lacked was a common sense, age-appropriate way to extend the discussion to cover a type of bullying that, by their own report, is becoming more and more common: anti-gay bullying.

Next, the pro-curriculum crowd spoke. Some of their speeches were good, some were classic East Bay hippie-dippy BS. The best was when this dorky 16-year-old hesher kid got up to talk about how he had been bullied for being gay, and how he liked fantasy and heavy metal. He was my hero of the night.

Before voting, the school board members grilled the teachers who had developed the curriculum, or who had been chosen to rep the curriculum, anyway, for what seemed like an eternity of bloviating self-love. Some people started to leave, so I was able to get back into the main chamber for the remainder of the evening. It was here that I had my one personal conflict of the night.

One of the board members, attempting to clarify something, or perhaps just being an ass, asked whether the curriculum would send the message to conservative religious kids that their parents' beliefs about homosexuality were wrong. The pro-curriculum part of the room reacted with a collective No! and I said, sotto voce, "Even though they are." This snide comment, heard by almost no one, caused a laugh-snort from the woman directly in front me and the head of the man sitting next to me to whiplash in my direction. He said, "No more than you," in a mildly shocked and offended voice, and that was it.

This was the most interesting moment of the evening for me because it led me to think about my own intolerance. After all, if I interpret him correctly, he makes an interesting philosophical point. If I would dispute religions claims as false I can, in the end, have no more proof for my point of view than the religious person, therefore I cannot be any more assured of the correctness of my view than I can of the incorrectness of that person's view.

Fair enough, philosophically and logically sound (I am not like the modern atheist whose insistence that logic demands his faithlessness is, in the end, an act of faith) -- but totally irrelevent! You are free to believe whatever you will and to raise your children in your system of belief, to teach them that homosexuality is a sin or that jews are evil or black people shifty. Your freedom to do so is another foundational American right, that I will always defend.

But our public institutions must be agnostic, BY LAW. They must, BY LAW, be equally accesible. They cannot teach one religion or even two or three or four religions as "correct." Sometimes these institutions will come into conflict with people's beliefs. That is the price we pay for living in the United States of America, that we must live with other people whose views differ and be tolerant of their right to profess those beliefs.

I am a tolerant person in that direction: you have the right to believe whatever you want, no matter how foolish or even idiotic I may find your belief system to be. Even if it's wrong! But you will not, cannot, force other people to abide by your belief system in the public sphere. This is the direction in which I am intolerant. I do not tolerate bigotry, demogoguery, lies. I do not tolerate stupidity and prejudice. If that's your religion, keep it in your home, your house of worship and share the public space. But if you want to force your beliefs on me at the expense of justice and equality for all, fuck you.

The curriculum passed, on a vote of 3-2.

A Month of Oscar

And no blogging. I will get back to it, back to life, back to whatever is normal for me now. The new normal. Normal wasn't normal for me before he was born - I'm actually used to having a job or at least an occupation - so who knows what normal will be now. What I know is that this economy sucks, that rich, greedy assholes fucked it up for everyone, that George Bush is especially to blame, that most politicians aren't much better. What I know is that I love my son and the rest of it matters very little.

Waves of visitors, relatives, food, little sleep, movies on the couch, board games, a crying, pooping, sleeping, bright-eyed baby boy. More baby clothes than even a baby needs. Thrush. A little more awareness, a few more smiles, every day. Bopo, Oz, the Flying Burrito. A sleepy blur of time.