Had Offensive Parts Already Been Removed?

Judge Williams ruled against the school district for two reasons. I'll address them in separate posts. The first reason was that the "Establishment clause" of the Constitution was violated. In a nutshell, that means that the curriculum appeared to promote one religion over another. You saw the stuff in the paper, taken from the CRC/PFOX complaint and the judge's memorandum opinion. The quotes badmouth Baptists and say that Quakers and Unitarians are more tolerant of homosexuality, and stuff.

One of the quotes that the judge cited was actually from the curriculum, and it is highly defensible. Nobody would've won any court case based on those statements, it lists some facts and supports them -- even though it promotes the idea that gay people are not freaks, it would not have justified blocking the whole curriculum.

The most offensive quotes that were used came from three different teachers' resources -- none of them were to be presented in class, but everyone on both sides agrees this kind of thing doesn't belong anywhere in a public school classroom. Teachers have the right to read on the side, but MCPS really shouldn't be promoting any specific religious beliefs.

But were they?

All the offensive quotes came from three documents. These were

• A report from the Planned Parenthood of Edmonton, Canada, called Sexual Orientation Myths
• A web site by the Family Pride Coalition called Myths and Facts
, and
• A document that was picked up, I believe, from Maricopa County Community College, in Arizona, and which is no longer on the web, and which was also titled "Myths and Facts"

These three documents were listed as teachers' resources in the Board of Education's Novermber 9th, 2004, report, detailing the proposed new curriculum.

As we all remember, however, revised documents appeared on the MCPS web site in the middle of April. We the public don't know when they became policy, but those documents (which you can read, linked on the righthand side of this page, since MCPS has taken them down from their site) were the curriculum. They listed the resources that would be used in the pilot testing. These were sometimes given as sources of definitions, and some were listed at the end of the outline as "content resources" and "activity resources."

By this time, the middle of April, the offensive resources had all been removed from the curriculum documentation. None of the three titles listed above are referred to in either the 8th or 10th grade curriculum Teachers Editions.

I have two thoughts about this. First of all, I am amazed at a judicial system that lets some complaining parties wave a bunch of literature around, and tell the judge that these things are "in the curriculum," and he believes it simply on faith. I observe that neither of the two Teachers Editions seem to have been offered into evidence, at least by the plaintiffs.

Second, you gotta wonder, and I hate to keep bringing this up, but you gotta wonder what the MCPS lawyers were thinking. Did they even know what was in the curriculum? Were they sitting around reading law books, or did it occur to them to mention to the judge -- "These materials did seem offensive to us, Yer Honor, and so our guys took 'em out last month. The plaintiffs have no case."

Did it occur to them?

Do I sound pessimistic? --I believe in this curriculum, it is the right thing to do, and we at TeachTheFacts.org have put a lot of effort into supporting it. The question now is whether Montgomery County's school board has the ... whatever school administrators have ... to stand up for a curriculum that corrects a lot of wrongs and leads our kids to a better understanding of human sexuality, or whether they will cave in, with a whimper.