It Was Political From the Start

Unbelievably, somebody else has emailed us yet another Google cache of Recall discussions. Hundreds of messages, some of them go back to the week that the Board of Education voted to adopt the new curriculum.

One thing you notice is how political the Recall movement was from the beginning. Remember, the national elections were held on November 2nd. The school board voted on November 9th to accept the new curriculum. You can't tell exactly, but it appears to be November 14th when you see CRC lawyer John Garza saying:

If you go the BOE building in Rockville you will think you are in a zombie movie. No one works there. The BOE could fire 2/3 or more of its employees and no one would be missed. If I ran my law office that way, I would be out of business in 6 months. My kids go to parochial school because I can't trust the local BOE. I guess if my daughter tells her teacher she thinks boys are yucky then its ok for the teacher to tell her she may be a lesbian and that's normal. I would prefer to have such conversations myself or her mother can discuss this. The BOE is out of step with the rest of the country and the voters here. We need people to step up to the plate and run for these offices. I can see why a conservative would not run in Montgomery County for any office. It costs money and there is a teacher's union and bureaucracy to deal with. There are no family values candidates that I know of. It seems elected officals only work to get re-elected, expand government, increase taxes, etc. If people are serious about this, I suggest they switch to the Republican Party and then get some good candidates to run against the establishment party. The local Repubs have no one strong to get behind but the party could be used to get family values on the agenda.

(I need to mention Garza's ridiculous mischaracterization of the curriculum. There is nothing, was nothing, and it was never proposed that there should be anything in the MCPS health curriculum that would make any comment on any student's sexual orientation, nor surmise from any behavior whether a person was gay or not. You wonder why they have always had to make up stuff like this -- if the curriculum was really so bad, why wouldn't they talk about things that were actually in it?)

(I might need to point out that this is the same guy who sat there and told the school board to their faces that he "loved" them. This might be one of their things, like, "Love the sinner, hate everything about them.")

You may have noticed that TeachTheFacts.org is not a political organization. I think a number of our members are Democrats, but that's something private for each person. You can search this site for the names of the political parties. and find one or two mentions, usually in a humorous vein. Our debate over the sex-ed curriculum is not a fight between Democrats and Republicans.

Growing up in Barry Goldwater's Phoenix, Arizona, I did not learn to despise conservatives. I think of real conservatives as intelligent people who argue one perspective in an important national debate. Seems to me that both sides need to be heard, and that America would be in bad shape if the debate came down to a lot of self-congratulatory one-sidedness. These days, of course, we have confusion between true conservatives and the religious right; I'm no expert, but it appears to me that though they have formed a shaky alliance, their goals and philosophies are severely at odds with one another.

It would be my expectation that a true conservative would not want to use government to advance a religious agenda. For instance, you didn't hear much complaining from the right through all the "marriage amendment" business, but wouldn't a real conservative be violently opposed to new laws regulating who people can marry? How would a real conservative feel about a powerless minority using tort lawyers and activist judges to impose their values on the majority of residents of a county? No, there is a conflict there, between the railroading religious right and true conservatives.

The debate, whether local or national, requires that the facts be presented honestly and openly. Given that some people are gay, given that some families do have same-sex parents, given that there is an AIDS epidemic and the AIDS virus is stopped by a correctly-used condom, given that AIDS and some other diseases infect men who have sex with men at a higher rate than the rest of the population ... I say, put these facts on the table, and let the debate begin: what are we going to teach our children, to prepare them to live in this real world? Conservatives, tell us what your point of view concludes about the situation -- how would you go about solving these problems, with your philosophy of smaller government and greater personal liberty? You liberals, what would you suggest, based on your ideas about government protecting the helpless? Talk to each other, let's hear what the two sides say -- we can be sure that the result will be a compromise of some sort, and both sides need to be able to live with that.

Some people don't want this discussion to happen. When you start with the assumption that you already know everything, and that God is on your side against the other guys, you've pretty much defined a situation that will go nowhere. And as we see, that's where the Recall group started.