Saying Nothing, Hatefully

Here in Montgomery County, we're trying to get a health curriculum put together, where teenagers can learn about sex. The state wants them to learn about "sexual variations," so the school district needs to figure out how to present stuff about sexual orientation in a way that is acceptable to the community, meets state standards, and hopefully educates the kids a little bit. These are polarized times, and a noisy minority of extremists has succeeded in using the courts to postpone implementation of a new curriculum. MCPS had developed a nice new curriculum, but through some legal chicanery they were able to have it thrown out.

The merits of the curriculum were never judged. Some problems were identified which could have been solved easily. The main thing that worried the judge were some statements in the teachers' background resources that were not appropriate, talking about which churches were more and less tolerant of homosexuality. It would have been very easy, nothin' to it, to throw out those resources. But the suers didn't want to fix the curriculum, they wanted to eliminate it. And in negotiating to prevent a lawsuit, the school district agreed to throw their nice new curriculum out and start over.

Today I was looking for something else when I came across a blog called Good As You. They had a little news item I hadn't seen before.

Robert Knight is a professional rabblerouser, he has worked with the Family Research Council, and now is some kind of monkety-monk at Concerned Women for America (wouldn't you think they would be... women?). He spoke at the March town hall meeting of the Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum, so we sort of think of him as a character in our story, though he's not local. He's just another gay-basher from the religious right.

OK, so the story is, I guess Planned Parenthood hired a guy to be their liaison with the Republican Party, and the guy's gay, he's what they call a Log Cabin Republican.

The omnipresent Mister Knight had this lovely comment:

This should be a seamless transition, given that both organizations pursue an anti-family agenda that's right at home in the culture of death," Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America's Culture & Family Institute told Cybercast News Service.

"Recall, for instance, that V. Gene Robinson, the openly homosexual Episcopal bishop, spoke at a Planned Parenthood event, which didn't raise a lot of eyebrows," Knight said. "After all, both Robinson and Planned Parenthood have rejected the natural family and pursued sex outside marriage and abortion as a reasonable, logical response to an unintended pregnancy." Log Cabin Official to Lead Planned Parenthood's Outreach to GOP

I imagine there must be people somewhere who think that these kinds of characterizations -- "culture of death," "anti-family," "rejected the natural family," and so on -- are just the right thing to say, that Mr. Knight is simply stating some facts.

We must make sure that those people do not gain control of any part of our county's policy-making. Especially the schools.