The Board Decides Tomorrow

Tomorrow the Montgomery County Board of Education will discuss the new curricula that have been developed, and vote to accept or reject them. It has been a long time coming, and we hope that the board is willing to pilot test the curriculum.

It is also a last chance to make it better, to include some crucial stuff that was left out by the district when they put together the final draft.

The citizens advisory committee strongly desired a handout with this wording:

Other things to know:

• Children who have fleeting same-sex attractions may assume incorrectly that they are gay or lesbian. Mere fleeting attraction does not prove sexual orientation.
  
• All mainstream medical and mental health professionals have concluded that homosexuality is not a disease or a mental illness.
  
• The American Academy of Pediatrics says that most experts have concluded that "one's sexual orientation is not a choice; that is, individuals do not choose to be homosexual or heterosexual." Moreover, according to the American Psychological Association, sexual orientation is not a "conscious choice that can voluntarily be changed." Similarly, the American Medical Association opposes "therapies" that seek to change sexual orientation that are premised on the assumption that homosexuality is an illness and that people should change.
  
• Homosexuals can live happy, successful lives; they "can be successful parents."
  
• Children raised by same-sex couples do just as well as those raised by heterosexuals, and are no more likely to be homosexual.

It looks like MCPS is afraid, though, that if they actually said out loud what the medical community believes, it will somehow make them more vulnerable to a lawsuit.

But look, this is important, students need to know this. It should be the heart of the "sexual variation" curriculum, the fact that doctors and scientists agree that being gay is not a disease and it's not a choice, that you can live a happy, normal life, being gay. It shouldn't be some optional add-on, this is the core of the whole thing.

Because, for me at least, this is what this whole battle is about. I have never seen this as a struggle for "gay rights." Now that I've been exposed to some of the ugliness, I certainly sympathize, but I'm sorry, if I were to "get political" it wouldn't be over the subject of gay rights.

No, to me, this is about courage and accuracy in education. It's about making our kids smarter by teaching them the truth in school, the scientific truth, the truth as it is understood by trained experts, no matter whose panties end up in a wad over it. It's about teaching the right thing, and it's about standing up to those who would try to bring you down to their level.

I value education, especially higher education. You learn a lot in graduate school and afterwards, when your career brings you in contact with other experts, with complicated theoretical notions, with the data and subtleties of analysis; these interactions lift you to a level of intimacy with the topic that other people simply don't have. And MCPS should not be ashamed to go into a classroom to teach students what the highly educated experts believe.

The school district says that if a student has a question about homosexuality, the teacher is supposed to tell them to discuss it with a "health professional." A doctor. The message will be, clearly, that this is a health issue, if you think you're "like that" there must be something wrong with you.

But that message is just the opposite of what the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics want taught. They want people to understand it's not a disease.

It would be the very best to give students these statements and discuss them in class, but we can think of several compromises. For one, the school board could take the document known as "the compendium" in committee discussions, and make it a "teachers' resource," so teachers, when asked hard questions in class, can draw on these for answers. Another solution, effortless to implement, is to give teachers the APA brochure that is the source of many of the statements in the "bullet points." This would just mean downloading it from the Internet and making copies for each teacher. This handout can provide many answers to the harder questions that teachers might receive in class.

It will be very interesting to see how the board's discussion goes.