Sunday Coldblogging: An Eventful Week

Man, it is cold out today. The thermometer on my front porch says 25 degrees, but the wind is howling over that snow out there, and it is a good day to be indoors listening to the radio.

This has been a pretty busy week in Montgomery County county, really. Three things. The nuts are going full speed, trying to make it legal again to discriminate on the basis of gender identity. They had a court hearing this week which is sort of a last gasp for stopping the new sex-ed curriculum. And word is that the tenth grade classes have been taught; we got a little bit of feedback from a teacher at the Yahoo group about that.

The Citizens for a Responsible Whatever have been making robo-calls to random houses, trying to get people to sign their petitions to make it legal again to discriminate against transgender people in Montgomery County. That strikes me as the rudest, most desperate measure ever. Random, recorded phone calls. We saw a blog this week where the person got a call, and in the comments we had a reader who got one. The blogger had a beautiful line:

Aaaaahhhhhh craziness. *headdesk*

I love it that there is a word "headdesk," that indicates that the speaker is beating his or her head on their desk. A beautiful word, and a perfect summary of this situation.

Another of our readers confronted a person standing outside a Giant store in Gaithersburg trying to get signatures on a petition to keep men out of women's restrooms. I don't know how the Board of Elections handles these things, but there must be a law about misrepresenting the petition you are passing around. Whatever, they said Giant ran the person off. Nobody was signing it anyway.

The big story this week is the very suspicious sighting of someone with muscles and big hands in a dress in a ladies locker-room in Gaithersburg. The gym's management can't confirm that the incident happened, but the CRW and other nutty web sites are pretending that this is a challenge to the new antidiscrimination law. Well, they need signatures. I'm not saying I know that they staged that incident, it's just that the timing is perfect for them. And it gave us an insight into what news sources can't be trusted: Channel 7, The Examiner.

Since the first days when we got involved in this fight, reporters and interested people have asked us to explain why anybody would be so viciously opposed to teaching about something like homosexuality or gender identity differences. Early on, a reporter asked me, "What do you think motivates them?" and I tried to answer, but I quickly learned not to. It's inexplicable. Why would anybody go to that length to organize groups, to stand out in the cold with petitions, to contact and work with the press, to fabricate incidents, just to preserve the right to discriminate against people who don't feel they are the gender that matches their biological equipment?

The statistics tell us that it's about one person out of a thousand who really feels this way; they don't ask for this to happen to them, in fact you can imagine it is a frightening and upsetting realization. You have to deal with it -- almost everybody pretends they match their plumbing at first, only a few go ahead and make the transition. It isn't a sex thing, it has nothing to do with behavior in the bedroom, it's not a Rocky Horror thing, it's a guy with a real personal feeling that he is a woman, or a woman with the real feeling that she is a man. I don't know why they feel that way, and to tell you the truth there are bigger questions out there. This falls under the category "individual differences," and I'll let somebody else figure it out. All that matters to me is that it does no harm.

This week the CRW went to court to try to force the state school board to review everything they complained about in the new sex-ed curriculum. I wouldn't presume to guess what the judge will decide. The main question, it seemed to me, was whether it makes sense to take a question like this to the courts. The school board is elected to do a professional job, and if there is a question in the county the state school board can step in. So why would you have to waste the court's time on something like this?

The CRW whined complained in court about two specific things in the curriculum. They didn't like the classes saying that sexual orientation is innate, and they didn't like the idea that the video says to wear a condom during anal and oral sex. They based their argument about innateness on a ruling called "Conaway v. Deane." The CRW described that case in court as if it ruled that homosexuality is not innate. The lawyer kept saying "innate and immutable." He said that for a reason. The Nutty Ones like to think you can stop being gay, so the issue of mutability is important to them. If the schools were saying that your sexual orientation can't change, they would attack it ferociously. Unfortunately for them, the word "immutable" does not appear in the curriculum in any form: immutability, immutably, immutabilatiousness... none of it. The classes actually don't say sexual orientation is immutable.

Conaway v. Deane talks about immutability, and that word does not appear in the classes; the classes talk about innateness, and that word does not appear in Conaway v. Deane. It's as simple as that. The words are not synonyms. Hair color, for instance, is innate but not immutable.

The curriculum does say sexual orientation is innate, in part. That is, there is some component of sexual orientation that is not learned, not chosen, it's just part of you. It is ridiculous to try to argue against that. Lots of personality characteristics seem to have an innate component, from intelligence to sense of humor to ... lots of things. The CRW wouldn't have a problem with heterosexual people's orientation being innate, and if they were smart enough to think about it, they would know that everybody's orientation is. But they do something really dumb. They change the word -- the lawyer literally said "innate and immutable" a whole bunch of times -- and then oppose it. You can't win that way.

They also want the judge to rule that saying you should wear a condom for anal and oral sex is "teaching erotic techniques." The state school board already said it isn't, which was the wrong answer for the CRW, so they're trying again, this time in court. Of course that's a thin thread to hang all of this on, and it would be really weird if the judge overruled both the county and state school boards on something like this. He might, I don't know, stranger things have happened, but it is a strange kind of theory to try to prove in court, that saying a word is the same as teaching a technique. Like one of the school district lawyers said, it isn't like they're making kids read the Kama Sutra.

Actually, the best news -- the tenth grade classes have now been taught and they went fine. The TeachTheFacts Yahoo group got a message from a health teacher at Einstein who said:

PLEASE-

These lessons went on without a hitch. Very little discussion except for thanks from some students for finally addressing the topic. The condom lesson was overkill- we were already teaching how to use a condom (since 1993). Talk to the people who are in the trenches. 97 percent overall opted in. 100% at my school opted in. Can we move on?

We have heard privately that some teachers think there is too much information in two days of classes, that it's hard to teach it from the script, and some other comments, which is normal for a new class. But nobody sees it as controversial or anything. Because it's not.

The eighth grade classes were taught before the Christmas break, and they went fine too. The fact is, this is a done deal. The CRW -- then RecallMontgomerySchoolBoard.com -- started fighting this in 2004, we jumped into it in about December of that year, and it has gone fast and furious since then. They have done everything they can to undermine the implementation of a new health curriculum, and there is more to come, but really the momentum is lost. They had a moment, right after the 2004 elections, when they could have claimed to have a "mandate" along with the rest of the religious right's nutty stuff, but that day is gone. Nobody wants that junk here.

Right now WPFW is playing a pretty nice version of Django Rheinhart's "Nuages." Some guitarist is doing a really nice job on it. By the echo and the clarity of the recording I'd say this is a recent recording. I'd like to know who this is, and see how he does some of these things with his right hand.

It is ridiculously cold outside. I bought a new book yesterday, and I think I'm going to light a fire in the fireplace and read for a while. Tomorrow's a day off, if there's something that really needs to be done I'll do it then.