Sunday Rumination: Looking Back Over Five Years

Man, it is cold out there! I took the dogs for a walk and it was all right until the wind kicked up. Now I see they've found a sunbeam in the kitchen to snooze in. WPFW is playing some rather loud electric guitar jazz this morning, not the mellow stuff you expect. I think the DJ said they were doing a tribute to Django today, but I hear a little more Larry Coryell in this. Well I suppose, like all of us, Larry Coryell was influenced by Django.

This blog began in December of 2004 -- it's been five years. So far we have had 1,962 posts here. At first other TTF members wrote for the blog, but somehow after a month or two it ended up being me. We jumped into the sex-ed controversy with both feet, I'd never been involved in anything like that before and it was invigorating. Allies quickly came to us, it turned out our little group of parents was just the tip of the iceberg, lots of people in our county were unhappy about the far right's attempt to take over our school district -- you might remember their web site was RecallMontgomerySchoolBoard.com, they came in on the back of Bush's 2004 "mandate" and hoped to replace our school board with people who would support their rightwing vision. They trimmed their ambitions back quickly when they were overwhelmed by opposition.

It turned out to be important for citizens to support the bureaucracy as the district worked on a sex-ed curriculum that would teach students a little bit about sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as showing them how to use a condom correctly. The school bureaucracy was easily influenced by noisy nuts, the district was perfectly willing to negotiate with them, to make changes to the curriculum in order to appease a tiny fraction of our community, and our job was to make sure that they were aware that the majority of us take a fair and kind view of individuals of various orientations and identities. The extremists attracted the news cameras, and even though there were only a handful of them the impression in the media was that there was a big revolt by citizens over this new liberal curriculum. Except that everywhere they went, we were there too.

In fact the curriculum that resulted is hardly liberal at all -- it is only liberal in comparison to the previous one. In the new curriculum, teachers have to read a script, they don't get to teach. And woo hoo, the big controversy was that they allowed to say, if a student asked a direct question, that homosexuality is "not a disease." Where most people in Montgomery County would want their children to get a scientific and accurate education, a tiny band of nuts was able to influence the process enough to result in a watered-down classroom presentation. But at least it was something, it went the right direction.

And when the County Council added "gender identity" to the nondiscrimination bill, the nuts regrouped and attacked again. The bill passed unanimously and the shower-nuts tried to get a petition for a referendum to recall the law, telling people that they were signing a petition to "keep men out of women's restrooms." The law said you can't discriminate in hiring and some other things on the basis of someone's gender identity, but they told everybody that perverted male predators would be lurking in women's shower-rooms if the bill became law. In the end they lost, their petitions were riddled with fraud and irregularities and the state appeals court threw them out. In the meantime they made a lot of statements that showed they were even nuttier than we realized. We remember Adol T. Owen-Williams II, of the Montgomery County Republican Central Committee, shouting in the County Council chamber, "Wait until little girls start showing up dead all over the county because of freaks of nature." And that was after he had shouted "Heil Hitler." It's been more than a year since the bill became law, and to date exactly zero little girls have shown up dead as a consequence. But still, if you talk to one of the shower-nuts you will find that they still believe it, they believe that the law really will result in pedophiles and predators lurking in the ladies room. The fact that it hasn't happened in reality does not affect their opinion. Which tells you something.

We have been going for five years now, and have seen a lot of action. Soon we will post the two-thousandth item on the blog. It is pleasing to pause at the start of a new year, to look back and to look forward. We have no way of anticipating what issues we will face this year or where the challenges will come from, our nation seems to be foundering in the dark water of anomie, unable to tell right from wrong, unable to make a commitment to benevolence, and though we cannot directly affect decisions at the national level we can pay attention as policies are formed and decisions are made here, where we live, in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Now PFW is playing a classical guitarist, this sounds like an adaptation of something by Mozart or Handel perhaps. The dogs are sleeping, the furnace is humming. My coffee-maker broke this morning, so it seems I will be forced to get into some real clothes and go out in pursuit of some caffeine.