Comment Highlight

My good friend from the Pensamientos blog left a reasonable and thought-provoking comment on one of last week's news posts. Her comment was in response to California's desire to mandate the teaching of "gay history" in schools. This is what she had to say.

I read the article on including gay history in California classroom curriculum, and specifically the suggestion that "slain San Francisco politician Harvey Milk would be an appropriate choice [to study]. Leno contends Milk's fight for civil rights is as worthy of class study as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s." I did some research, curious to see if the concept of teaching gay history in the classroom could be considered more of an attempt not to leave out important, influential people in history simply because they were gay.

However, after reading some about Harvey Milk, I have difficulty seeing how a classroom discussion of him could be appropriate for the high school or middle school audience. Kids don't need to be involved in discussions about the nitty gritty defining lines of sex crimes (a lot of the political controversy surrounding gay rights in the 1960's had to do with laws prohibiting oral sex and similar activities), and while I agree with the thought that the public at large should not believe that all gay men are trying to lure children into sexual abuse (one of the prominent beliefs of the 1970's straight world), do conversations about pedophilia really belong in the high school or middle school classroom? Children don't need to be hearing or discussing these sort of things... and a sanitized version of Harvey Milk's story would simply be another distortion of history.

And an interesting point about Milk's assassination... he was not assassinated for being gay. He was assassinated by a disgruntled fellow politician. How can someone compare Milk's story to Martin Luther King's? Other details confirm that Milk, although perhaps he could be seen as a brave man campaigning for the rights of a minority group, does not have the kind of integrity that a man like Martin Luther King had (such as a story of Milk disclosing the sexual orientation of Oliver Sipple, a gay ex-marine who saved President Gerald Ford from an assassination attempt, against Sipple's wishes, because he felt that it was "too good an opportunity" for the gay community).

These are important issues... but these are not issues that can be presented objectively, without a political slant, nor are they ones that can be taught in a manner appropriate for the age of the audience.

Well said.