Quote :

"SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California lawmakers on Tuesday sent the governor a bill that would make the state the first requiring public schools to include the contributions of gays and lesbians in social studies curriculum. The bill, passed on a party-line vote, adds lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people as well as people with disabilities to the list of groups that schools must include in the lessons. It also would prohibit material that reflects adversely on gays. Democratic Assemblyman Tom Ammiano of San Francisco says SB48 is crucial because of the bullying that happens to gay students. Republicans called it a well-intentioned but ill-conceived bill and raised concerns that it would indoctrinate children to accept homosexuality. "This bill will require California schools to present a more accurate and nuanced view of American history in our social science curriculum by recognizing the accomplishments of groups that are not often recognized," said Assembly Speaker John Perez, the first openly gay speaker of the California Assembly. The bill now goes to Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, who has not said whether he would sign it. Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill in 2006. Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, a Republican from Twin Peaks, said he was offended as a Christian that the bill was being used to promote a "homosexual agenda" in public schools. "I think it's one thing to say that we should be tolerant," Donnelly said. "It is something else altogether to say that my children are going to be taught that this lifestyle is good." California law already requires schools to teach about women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, entrepreneurs, Asian Americans, European Americans, American Indians and labor. The Legislature over the years also has prescribed specific lessons about the Irish potato famine and the Holocaust, among other topics. SB48 would require, as soon as the 2013-2014 school year, the California Board of Education and local school districts to adopt textbooks and other teaching materials that cover the contributions and roles of sexual minorities. The legislation leaves it to local school boards to decide how to implement the requirement. It does not specify a grade level for the instruction to begin. Opponents argued that such instruction would further burden an already crowded curriculum and expose students to a subject that some parents find objectionable. Assemblyman Chris Norby, R-Fullerton, said the bill micromanages the classroom. "Our founding fathers are turning over in their graves," Donnelly said. The bill's author, Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said he hopes Brown will sign his bill. He dismissed arguments that the bill promotes certain sexual behaviors and said it removes censorship in textbooks. "Bottom line, it's only beneficial to share with students the broad diversity of the human experience and that our democracy protects everyone," he said. Before the Assembly vote, Perez pointed to a few contributions of gay people, including Friedrich von Steuben, one of George Washington's military advisers who fled Prussia after he was hounded as a homosexual. Von Steuben is credited with being one of the fathers of the Continental Army and teaching essential military drills. He also cited Alan Turing, a mathematician who helped crack Nazi Germany's secret codes by creating the "Turing bombe," a forerunner of modern computers. Some churches and conservative family groups warned the bill will drive more parents to take their children out of public schools. "This sexual brainwashing bill would mandate that children as young as 6 years old be told falsehoods – that homosexuality is biological, when it isn't, or healthy, when it's not," said Randy Thomasson, president of SaveCalifornia.com. The Assembly passed the bill on a 49-25 vote."

I searched and didn't see anything so discuss if there isn't a thread already.

My thoughts: children should be made aware but I think it should be up to parents and not the school.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/05/california-gay-history-bill_n_890846.html

7/10/2011 8:16:52 PM

Just like how it should be up to the parents to learn about womens suffrage or black history?


Gay rights is just the latest civil rights movement and will be treated as all the other civil rights movements when all is said and done.

7/10/2011 8:55:20 PM

I imagine a few homophobic teachers will portray Friedrich von Steuben as a prancing poofter and Alan Turing as a mincing, swishing sissy.

7/10/2011 9:02:26 PM

Quote :

"The bill, passed on a party-line vote, adds lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people as well as people with disabilities to the list of groups that schools must include in the lessons. It also would prohibit material that reflects adversely on gays."

the last sentence says a lot. insert anything for "gays" and it still sounds like garbage. if you're going to teach history, teach it as truthfully as you can.

7/10/2011 9:46:24 PM

I guess that means no coverage of Bradley Manning

7/10/2011 10:14:07 PM

Turing was a gay?

dammit...

7/10/2011 10:25:38 PM

What exactly is gay history, list of everyone who is gay or more technical like assplay breakthroughs over time?

7/10/2011 11:27:04 PM

I support the rights of all individuals. This has nothing to do with anyone's rights. It also has nothing to do with any "agenda". It's just a bunch of dumbasses thinking that this is going to change the way people look at others.

7/11/2011 12:30:12 AM

^^part of it is the history of the perception and societal treatment of homosexuality

part of it is about how gays contributed to the larger arc of history, like how Alan Turing helped develop the theoretical foundations of computing, and how Bradley Manning exposed the weakness in the Army's excessive trust in enlisted soldiers who weren't even NCOs

7/11/2011 12:50:11 AM

How is being gay remotely relevant to technical achievement? I have no problem with acknowledging the civil rights aspect, but to highlight individuals just because of their sexual orientation (or race/creed/religion for that matter) is just silly. If someone cures cancer I don't give two shits if they are a vegan buddhist Venezuelan with hardcore S&M tendencies.

7/11/2011 2:13:45 AM

Quote :

"If someone cures cancer I don't give two shits if they are a vegan buddhist Venezuelan with hardcore S&M tendencies."

Yeah, but most people in the world aren't like you.

When you have a group of people pushing the narrative that the gays are a struggling, bitter, worthless demographic, it helps to merely point out great people who happened to be gay to combat this.

The fact of the matter is that there are always going to be narrow-minded, irrational people who hate gays no matter what, but that doesn't mean you just leave behind the other people who are taught lies to wallow in ignorance.

I don't know what the scope of this bill is, but it's a Good Idea™ to at least note which famous people students ALREADY study were gay. It helps people realize that the issue of homosexuality isn't a religious debate, it's a rights issue. These historical gays weren't trying to piss of the church, they were just trying to live their lives.

7/11/2011 2:21:10 AM

Quote :

"What exactly is gay history"

I guess there's stuff like Stonewall riots in NY and the Milk election/assignation in CA. But from ctnz71's description it sounds like its people focused rather than event focused?

7/11/2011 5:14:22 AM

Quote :

"It also would prohibit material that reflects adversely on gays."

That's like saying: "Hey let's not teach slavery because it adversely reflects southern whites."

7/11/2011 1:28:55 PM

^ If you can't see the flaw in your analogy I'm not going to point it out to you.

7/11/2011 2:20:54 PM

Quote :

"I guess there's stuff like Stonewall riots in NY and the Milk election/assignation in CA."

But they couldn't read the best biography on Milk, or learn anything substantive about him, because it would "reflect adversely on gays."

A glowing book of tribute by a gay journalist, about a gay activist, said "...sixteen-year-old McKinley was looking for some kind of father figure...At 33, Milk was launching a new life, though he could hardly have imagined the unlikely direction toward which his new lover would pull him." (p. 30-31)

or

"Harvey confided one night that at twenty-four, Doug was the oldest man Harvey had ever started an affair with." (p. 237)

or

"Harvey always had a penchant for young waifs with substance abuse problems." (page 180)

or lying about his military record for votes:

"He had not suffered this disgrace, he told a later campaign manager, but he knew the story would make good copy. If anyone said something to Harvey about his fondness for such stunts, he would gesture wildly as launched into a lecture. 'Symbols, symbols, symbols,' he insisted. Sure, he had not been kicked out of the military...The point of the story was to let people know that service people routinely do get kicked out. Besides, he once confided, 'Maybe people will read it, feel sorry for me, and then vote for me.'" (p. 78-79)

http://www.amazon.com/Mayor-Castro-Street-Stonewall-Editions/dp/0312019009

If you're going to learn about a man, or a movement, you shouldn't censor the problems. Of course, we already do that for protected groups or saintly folks in history, so this really isn't anything new. Unless, of course, it's politically beneficial to highlight their flaws more than their accomplishments, in which case it's open season.

[Edited on July 11, 2011 at 3:44 PM. Reason : a]

7/11/2011 3:43:49 PM

Aren't we already failing at educating children? Will this "extra" curriculum help someone get a job or go to college?

7/11/2011 3:44:50 PM

Quote :

"Aren't we already failing at educating children? Will this "extra" curriculum help someone get a job or go to college?"

Yes we are failing at educating children; basic history is part of a person's education. To limit educate merely to the realm of job-seeking and performance is to allow private employers full control over what's "useful" for people to learn in our society.

This has already happened to a great extent in our country. Turns out people who can't think critically and who are ignorant of history make terrible decisions.

7/11/2011 3:59:03 PM

^^^ pathetic.

7/11/2011 4:06:14 PM

^^ oh I got it. So if my child is taught that homosexuality and getting your junk cut off should be normal he will surely make better life decisions.

7/11/2011 5:52:53 PM

Oh I got it, you have nothing other than fantasy-scenarios and naked bigotry to offer. I'm sorry that the basic elements of being a good, upstanding, intelligent, aware individual are not part of your belief-system, but that doesn't mean that your child should have to suffer for lack of a good role model at home.

[Edited on July 11, 2011 at 6:16 PM. Reason : .]

7/11/2011 6:14:59 PM

troll vs. troll

7/11/2011 7:40:11 PM

my views of "being a good, upstanding, intelligent, aware individual" are accepting those that don't believe the same things i do (which i do) and i dont need that taught to my child in school. i can handle it on my own.

7/11/2011 7:44:08 PM

Apparently you can't; your criteria for success are lifted from the wretches that your wretch-parents produced. You're certainly entitled (somehow) to teach your kids to hate faggots; don't expect the rest of us to sit by and let it happen without any interference, though, because if living alongside pieces of shit like you has taught reasonable people anything at all, it's that your stupid shit needs to get nipped in the bud.

Edit: And I honestly don't give a fuck if you're a bigot yourself or just a bigot-sympathizer. It's funny how people who have all of these abstract philosophical arguments about "crowding out bigots is just bigotry too" are just oblique defenders of racists and all other sorts of trash.

[Edited on July 11, 2011 at 8:26 PM. Reason : .]

7/11/2011 8:24:45 PM

Who hates "faggots"? I have a lot of clients that are "faggots." they are all nice people and I don't treat them any different from any of my others. Just because I wouldn't want my young child to be taught this kind of thing in school doesn't mean they won't know about it. It means they will know when I think they are ready and at that point they will be able to form their own opinions on the subject.

I don't hate anyone.

7/11/2011 8:41:21 PM

from the schoolkids they will learn that gays are weird and creepy and will go to hell and deserve to get beaten up

also it's way too easy for people to believe that "gay history" is wholly separate from the rest of American history
kinda like black history is seen

7/11/2011 9:57:39 PM

Does that mean we will have a gay history month?

7/11/2011 10:18:59 PM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_history_month

Quote :

"LGBT History Month is a month-long annual observance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history, and the history of the gay rights and related civil rights movements. It is observed during October in the United States, to include National Coming Out Day on October 11.[1]...LGBT History Month originated in the United States and was first celebrated in 1994. ... October was chosen by Wilson as the month for the celebration because National Coming Out Day already was established as a widely known event, on October 11, and October commemorated the first march on Washington by LGBT people in 1979. "

7/11/2011 11:03:05 PM

ill be sure to take a day off work

7/11/2011 11:21:29 PM

Quote :

"Who hates "faggots"? I have a lot of clients that are "faggots." they are all nice people and I don't treat them any different from any of my others. Just because I wouldn't want my young child to be taught this kind of thing in school doesn't mean they won't know about it. It means they will know when I think they are ready and at that point they will be able to form their own opinions on the subject."

Their own views about what? People are educating others about the valuable things that homosexuals have provided to our society, in light of the insane bigotry and persecution they've suffered for... well, forever. The lack of education, at this point, given the climate, is biased.

Quote :

"I don't hate anyone."

Could have fooled me. Certainly seems like you're scared of your kid learning about homosexuality in any way, shape, or form without you there to make sure you formed the first, lasting impressions. Only bigots are so terrified of the brittleness of their teachings.

[Edited on July 11, 2011 at 11:56 PM. Reason : .]

7/11/2011 11:56:18 PM

no see it's all part of the insidious FAG agenda where FAGS and DYKES and TRANNYS recruit OUR CHILDREN to march in those HEDONISTIC "pride" parades of SIN and GROSS INDECENCY then bring in a GODLESS NIGGER JEW FAGGOTRANNY QUEER PERVERT SPIC to ASS RAPE my good little johnny bawww-y

so see, gay "history" = buttrape


any questions

[Edited on July 12, 2011 at 12:22 AM. Reason : (/sarcasm)

7/12/2011 12:21:29 AM

http://youtu.be/SbBtNVFjeDA

[Edited on July 12, 2011 at 12:26 AM. Reason : WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?!?!?]

7/12/2011 12:25:14 AM

He probably will have a gay kid.

7/12/2011 12:45:11 AM

Quote :

"Gay rights is just the latest civil rights movement and will be treated as all the other civil rights movements when all is said and done."

yes. because there really is something analogous to a personal choice and a genetic trait. yep

7/16/2011 5:23:18 AM

Quote :

"California law already requires schools to teach about women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, entrepreneurs, Asian Americans, European Americans, American Indians and labor. The Legislature over the years also has prescribed specific lessons about the Irish potato famine and the Holocaust, among other topics. "

Here's a thought, how about having history classes teach about history, and whether the people who make up the important events in history are black, women, asian or any other group under the sun be brought up only as it relates to the context of that event in history.

7/16/2011 7:02:59 PM

^

7/16/2011 7:09:57 PM

^^ because we as a society still have large groups of people who would intentionally ignore or skew their teaching of history to create a negative bias. Look at a backwards state like Mississippi, do you really want them just doing their own thing to teach their own idea of what "history" is?

7/16/2011 7:15:10 PM

about as much as i'd like some delusional pc asshat from CA teaching their idea of what history is.

7/16/2011 7:28:17 PM

^^ So we fix it by creating a bias in the other direction? Maybe if we stopped politicizing education, you could stop the people from skewing it. Of course history is biased by who won and who does the teaching anyway, but at the same time, the solution to biased teaching isn't to introduce more bias, it's to eliminate the existing bias.

Of course that requires that we're interested in an education system which actually teaches people and provides them a base from which to think critically and evaluate the world around them. But listen to any talk about what we should teach our children and teaching them to think for themselves is usually very far down the list (though they might throw that phrase around when they talk about whatever point of view they want to indoctrinate, see both sides of this current issue as an example)

7/16/2011 10:41:02 PM

Quote :

"the solution to biased teaching isn't to introduce more bias, it's to eliminate the existing bias"

wanna guess how we try to do that?

7/17/2011 8:17:34 AM

Not by adding more bias. The bias is just noise that takes away from the actual learning. Look, if you have a cart that isn't going straight because one wheel is locked, you don't fix it by locking the other wheels too.

7/17/2011 11:45:16 AM

Quote :

"wanna guess how we try to do that?"

Teach kids how to think rationally, rather than only teaching them what to think.

7/17/2011 12:33:44 PM

This would make up for Texas and there wacky educational system....

7/17/2011 4:56:10 PM

Quote :

"Look, if you have a cart that isn't going straight because one wheel is locked, you don't fix it by locking the other wheels too."

no shit, you unlock that wheel instead

by (OH SHIT) ensuring that students learn some of the TRUFAX that show the bigoted lies they hear around them for what they are

IMO anyone who thinks that the contributions of gays to history oughta be covered up as much as they were when I was in high school is peddling the same kind of false equivalence I hear many a Rethugnican shit out when called on hir bullshit.

[Edited on July 17, 2011 at 6:56 PM. Reason : o wait, "rationally" means "heteronormatively" to you

7/17/2011 6:56:09 PM

Quote :

"o wait, "rationally" means "heteronormatively" to you"

Are you kidding me? I've been one of the biggest defenders of gay people on this forum. I just don't think it's essential to delve into a person's sexual orientation unless it's relevant to the actual piece of history. I definitely think the gay rights movement should be covered, but we don't need a chapter dedicated on gay historical figures.

[Edited on July 17, 2011 at 7:50 PM. Reason : .]

7/17/2011 7:47:58 PM

Getting all bent out of shape about the nuances of what the schools are teaching is just stupid. I'm still trying to understand why you people want the government deciding what to teach the kids. For those of you (the gays, clearly) that feel like its that important for your offspring to know, fucking teach them yourself. A public education as watered down and lowest common denominator as it is can only get worse with tripe like this.

7/17/2011 8:03:50 PM

My hastily arrived at opinion is that it's just a shitty thing to exclude on purpose. Teaching a history course and don't happen to touch on gay history because it doesn't matter to the time period/topics covered? Fine. Teaching a history course and purposefully leaving out relevant gay stuff? Probably not fine.

7/17/2011 8:45:48 PM

It's not so much that we want the government dictating what shall be taught to our children, it's that the government already does set standards, ideally as a baseline that most schools end up surpassing, and although pointing out important LGBT figures in history is minor compared to ensuring that people can find prime factorizations of integers, it's a crying shame that in the school system I grew up in, it was completely possible to hear nothing factual to counter the ever-present sense that "the gays" are some pestilence on the nation emanating from the primordial ooze of the '60s to lay waste to our traditional values, unless such information was sought out for oneself.

Seriously, it's like an English curriculum without dangling participles or parallelism, a health curriculum without discussion of safe sex or birth control, or a science curriculum without evolution or even heliocentrism (at least as a good first approximation to the truth).

I'm so so sorry that the California Department of Education is no longer being a silent enabler of bigotry based in ignorance and falsehood


P.S.: In some sense, LGBT history is part of American history as a whole, but little of the broad strokes can feasibly be covered in such a class, but just as it can be pointed out in passing that a black man designed the District of Columbia and another one researched a few hundred uses of peanuts to save an American South that could no longer rely on slave-picked cotton, it can be pointed out in passing that one gay man helped crack a code that led to the pwnage of Nazi Germany and another one confosed and embarred the intelligence community from the inside for the lulz.
IDK the manner in which all of this will be covered, but like most of the figures who weren't Presidents, the individuals will be given short shrift, but at least they'll be mentioned.

P.P.S.: I've been having a really hard time thinking of a prominent trans person in history, and I don't mean someone on the penumbra of the umbrella like that fetishist J. Edgar Hoover; the closest one I can think of is Wendy Carlos, but because the history of music generally, let alone electronic music, isn't dealt with in the typical social-studies curriculum, I doubt she'll be mentioned.

7/17/2011 9:47:26 PM

I will reserve judgement until Josh Hamilton tells me what to think about it.

7/17/2011 9:50:42 PM

josh hamilton is a bigot and does not approve of this so feel free to share.

history lesson for today: elton john had number one hit. this is history because he is gay.

7/17/2011 10:12:43 PM

You know, there's actually a reasonable argument against this. I'm not sure why you have to resort to being a complete shithead instead of making that argument.

7/17/2011 10:41:49 PM