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Gays and Lesbians in Classrooms
It was about twenty years ago that I first encountered
gay/lesbian issues in my fifty year career in education. At
the time, I was the negotiator for a suburban school board
in California. The union negotiator and I had come to
agreement on most items, including salaries, which are
usually the most difficult to resolve. The remaining issues
did not fit any particular pattern, except the usual union
tactic of trying to get improvements just for the sake of
new benefits, no matter how cosmetic, in order to build on
them when the new contract expired. Or so I thought.
One of the remaining items was a proposed change in sick
leave policy. The existing policy allowed teachers to use
their sick leave for spouses, children, parents, and few
other specified relatives of the teacher. The union wanted
to add the following to the eligibility list, "...or anyone
living in the same household" (that is, the same household
of the teachers receiving sick leave benefits).
My counterpart at the table was a UniServ director who
had not said very much about this particular proposal.
"Look," I said, "We are getting to the end and the contract
should not be held up over such demands. What's behind all
this?" It turned out that cohabiting teachers and
gay/lesbian couples were behind it. I asked how many such
couples there were, since my practice was to inform the
school board about proposal costs regardless of my personal
feeling about the proposal. To my astonishment, I was told
that perhaps twenty percent of the teachers would be
eligible for the sick leave expansion if the board accepted
the union proposal. This meant that the cost of agreeing to
it would be higher than I had surmised; however, how much
higher would be guesswork. Of course, cohabiting couples
outnumbered gay/lesbian couples by quite a margin, but I was
still surprised by the number of gay/lesbian teachers in the
district. The very fact that the UniServ director hung tough
on the issue was a sign that more than a few teachers had a
direct interest in it.
Over time, the issue frequently arose elsewhere. My
personal attitude was that if teachers wanted the benefits
of marriage, they should get married; however, my job was to
get as much information as I could about the issues so
school boards could make informed decisions about union
proposals. In my first experience with the proposed
expansion of sick leave, I pointed out to the UniServ
director and later the school board that no other contract
in our county allowed sick leave for anyone in the immediate
household &endash; in my opinion, a strong reason to reject
the proposal; however, by the time I retired from
negotiating at the table in the late 1980s, other contracts
in the area did allow teachers to take a certain amount of
sick leave for anyone in the immediate household.
The proposal to expand sick leave was only the first of
many union proposals intended to benefit gay/lesbian
teachers. Although I had (and have) no hard evidence on the
issue, it seems clear to me that public education is
experiencing a substantial influx of gay teachers. Clearly,
gay teachers are coming out much more often; the emergence
of highly influential gay/lesbian caucuses in both the NEA
and AFT is one indication of this. There is no doubt that
gay/lesbian caucuses play an important role in the election
of union officers at all levels in both unions; also,
candidates for public office are very unlikely to get
NEA/AFT support unless they support the inclusion of "sexual
orientation" as a prohibited criterion in matters of
employment.
As the importance of the issue increased, so did my
interest in it, even after I no longer served as a
negotiator for school boards. Personally, I have no
objections to the employment of gay/lesbian teachers in
public schools. Generally speaking, conservative fears that
such teachers will seduce young children are not well
founded. The fact that I believe there should be no
discrimination against gay/lesbian teachers does not mean or
imply that I also support including gays and lesbians under
the protective umbrella of anti-discrimination laws that
prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion,
or country of origin. I was very active in the civil rights
movement when there was a career risk in such activity, and
I was an unequivocal supporter of the Civil Rights Act when
it was enacted in 1964. My opinion now is that although laws
prohibiting discrimination served useful purposes in the
past, the laws have outlived their usefulness; more
precisely, their downside now outweighs their beneficial
consequences. By the same token, I do not support adding
more protected groups to the anti-discrimination laws.
I am, however, deeply concerned about the way that
gay/lesbian organizations, especially of teachers, are
trying to change K-12 curricula to present a one-sided
picture of gay/lesbian lifestyles, especially when the
changes are shoe horned into curricula in which the issues
are entirely inappropriate regardless of one's position on
the issues. In other words, gay/lesbian organizations are
trying to change the K-12 curriculum from what they regard
as a hostile environment to a very positive one for gays and
lesbians. In my view, there is no justification for gay
bashing, nor is there any for injecting a grossly one-sided
positive view of gays/lesbians and their lifestyles at any
level of education. Regrettably, gay/lesbian organizations
tend to label this point of view as "homophobic," but this
is a huge mistake on their part.
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