Schools Should Teach Tolerance, Not Hate Anti-Senate Vote Action Violates States’ Rights And Sends Chilling Message
This week, U.S. Sens. Jesse Helms and Robert Smith stood before their colleagues on the Senate floor, waving pamphlets and raving about obscenity creeping into schools. When they finished, states were at risk of losing more power to educate students and Americans were that much further from living in harmony.
It’s the war over homosexuality again. From Monday’s vote, it seems the fear mongers might win a battle.
The Senate voted 63 to 36 to block federal funds to any school district that teaches acceptance of homosexuality. The scare tactics worked, to a degree. But some say the measure will be removed before the bill is finally approved.
We can only hope. In its zeal to look good to anti-homosexual forces this election year, the Senate severely overran its bounds.
Education is the charge of the states. Communities need the freedom to shape their children’s education for themselves.
Schools have a responsibility to educate in a factual, objective way. When talking about human sexuality, it’s imperative to include all aspects - especially when teaching about AIDS, since the deadly disease is transmitted sexually.
The deeper hurt in this vote, however, is a rejection of gays and lesbians in our schools. Forbidding discussion of homosexuality in a positive or neutral way sends a clear message to kids who may be grappling with their sexuality: You are obscene. A freak.
It also tells heterosexuals exactly how to deal with people who are different: Shun them, hate them.
Schools would be serving everyone best if, when addressing sexuality, they provide youngsters with age-appropriate facts.
Stunts like Helms’ pamphlet-waving are empty displays. Schools don’t detail gay or lesbian sex acts any more than they teach heterosexual positions or perversions.
It’s a simple matter of recognizing that some people are attracted to their own gender by nature. That’s as far as it needs to go.
What isn’t appropriate is peppering these discussions with sweeping hysterical generalizations about homosexual sex.
Homosexuals can be monogamous and conservative in their sex lives just as heterosexuals can partake in the perversions that homophobes love to talk about like eighth graders in a locker room.
Most Americans know that. Hopefully our children will learn tolerance and caring from those people rather than hate and hyberbole from the others.