[This is a guest post, written by Jeremy Woodburn and reprinted with permission from Calitics. Between now and the election, I’ll be doing this quite a few times, with posts either related to Proposition 8 or to same-sex marriage. –Amp]
A friend just passed along the latest email blast from the Yes on 8 team, wherein the Yes on 8 people are claiming that one of their parade of horribles have come true at last: Homosexual Marriage Is Being Taught In Schools To Children! Against The Wishes Of Their Parents! The Horror! The quote in full from the email blast:
In the same week that the No on 8 campaign launched an ad that labeled as “lies” claims that same-sex marriage would be taught in schools to young children, a first grade class took a school-sponsored trip to a gay wedding. Eighteen first graders traveled to San Francisco City Hall Friday for the wedding of their teacher and her lesbian partner, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. The school sponsored the trip for the students, ages 5 and 6, taking them away from their studies for the same-sex wedding.
Except you know, not really. This is a lie by omission. A set of actual quotations from the San Francisco Chronicle article describing the event in question.
A group of San Francisco first-graders took an unusual field trip to City Hall on Friday to toss rose petals on their just-married lesbian teacher – putting the public school children at the center of a fierce election battle over the fate of same-sex marriage.
The 18 Creative Arts Charter School students took a Muni bus and walked a block at noon to toss rose petals and blow bubbles on their just-married teacher Erin Carder and her wife Kerri McCoy, giggling and squealing as they mobbed their teacher with hugs.
Wow, that’s horrible! First graders! Who love their teacher! And want her to be happy! An indictment of the public schools to be sure. But this must be something the school forced on the parents, because we all know the evils of the public school system, and no parents could ever agree to allow their children to see such a thing.
A parent came up with the idea for the field trip – a surprise for the teacher on her wedding day
But I bet one radical parent forced the field trip on all of the other children, and their parents never even had a chance to object.
As is the case with all field trips, parents had to give their permission and could choose to opt out of the trip. Two families did. Those children spent the duration of the 90-minute field trip back at school with another first-grade class, the interim director said.
Apparently not.
So, let’s see. A parent suggests a field trip to see the wedding of a beloved teacher, the school agrees, every parent of every child in the class has an opportunity to object, and yet, the Yes on 8 people have this to say:
“It’s just utterly unreasonable that a public school field trip would be to a same-sex wedding,” said Chip White, press secretary for the Yes on 8 campaign. “This is overt indoctrination of children who are too young to have an understanding of its purpose.”
Yep, That darn public school taught children the exact lesson that their parents wanted them taught, and which all of the parents involved expressly agreed they should be taught. The horror, the horror of a school that is responsive to the wishes of the parents.
See, what the Yes on 8 people object to is anyone being taught that this teacher’s love and her rights are the same as everyone else’s. The Yes on 8 people believe that this teacher should be treated different from everyone else because she happens to want to marry someone of the same sex. And the Yes on 8 campaign is prepared to lie (in this case by omission of the actual facts) in order to imply that the school did something that the parents didn’t want, in order to force the government to treat this teacher differently from everyone else. Lies and fear, that’s pretty much what the people running the Yes on 8 campaign have got to offer. And no good idea needs to be sold with lies and fear.
If you’re as tired of the lies as I am, give the No on 8 Campaign some help.
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One of the things I noted from the story that I think gets too-often overlooked:
In other words … there are already gay and lesbian parents. They already have kids. Those kids are in school. The only question now is whether we treat them equally or consign them to second-class status.
—Myca
This sounds like it was handled beautifully (just completely mangled in the retelling for political purposes). I’d take my daughter to see a beloved teacher get married, if she were invited. I remember going to my piano teacher’s wedding when I was six or seven. It was good to see her with a family and a life beyond our weekly time together.