LA Times Editorial Trivializes Harvey Milk Day Victory

reprinted with permission from the California Ripple Effect (EQCA's blog)



In the past our community has counted on the Los Angeles Times editorial board to have our back. Last year they calmly and rationally made the case against Prop 8 to their readers, but this morning we awoke to a shocking and inexcusable editorial criticizing Gov. Schwarzenegger’s historic signature making Harvey Milk Day a reality in California:

Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger's lame-duck status may have given him the courage to sign some controversial bills that we wish he hadn't...

…By taking a grown-up political fight to schoolchildren, Leno's bill will only add to the hysteria surrounding gay rights, proving to conservatives that proponents really are eager to teach homosexuality in the schools. Schools have an obligation to teach history, but they shouldn't be used as a platform for a political agenda. Although Milk deserves recognition as a gay-rights pioneer, there are more appropriate ways to honor him. At times like this, we miss the days when Schwarzenegger lacked a backbone.

Not only does this editorial miss the point of Harvey Milk Day, it’s insulting.

The only ones using schools as a platform for a political agenda are anti-LGBT extremists who try to make easy targets of our community’s most vulnerable, in this case LGBT students. These people have actually fought against anti-bullying and nondiscrimination protections for students, have tried to systematically erase the contributions of LGBT people from history books, have tried to clamp down on students’ free speech and association rights and have exploited student-led Day of Silence demonstrations to promote grown-up led, vicious hate rallies at public schools targeting LGBT students and allies.

Furthermore, Harvey Milk Day does not mandate any changes to the curriculum at all. It simply encourages schools to offer appropriate commemorative exercises. Let’s remember that California has some of the most generous parental opt-out laws in the country. Parents can take their children out of just about any lesson whatsoever they find objectionable. Let’s also remember that the campaign that passed Prop 8 routinely lied about this fact to scare parents into supporting a vile amendment that had absolutely nothing to do with our schools.

During that time period, the GSA Network documented a marked increase in anti-LGBT bullying. LGBT schoolchildren are already at much higher risk of bullying and suicide because anti-LGBT grown-ups have already taken this political fight to them.

With all due respect, members of the editorial board, we are not the ones trying to politicize classrooms. We are not the ones waging our battles on the backs of vulnerable youth. Harvey Milk Day, as well as a number of nondiscrimination and safe schools bills that EQCA has helped to pass, make sure that LGBT students are safe to learn, grow and be themselves and that other students learn the value of diversity and the cost of violence.

At a time when the same people who took away marriage in California are again using schoolchildren as pawns to further their anti-LGBT agenda in Maine, lying about anti-bullying curriculums in California and about the so-called “consequences” of the freedom to marry, we really should be able to count on one of the country’s most esteemed newspapers to cut through the spin and look at the facts.

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