Winning in New York - New York, New York Board of Education furor over proposed public school curriculum which would teach tolerance of homosexuality and safe sex in AIDS prevention

National Review, Jan 18, 1993 by Richard Vigilante

NEW YORK

LAST year New York City's School Chancellor Joseph Fernandez promulgated a multicultural curriculum called The Children of the Rainbow, aimed in part at teaching grade-school children "positive aspects," as the curriculum put it, of homosexual family life. The recommended reading includes books like Daddy's Roommate (in which a young boy is surprised, then delighted, that his divorced father is so happy with his new, male friend) and Heather Has Two Mommies (in which a girl, the product of artificial insemination, finds that two mommies are at least as good as a mommy and a daddy). The curriculum met resistance but seemed destined to prevail through sheer parental fatalism until Community School District 24, in the heart of white ethnic Queens, flatly refused to accept it.

Even then, the political outcome seemed certain. New York's gay-activist lobby is not only the most aggressive and self-indulgent interest group in the city, it is one of the most powerful. It effectively controls the city's Human Rights Commission, which forced the (explicitly Catholic) Ancient Order of Hibernians to include homosexual groups carrying "message" banners in the St. Patrick's Day parade, though the parade had banned all such banners for years. The gay lobby wields great influence in the city's education bureaucracy, and was specifically conceded considerable influence in the preparation of the Rainbow curriculum.

The New York press, which is less liberal than one might expect on most local issues, is over the top on this one. Even the New York Post, whose editorial page is conservative, has adopted the Times's strategy on the news pages: quote as little as possible from the curriculum or the recommended books and repeat over and over again that the folks out in Queens are opposing the curriculum because it "teaches tolerance." Perhaps the most stunning display of the apparent balance of political power was that Andrew Stein, a moderate Democrat, endorsed the imposition of the curriculum on unwilling districts, even though his hopes to unseat Mayor Dinkins in 1993 depend absolutely on votes from ethnic Queens and Brooklyn.

Imagine the surprise, then, as the opponents of the curriculum started winning. When Chancellor Fernandez took the extraordinary step of suspending the entire board of District 24 and appointing his own surrogates to run the district--something never before done except in serious cases of corruption--District 24's board appealed to the seven-member Central Board (which had hired Fernandez) to stay the suspension pending a full investigation. The betting was that the Central Board would, at best, temporize: it would wait for the investigation and hope for a compromise. In the event, the Board, led by Irene Impellezari, a local conservative heroine, went beyond District 24's request for a stay and voted 6 to 0 (with one abstention) to overturn the suspension immediately.

Now, the leak only a few days before of lengthy excerpts from Fernandez's forthcoming memoir--in which he says extremely unflattering things about the Central Board and calls Board member Ninfa Segarra a "political prostitute"--probably did not help his case. But there is a lot more going on here. Two weeks before, the Board had voted 4 to 3, over the furious opposition of Fernandez and gay lobbyists, to require city school teachers to stress abstinence over "safe sex" in classes on A/DS prevention. The swing vote came from Miss Segarra, who was appointed to a four-year term on the Board on the assumption that she would be predictably liberal.

As Miss Segarra, the only Board member with children in the public schools, told New York Post columnist Ray Kerrison, she changed her mind when she actually read the AIDS curriculum and saw what the schools intended to teach her kids. "There was information in there that made me squirm .... It made me physically ill. . . . [I could not accept] the idea that this would be taught to my daughter and son by some stranger in the classroom." The curriculum's comment on masturbation: "Do it, it's fun."

Even before the Central Board slapped Fernandez, the revolt was spreading beyond District 24. District 29, in a virtually all-black Brooklyn neighborhood, also rejected the curriculum. After the slap, one began to hear news of angry open meetings throughout the city, where parents have made their unhappiness clear to local school boards.

What's going on, in part, is that the sexual liberals have been out mugging folks, and even here in New York a mugging or two tends to shift one's perspective. As Barnard sociologist Jonathan Rieder has remarked about another social issue, "The parent so liberal that he does not mind his child sharing a park bench with the homeless does not exist." The same could safely be said of childhood instruction in techniques of anal stimulation.

Perhaps more importantly, the gay lobbyists and their allies have been caught on the wrong side of the pluralism question. Despite the virtual press embargo on the actual contents of these curricula, parents understand very clearly the difference between teaching children not to be mean to people who are different, and using tolerance as cover for sexual propaganda. In a city where nearly everything is tolerated, Fernandez et al. will not tolerate the values of traditional communities. Protesting parents are making it dear that they are perfectly willing to live and let live, and say it is Fernandez and company who are "imposing their values."