Good book

Posted on February 28, 2008 by David

>Here is a transcript of one of the speeches before the School Board on Tuesday night. It was received with tremendous applause, quite deservedly so:

“My name is Katie Neville; I’ve lived in Mr. Marshall’s School Board district for 23 years, on ____ St. in the same house; three of my children graduated from high school in Loudoun County. My husband – I only have one, I’ve still got him – have (inaudible due to laughter) children and five grandchildren. I’m also a cradle Episcopalian. That’s a term that will make sense to Dr. Hatrick, meaning I’ve been one for about sixty years. I’m also a fourth-generation teacher, and I would like to share with you a story about my mother, who stood on the Courthouse steps in 1958 in Warren County, and said it’s wrong to close the schools rather than enroll Black students. That’s where I learned to stand up for what I think is right.

“And what I think, is that when we remove this book from any of our libraries, we send the wrong message. We send the message that some families are less acceptable than other families. And as a public school ““ I’ve worked for the public schools for thirty-six years. I’ve worked with every kind of family. And I think, that if a parent has a concern about a book, there’s a very easy way to solve it: ‘Dear Librarian, this book is not suitable for my child. Please let him check out another one.’ I don’t think it’s right to remove this book, I think it sends the wrong message. And I think as a public school system, we need to stand up, to teach tolerance and respect for every student, every staff member, and every family that’s part of our system.

“That’s the message in this book,” (holding up Tango) “and that’s the message in this book” (holding up the Bible).

Posted in Advocacy, Commentary | Tagged , , , , | 24 Comments

Common ground

Posted on February 26, 2008 by David

You know, Barbara Curtis* (Mommy Life) just said something I really agree with:

I’m wondering if a picture book about a boy who wanted to grow up to be a priest – maybe based on a true story – would be acceptable on public school library shelves? Or how about a story of a girl who one day got off the bus crying because two boys – one from a fiercely atheist home – had called her “pea-brain” and “stupid” because she is a Christian? This really happened to my daughter Maddy a couple years ago (the only time she ever came home without a smile on her consistently happy face).

The point is that all children will encounter opposition at some point in their lives – they are too fat, too skinny, too smart, too dumb, too clumsy, too shy. Their house is too small, their car too old, their parents too weird. Maybe their parents are two dads or two moms. You know, I don’t think in the world of little children these things really matter all that much.

The early years are the years for building up character, compassion and kindness so that when these issues come up our kids will respond in the right way. They would not bully someone for being homosexual or having homosexual parents because they do not bully, period.

First of all, I very much think that the two hypothetical books she mentions here should be be included in library collections, just as I think And Tango Makes Three should be included. And bullying for any reason, like what happened to her daughter, should be absolutely unacceptable in our schools and elsewhere in our community. We are the adults, and we need to make this clear to our children. Part of doing that is to show that we, the adults, accept all kinds of people ourselves.

It’s too bad, then, that her conclusion is based on such a false assumption as this:

When a group – many with no children in the public schools – dress up in black and white to defend a book about Penguins, you know it’s about more than penguins.

It’s probably not really her fault that she thinks this (even though many of our GLBT members do have children in our public schools, we’ll set that aside for now), because our local media has been reporting things like this: “Equality Loudoun is encouraging people to attend the meeting wearing black and white.”

This is technically true – we have been sharing with our members and supporters what has been shared with us by other people who have contacted us on their own. These are, as far as I can tell, people who saw our organization mentioned in news accounts of this issue and found us online. They are overwhelmingly people who are not particularly political, and not affiliated with any group. They are also almost all parents, in particular parents who are actively involved in their children’s schools.

So to say that “a group” is planning to attend tonight’s meeting, of which “many” have no children in the public schools, is not really quite…let’s just say “comprehensive in its truthiness.”

As I said, I think Barbara probably has good reason to see things the way she does. Individual parents who are upset by the decision to remove the book don’t have websites; we do. The media is always drawn to framing things as a showdown between advocacy groups. Everything fits into a tidy narrative that way.

And Barbara asks a very good question in another post, which is “why is David the go-to guy” for reporters when they write about issues like this? That may seem like an easy question to answer; after all, Equality Loudoun is the local GLBT community group, and the complaining parent specifically said that what she dislikes about the book is its positive portrayal of a family with two daddies. Of course the reporters called us.

But now, I think it’s quite appropriate to insist that this is not really a gay issue. The issue here is whether a single point of view can be privileged in the public school libraries that many different kinds of families use. Frankly, the answer is no. In my very first post about this issue, I raised this question: What’s next? If a parent can have the idea that a loving family can have two mommies or two daddies removed, what idea is next on the list? That is still the question, and it should concern us all.

*And yes, she does get paid for writing for Focus on the Family. Her upcoming article is about the Parker case, the Massachusetts parents who wanted their children isolated from the children of gay couples – and books about them.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Somebody has some ‘splainin’ to do

Posted on February 25, 2008 by David

Well, this is certainly an interesting development.

One of the many parents who is angered by the unilateral decision of Superintendent Hatrick to remove And Tango Makes Three from Loudoun County elementary school libraries has just pointed out to me that the written policy was not followed after all.

According to that written policy, Procedure for Review of Challenged Materials, under § 5-7, D:

1. Either parent of a child enrolled in Loudoun County Schools may state an objection to and request a review of a material or materials used in the instruction of that child or accessible to that child.

2. Requests for review of materials shall be in writing and objections shall be specific as to the materials and reason(s) for the objections.

3. Requests for review shall be made to the principal of the school the child attends. The principal shall appoint a committee of appropriate personnel to review the material and make a recommendation on the disposition of the complaint.

This was done properly (assuming of course, that the complainant’s child actually attends Sugarland Elementary); see the Request for reconsideration of instructional materials, dated May 28, 2007.

4. The principal shall notify the parent who requested review of his/her decision in writing within fifteen school days of receipt of the written request.

This was done properly; see the review committee report, dated June 6, 2007, and letter to the complainant, dated June 12, 2007.

5. The decision of the principal may be appealed in writing to the Division Superintendent, who shall appoint a division review committee to review the materials and make a recommendation on the disposition of the complaint.

6. The Division Superintendent shall notify the parent of his/her decision in writing within fifteen school days of receipt of the written appeal.

7. The decision of the Division Superintendent may be appealed in writing to the School Board, which shall make the final decision to retain or withdraw the challenged material. This decision shall be made within 30 school days of the receipt of the written appeal or as soon thereafter as practicable and shall be made in writing to the parents who requested review.

8. All appeals under this policy must be made within 5 school days of receipt of the decision being appealed. If a decision is not appealed within this time limit, the decision on the request for review shall be final.

Here’s where things get interesting. The complainant’s appeal of the school level review committee decision is dated September 18, 2007. The policy was not, in fact, followed. According to the written policy, the unanimous decision of the Sugarland Elementary review committee to retain the book in general circulation should be final. The district level review committee should never even have been convened – let alone its decision contravened, and let alone that decision applied to ALL elementary schools.

9. All materials in process of being reviewed shall remain in use or circulation until a final decision is reached.

The policy was not only breached once, at the improper appeal of the school level committee decision, but twice: The district level review committee issued its decision on October 3, 2007. The complainant’s appeal to the Superintendent is dated December 28, 2007 – again, well beyond the time limit of five school days allowed by the policy. [Update, 2/29: In re-reading the documents, it’s not clear that the complainant is responding to the October 3rd committee recommendation, or whether she was even made aware of it. This may help to explain Dr. Hatrick’s statement of February 26, in which he refers to his own failure to act within the prescribed time limit, and not the complainant’s. Regardless, the complainant still failed to file her appeal within the time limit, and her September appeal should have been rejected.]

Why was this particular individual allowed to flout the written policy, weak as it is? And why is the LCPS administration pretending that the policy was followed, when they know very well that it was not? Erica Garman asked LCPS spokesman Wayde Byard about the apparent discrepancy, and he indicated that the policy had been followed. I pointed out in the previous post that deliberate misinformation was being spread about the district-level committee vote. At least one School Board member was under the false impression that the vote was 50-50, when in reality it was 9-2-1 in favor of retaining the book.

Who is getting this extra-special treatment from LCPS, and why?

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Now we know

Posted on February 25, 2008 by David

Update: Erica Garman of Living in Loco filed an independent FOIA request, and has posted the documents online.
We have now seen the documents pertaining to the Sugarland Elementary* parent’s challenge to And Tango Makes Three. I’ll just share this part: One of the questions on the challenge form is “Is there anything good in this material? Please comment.” The parent responds, “I can not say anything good about this book.”

This detail alone demonstrates without a shadow of doubt that this person is uninterested in any viewpoint other than her own. Her objection to the book is simply that she can’t tolerate the ideas that it contains – anywhere, for anyone, of any age. Otherwise, her answer to that question would have been different.

This is a book that has won the following awards:

– American Library Association Notable Children’s Book
– ASPCA’s Henry Bergh Award
– Gustavus Myer Outstanding Book Award
– Nick Jr. Family Magazine Best Book of the Year
– Bank Street Best Book of the Year
– Cooperative Children’s Book Council Choice
– CBC/NCSS Notable Social Studies Trade Book
– Finalist for 2006 Lambda Literary Award

Although it’s perhaps less flashy, the authors are particularly proud of this award: Last year the 5th grade classes of Manhattan Country School, Children’s Workshop School, and Central Park East 11 in New York City chose co-authors Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell to receive their “Living the Dream” Award, given each year in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, and in recognition of a children’s book “that best provides positive and authentic cultural images and dispels prejudice.” The students reached this decision through careful consideration, open debate, and discussion with their teachers throughout their year-long judging process. The authors say:

Hearing them talk about our book gave us both clear evidence of the importance of giving children free access to books and ideas, so they can form their own opinions.

But Sugarland Parent could not “say anything good about this book.” This speaks volumes about her, and what it says is not pretty.

Let’s just say that she is unable to say anything good about it because she dislikes penguins. A very good comment to this Loudoun Times-Mirror article addresses what now very much appears to be her motive:

It is clear, since the American Library Association has reported that “Tango” is one of the most challenged books, that this particular challenge is part of a larger effort by religious conservatives to further their theocratic agenda. After all, if homosexuality is present in other species, it is strong evidence that it is innate in humans as well, and not a “choice” as the religionists like to portray it. As always, their preferred course of action is to censor any material that conflicts with their particular views.

The current school policy allows — and even abets — these censorship efforts by allowing the perpetrators to remain anonymous. Any change in the school policy should address this particular factor. Book challenges should be public, with those making the challenges identified to the community. And the process should always default to open access. That is, the school board could overturn a decision to remove a book, but could not overturn a decision to keep it.

Once again, a Loudoun official’s catering to a small intolerant minority has painted Loudoun in the national news as a bunch of backward reactionary rubes. [Emphasis added]

Whatever Dr. Hatrick’s intention was (which I suspect was, ironically, to avoid controversy by placating the complaining parent), he is wholly responsible for this mess. It’s not fair to expect the School Board to fix it; their job is not to micro-manage and clean up after the Superintendent, their job is to set policy so that mistakes like this can’t happen.

It’s hard to admit it when you’ve made a mistake, but sometimes that’s the only thing you can do. There’s just no way of spinning out of this.

Unfortunately, the response we are now seeing is the deliberate spreading of misinformation in order to make the decision appear justified. Specifically, the Superintendent’s office has been circulating the rumor that the review committees’ votes on the book were “split.” This is flatly untrue. Here are the facts, directly from the obtained documents:

– At the school level, the committee of (3) unanimously voted to retain the book.

– At the district level, the committee of (12) voted overwhelmingly to retain the book. (9) voted to retain, and only (2) voted for removal, with (1) abstention.

– At both the school and district level, the discussion and vote was limited to Sugarland Elementary only, not all Loudoun elementary schools. We are aware of no other case of book challenge in which the decision was applied to any school other than the one at which the challenge was filed.

The misinformation campaign is an attempt to deny one of the things that parents are so angry about: That one individual, our Superintendent, contravened the recommendations of these review committees. It’s unprofessional, and it won’t work. The decision was wrong, for all the reasons already discussed, and the book should be returned to our public elementary school libraries.

* It’s unclear whether the complainant’s children actually attend Sugarland Elementary.

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CWA ladies caught in another lie

Posted on February 24, 2008 by David

Blessings upon the folks at Good As You for finding this gem from the ladies of Concerned Women for America (you may recall this outfit as the home of disingenuous Senate candidate Patricia Phillips. She’s also the anti-gay activist who claimed to the Washington Post that the LCPS policy for student theatrical productions would prevent “the normalization of homosexuality,” which could only be the case if the policy were abused.)


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In this audio clip, the ladies explicitly attack Equality Loudoun by name, suggesting that our members are somehow by definition not part of the category “parents” (and isn’t that kind of the point of why they don’t like this book?) They also hilariously claim that the children’s book And Tango Makes Three is “very sexually explicit” (CWA ladies do seem to have a ‘special’ problem with regard to factual accuracy). Once challenged on this whopper by Daimeon at Pam’s House Blend, Janice Crouse of CWA sheepishly claimed to have been “thinking about another book.” Good As You:

[W]hile we accept that she made a mistake, the mentality of viewing hetero-centric books in one way and homo-centric ones in another would seem to be the larger error.

Exactly, and that is the error that our friend Jack makes in his comments on this blog. To him, a book that tells a true story about a penguin family with two daddies constitutes presenting “an opinion,” while the countless books that illustrate mommy-and-daddy families and prince-and-princess stories do not. This, of course, is nonsense. All books convey a point of view to their readers.

I am underwhelmed by Janice Crouse’s note of apology. The readers of whatever tripe CWA sends out to their subscribers will not receive that information, they will simply absorb the lie about the book as intended.

CWA has pulled both the audio clip and the article from their website.

There has been no retraction of the lie they told.

Posted in Commentary, News | Tagged , , , , , , , | 26 Comments

“Ex-gay” therapy for penguins. Who knew?

Posted on February 22, 2008 by David

This just gets weirder and weirder.

An amusing little treat landed in my inbox yesterday, containing the answer to the question “where are the national anti-gay advocacy groups in the ‘Tango’ story?” It’s an alert from the James Dobson/Focus on the Family franchise “Citizen Link,” urging Dobson groupies across the nation to TAKE ACTION by mass mailing their boilerplate letter to our Superintendent.

They link, with great fanfare, to “the real story of the penguins,” as if Silo, who later went on to form a pair with a female penguin, Scrappy, is the newest poster child for the “ex-gay” industry (did he seek reparative therapy?) From the alert:

Candi Cushman, education analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said the book is far from a “true story.”

“It’s very misleading,” she said, “and it’s a very disingenuous, inaccurate way to promote a political agenda to little kids. What they’re not telling kids is that the supposedly gay penguin who is the star of this story later mated with a female penguin in real life.

They even add “It just goes to show: Penguins can change,” which made me laugh so hard I snorted coffee up my nose. Thanks a bunch, Citizen Link.

Only anti-gay activists would accept as unproblematic the notion that penguins, or any other non-human animal, can be “gay” or “straight.” Maybe they can, maybe they can’t. That knowledge is not something we have access to. We can’t interview them to assess whether they experience something like what we understand as orientation, we can only observe their behavior.

This is what Bruce Bagemihl, PhD, author of the authoritative book on the topic of same sex pair-bonding and sexual behavior in the animal kingdom, Biological Exuberance, says about the language challenge he faced in writing the book, which was intended for both an academic and lay audience:

With animals…we can often directly observe their sexual (and allied) behaviors, but can only infer or interpret their meanings and motivations…

…Virtually no terminology for animal behavior – particularly sexual behavior – is entirely free of human (cultural, historical, etc.) associations. When confronted with this situation, we have two options: construct an alternative vocabulary of relatively opaque labels and unwieldy circumlocutions that attempts to avoid such bias (but inevitably falls short of this ideal); or use the already available terms with careful qualification of their meanings and an understanding of their historical context, such that they become uncoupled from their anthropomorphic connotations. In Biological Exuberance, I opt for the latter.

The point here is that when academics refer to “homosexuality” in other species, it’s not really correct – but we don’t have an alternative vocabulary to talk about what we observe. We can’t possibly know whether other animals experience something like sexual orientation, and we shouldn’t jump to that conclusion.

The behavior illustrated in And Tango Makes Three, the bowing and singing and nest-building, is in fact penguin courtship behavior, for whatever that’s worth. Again, it’s behavior, not evidence of an internal orientation. What we know is that this pair exhibited a strong drive to parent a chick, so they were given one that otherwise would have died, and that chick is now a healthy adult.

“They got all excited when we gave them the egg,” said Rob Gramzay, senior keeper for polar birds at the zoo. He took the egg from a young, inexperienced couple that hatched an extra and gave it to Silo and Roy. “And they did a really great job of taking care of the chick and feeding it.”

That’s the story, and it is true. Anything more than that is projection.

The book And Tango Makes Three is not about orientation. Nowhere do the authors suggest that Roy and Tango are “gay,” or that they have a sexual relationship; what they have is a pair-bonding relationship, a phenomenon that is not at all uncommon between members of the same sex in a wide range of species. In this Daily Show clip we blogged a few days ago, the zoologist explains in a very matter-of-fact way that there are, in addition to Roy and Silo, two other same-sex pairs in the penguin house.

And Tango Makes Three is really about the strong drive to pair-bond and raise a chick. It’s about, from a child’s point of view, the strong desire to be part of a family, and that the important thing about a family is the way the members take care of each other. It’s about the love, nurturing and safety that family represents, no matter what the family looks like. That’s a very appealing message, and a very important message.

There is necessarily some anthropomorphizing involved, because that’s what is so compelling about animals, especially to children. Penguins in particular display a degree of sacrifice, devotion and cooperation in raising their babies that is very attractive to us as humans. That’s why March of the Penguins is so popular, but we don’t really know whether penguins experience what we understand as love, either.

Of course, the part that was left out of March of the Penguins is that penguins don’t mate for life, the way that geese do, for example. A pair may stay together for a few years, then find different partners. That’s what happened with Roy and Silo, too. It’s not a stop-the-presses moment.

People getting all bent out of shape over this story need to chill out, and consider welcoming the opportunity to have a conversation with their children about what they believe. As the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression recently wrote to Dr. Hatrick,

No one is being forced to read And Tango Makes Three. But restricting student access violates the rights of children whose parents want their children to be taught tolerance and respect for diversity. The role of the library is to allow students to make choices according to their own interests, experiences, and family values.

Join the Facebook group Put the Penguins Back, and get connected with others who agree.

Parents are planning to attend the next School Board meeting in a show of support for returning And Tango Makes Three to general circulation, as recommended by both review committees. They are asking that folks wear black and white (nice touch).

Tuesday, February 26, 6:30 pm
LCPS Administration Bldg
21000 Education Court
Ashburn, Virginia 20148

Map of 21000 Education Court Ashburn, VA 20148, US

You do not need to speak. The objective is to visibly show support for this book and for the right to a diversity of ideas in our public schools. Please be there if you can, and spread the word.

Posted in Commentary, News | Tagged , , , , , | 29 Comments

Now we’re on “The View”

Posted on February 20, 2008 by David

Whoopi Goldberg thinks that our public school administrators need to spend some time watching Animal Planet. Joy Behar wants to know why anyone wouldn’t like this true story about creatures taking care of each other. Sherri Shepard displays an astonishing degree of unexamined discomfort about gay people.

These are exactly the conversations people need to be having. Parents who believe that they can exert control over how and when their child understands that some children have two daddies or two mommies need to gently be told the truth. This is part of the world as it is. The only reason it would ever be disturbing to a child is if you make it disturbing.

Thanks to PageOneQ for the video of the broadcast, from February 18:

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