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Sixth Grader’s Project on Harvey Milk Banned by School
Natalie Jones just wanted to get a good grade on her sixth grade project. She didn’t know writing about Harvey Milk, a person she said stood up for all people regardless of their backgrounds, was going to make schools officials pull out their “sex education” policies.
Maybe because she’s in sixth grade, and she wasn’t writing about sex?
The California sixth grader was yanked into the principal’s office the day before her Power Point present was slated to be given in class, and complimented by the administrator for doing high school quality work. A backhanded compliment, apparently, because the principal then informed Natalie she was probably not going to be making the presentation the following day.
“She explained to me because he was a gay, that not maybe all the parents might agree with their kid watching that,” Jones said in an interview with CNN.
OK, better to pretend the gays just don’t exist then? Because, as Natalie’s mother, Bonnie, pointed out – this was a project on a man’s life. It wasn’t about gay sex. Natalie picked the state’s first openly gay politician to profile after watching the Sean Penn Academy Award-winning movie (named Milk, by the way, if you’ve been hiding under a rock and haven’t heard about it). She said it’s because “he stood for all minorities, no matter what you were.” See, nothing about sex, folks.
And that’s where Mt. Woodson Elementary School really got this one wrong. Because they picked on a kid talking about a homosexual person not only as though that were something bad but as if that’s all he was. Yes, Harvey Milk was openly gay and did a lot for gay rights. But he was also a politician in California. A pretty famous one. And this is a California student writing about an influential figure for a report for a California school.
So they’re not only teaching kids that they discriminate against homosexuals and encouraging discrimination, but they’re teaching them how to pigeonhole people based upon one part of their life.
The ACLU is demanding an apology from the school district, by the way, and has threatened to file a lawsuit.
Image: Amazon
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2 Comments
leahsmom commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amThis is one of the many problems we get when we treat the prejudice faced by gay and trans people as purely a sexual matter. It isn’t.
Shannon LC Cate commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amWhen I was in sixth grade, one of the eighth grade speech competition contestants did a speech on Adolf Hitler. The theme of the competition was “great leaders.” Nobody blinked. In fact, we were told not to judge the kid doing the speech because of A) the idea of free speech and B) the theme was about people who were effective, not necessarily nice.
If that’s appropriate for sixth graders (and actually, the captive audience was the entire school, first-eighth grade), then certainly Harvey Milk, who never gassed anyone based on religion or ethnicity, but in fact was murdered for being himself, is appropriate.
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