GLAD atty: Lexington lawsuit has had chilling effect on schools
by Ethan Jacobs, Bay Windows
Thursday Sep 27, 2007

Nima Eshghi, an attorney for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), told attendees at the Greater Boston PFLAG annual meeting Sept. 24 that the federal lawsuit by a pair of families against the town of Lexington for including LGBT-themed books in the elementary school curriculum has had a chilling effect on other schools. She said last spring a lesbian couple with a daughter in a Watertown elementary school contacted GLAD to complain that the school had pulled the book And Tango Makes Three, a true story about a pair of male penguins that became mates and raised a baby penguin, from the library shelves in response to parent protests. The couple spoke with the librarian and the school principal and urged them to restore the book to the library, but they were rebuffed.

"Ultimately the school said, ’We just don’t want to be sued like Lexington.’ And they kept the book out," said Eshghi. She said the couple chose to pull their daughter out of the school. Eshghi said GLAD did not get involved directly in the situation, and she does not know which school the couple’s child attended.

Eshghi said opponents of LGBT-inclusive curricula, both in Massachusetts and nationally, have exploited state parental notification laws around sex education by asking schools and courts to apply them to any discussion of LGBT families or people.

"What these parents groups, who are really fueled by a larger right wing establishment, are trying to do is take very, very narrow opt-out and parent notification rules that exist at the middle school and high school level purely for sex education, and only to be used in certain narrow circumstances, and they are trying to take that, bring it down into the kindergarten, first and second grade level where kids are not talking about sex. They are talking about who’s in a family. ... They’re not objecting to studying families. They’re objecting only to certain families. They want their children opted out of learning about certain families," said Eshghi.

She told the crowd gathered at the Congregational Church of Needham that GLAD has learned that some schools in Massachusetts have done just what the families in the Lexington case have demanded from Lexington Public Schools, notifying parents with objections to homosexuality about any LGBT-related materials and allowing them to opt their children out of any discussion of LGBT people and families. She said many schools will grow tired of expending resources to screen for any reference to LGBT people in their curriculum, and they will follow the Watertown school’s example and do away with the LGBT books. GLAD is filing an amicus brief in the case, she said, because the organization worries it could have a chilling effect on discussions of LGBT people in the classroom.

Last February U.S. District Court Judge Mark Wolf dismissed the Lexington case brought by the two families, David and Tonia Parker and Robert and Robin Wirthlin, but the families have appealed that decision. Eshghi explained that one of the core arguments Wolf used in his dismissal is that part of the mission of public schools is to inculcate the value of diversity in the students. Eshghi said in its amicus brief GLAD will go farther, arguing that the Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly over the years that one of the missions of public schools is to bring together diverse groups.

She said GLAD is filing the brief "so [schools] can have some language coming from our briefs that we hope will make it into this case so they can offensively say, you know what, it’s not just that we’re permitted to teach this material; it’s that we are mandated to teach this material. This is our mission, and this mission is actually rooted in larger constitutional principles about what the role of public schools is."