“Gay math”
Wasn’t the whole “seperate, but equal” thing settled a long time ago?
- New York City is creating the nation’s first public high school for gays, bisexuals and transgender students.
The Harvey Milk High School will enroll about 100 students and open in a newly renovated building in the fall. It is named after San Francisco’s first openly gay city supervisor, who was assassinated in 1978.
“I think everybody feels that it’s a good idea because some of the kids who are gays and lesbians have been constantly harassed and beaten in other schools,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday. “It lets them get an education without having to worry.”
. . .
State Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long criticized the creation of the school.“Is there a different way to teach homosexuals? Is there gay math? This is wrong,” Long said. “There’s no reason these children should be treated separately.”
The Hetrick-Martin Institute’s Web site says the school will give its students “an opportunity to obtain a secondary education in a safe and supportive environment. … We believe that success requires the ability to respect and value the diverse human community.”
First of all, the “gay math” thing made me laugh, but more importantly, Mike Long is totally right. Opening up a “gay-friendly” school is a terrible idea. Shouldn’t every school be “gay friendly”?
Why isn’t the “some of the kids who are gays and lesbians have been constantly harassed and beaten in other schools” quote raising a big red flag here? Does the New York public school system routinely look the other way at gay-bashing? Integrating schools isn’t just about giving minorities a safe learning environment, but making the rest of the kids learn how to be mature enough to accept people who are different.
If schools aren’t safe for everyone, then Mayor Bloomberg should make them safe. That means cracking down on anti-gay harrasment, punishing any school officials that condone harrasment, and, if necessary, using force to ensure that every kid is given an equal opportunity to learn. There’s a reason Kennedy had to send in the National Guard to forcefully integrate the University of Alabama. The fact that Bloomberg is taking the easy way out shows how little he cares about the rights of homosexuals.
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Damn right. This whole enterprise is just so creepy on 100 levels.
Maybe it’s just my Oklahoma upbringing, but all I can think is that they might as well call the football team for this school the “Harvey Milk Arson Victims”, or the “H.M. Pipebombs”. Seriously, putting all your “undesirables” in one place isn’t going to make things better for them, it’s going to just make them an easier target. Then again, it might also make it easy to keep tabs on them, which I suspect might be the idea here.
To be honest, I’m most annoyed by the idea of having a “gay” school”. Not only is it silly sounding (This is going to be the source of so many horrible puns), but it treats gayness as if it were a vocation. You can’t get a Gay degree, you know? They don’t offer Queer certifications at Learning Tree University. And come to think of it, with the proposed curriculum and student body, it isn’t any different than most public arts high schools. It’s just that the “Band Fags” will be the official school mascot rather than the school punch line.
Da dum dum.
But seriously, let’s be honest – this is going to play right into the hands of everyone who have ever claimed that gay people have an agenda to “convert” everyone. If the object here is to promote understanding and acceptance, then it must be opposite day in NYC. Next we’ll hear about those wonderul water fountains for black people and white people. Idiots.
Comment by Ross Angeles — July 28, 2003 @ 4:46 pm
Also, in case it wasn’t clear, I agree with Greg – Let’s face it, if Gay kids are being harrassed in schools, the solution ought to be rigerously protecting the rights of gay students to get an education without being harrased just for who they are, not sending them off to be apart from everyone.
The whole point of fighting for gay rights is to get it through the thick skulls of many people that they’re just like us, and in fact, they are “us”.
Comment by Ross Angeles — July 28, 2003 @ 4:55 pm
i wish they’d had a seperate “nerdy, metal-head high school” when i was growing up. that would’ve saved me a lot of ass-whoopins.
i have to agree. segregation is not the way to deal with a problem.
not only that, but this is going to give more fuel to the arrogant republican assholes who hate paying taxes that support public schools. our public schools are already in really bad shape due to under-funding.
remember when the republicans dismantled the National Endowment for the Arts because an “artist” stuck a bullwhip up his ass and photographed it using our tax-dollars? soon we’ll have the right-wing trying to get rid of all funding to public schools.
Comment by tom — July 28, 2003 @ 4:58 pm
oh yeah, i too am in full support of what greg says about enforcing tolerance in our public schools, rather than using segrgation as a way of side-stepping the issue.
i don’t want to be lumped in with all the right-wing people who are going to be screaming against this school.
Comment by tom — July 28, 2003 @ 5:00 pm
You should never worry about being lumped with the right wing or the left wing. A good idea is a good idea no matter its source. To that end, I think it’s ridiculous to give gay students their own high school simply because they’re being harrassed. Every kid who attends school gets harrassed by some other kid. Of course this makes it seem like there’s a “gay agenda”; after all, why should their harrassment be treated any differently from anyone else’s? This seems like a silly attempt to pander to a constituency which will accept the gift with open arms in the name of “tolerance” while ticking off everyone else.
Part of being in the general population in high school is learning to accept others, and the other part is learning to deal with the fact that other people will feel differently from you. They’re two sides to the same coin.
Comment by Earnest — July 28, 2003 @ 5:05 pm
How many kids at age 14 are firm in their sexuality anyway? I know I wasn’t. What if I’d enrolled in the Harvey Milk School, thinking I was into dudes, and then got caught making out with some girl? Would they have expelled me?
I’m not saying that being gay/lesbian/bi is a choice, but I think kids that young are still discovering themselves and their preferences. I didn’t even figure this stuff out until I was in my twenties. I think it would suck to have some middle school guidance counselor give me a test and ship me off to the gay school by mistake.
Comment by Dan — July 28, 2003 @ 7:30 pm
Actually, I think a clear distinction needs to be made between the normal sorts of harrasing, which ARE common (Though extremely full of shit in their own rights), and the kind that reaches almost pathological levels of meanness, cruelty, and let’s be honest, violence. There’s a hell of a big difference between being beaten soundly because some asshole thinks Jesus has commanded him to beat all gays, and being shook down for your lunch money or because you’re just weaker.
I know the comparison isn’t entirely just, because being gay is something much easier to hide than being, say black, but I do think the sort of beating a gay student is likely to recieve is one driven by undeveloped idealogical hostility, and not by the normal high school pecking order. In this way it’s similar to racist aggression.
As a result, the plight of homosexual students should be given some due consideration. The thing about this is that homophobic violence ans culture is so complicated that it can affect a wide range of people – it becomes really complicated. The people who hate gay people enough to beat the living shit out of them don’t always understand exactly what they’re scared of, and as a result, tend to lash out rather imprecisely.
I am straight (I know, I know – “Sure Ross, sure you are”), but in High school I endured bullying, and got in several fights with people who started shit with me because they assumed my flamboyant behavior meant I was gay.
Even I didn’t get the worst of it. In my case these people were enforcing a strict code of conformity that got wrapped up in homophobic nonsense. It was far worse for the first guy at my high school to actually come out – he was harrassed so much that he eventually dropped out.
Naturally, you can bet your ass that I think bullying ought to be punished so severely that the bully stops, forever. I think that assholes in school who abuse others for any reason ought to be abused in kind. Let’s let the bullies cry themselves to sleep for a change.
That said, a jock who picks on a nerdy kid might be an asshole, but he isn’t picking on the nerdy kid for idealogical, religious, or political reasons. However, that same jock who beats up a kid who he knows to be gay is probably enforcing morality through violence, and that’s the difference.
My apologies for any spelling errors. I don’t have access to a spell check at the moment.
Comment by ROss Angeles — July 28, 2003 @ 7:46 pm
Whether the motivation is ideological or not, all violence stems from a lack of respect for another person, so I don’t think that you can elevate violence against one person away from a “lesser” violence against another. If you diminish the punishment one kid has had to endure at the hands of a bully simply because the kid isn’t gay, what are you telling him? That he isn’t important because he isn’t gay or black or a member of any other special group? I just believe that while I have no problem against self-segregation, I don’t like the idea of the government enforcing segregation any more than it already does. Let the gay community open private schools if they feel the need for segregation.
Comment by Earnest — July 28, 2003 @ 8:18 pm
Well, obviously I’m against this segregation, and I’m particularly aginst it when it’s self imposed. I think retreating from the world is stupid and kind of short sighted.
I’m also not trying to reduce the suffering of people who aren’t beaten for idealogical reasons. As someone who actually endured being picked on quite cruelly, I would never assume that the nerdy kids who still get it should just deal while their classmates are taken much more seriously.
However, I never really felt scared for my very life. What I’m suggesting is that the motivation HAS to be considered when looking at violence aginst people, because the motivation goes along way towards finding out how to stop it.
It doesn’t matter how much you make people work and hang out together if you can’t have an honest look at the bullshit one of those people gets on Sunday morning (or saturday, or whenever their sky diety commands them to kiss his ass), and how it affects their view of the person their tormenting.
After all, if it’s just a matter of two people with similar beliefs in a fucked up situation, that’s much easier to fix than if one if convinced that the other is a spawn of hell, or something to be reviled and possible destroyed.
So perhaps the punishment for the violence shouldn’t be very different, but the situation should be considered differently. The impulses and reasoning is definitely more severe when violence is rooted in bigotry.
At any rate, bullies ought to be punished regardless of motivation. If two people end up in a fight, and one is considerably weaker than the other, then I think a bullying charge could be leveled, and the bully should be severely punshed. I’d almost support bringing back corporal punishment if it meant that Bullies would go home bleeding and crying, and ultimate be cowed into submission like the scum they are. Almost. I mean, I may be angry but I’m not cruel. I hope.
Comment by ross angles — July 28, 2003 @ 8:36 pm
as always forgive spelling and grammar errors
Comment by Ross Angeles — July 28, 2003 @ 8:37 pm