Teaching fear and homophobia in Texas, one textbook at a time

My mom teaches nursery school here in Pittsburgh. She is required by her director to read… My mom teaches nursery school here in Pittsburgh. She is required by her director to read picture books to her 4- and 5-year-old students that represent many different types of families — divorced parents, widowed parents, single parents, mixed-race parents and, yes, same gender parents. She happily complies. But orders from the higher-ups at her school might be very different if she lived in Texas, not Pennsylvania.

According to the New York Times, the Texas Board of Education approved new health textbooks for the state’s high schools and middle schools on Nov. 5 after the publishers agreed to change wordings in the texts to define marriage strictly as the union of a man and a woman, a decision that will affect hundreds of thousands of books in Texas alone.

Current textbooks use culturally sensitive descriptions such as “married partners,” instead of the traditional — and, according to Texas law, legal — description “husband and wife.”

Let me rephrase this in a simpler form. At one point, Texas made a conscious decision to promote tolerance of gay couples, and, a week ago, they changed their minds. To them, I direct the most adolescent of responses: “No takebacks!”

In a reaction to the sudden increase of homosexuals trying, and succeeding, to marry, the United States has chosen to terrorize — and, yeah, I’m using that word — gay people by crusading to keep them marginalized. It’s as if a countrywide public announcement has been made — most pointedly through the 11 states that passed referendums approving constitutional bans on same-sex marriages that basically say, “We may not be able to control whom you sleep with, but we’ll be damned if you get rights like real Americans.”

Karl Rove, whose grave I will someday spit on, said pretty much that when he declared that a federal ban on same-sex marriages is needed, “for the creation of a hopeful and decent society.”

His bestest friend, President George W. Bush, plans yet another movement to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage in his second term. Makes you wonder: Had those tolerant textbooks existed when he was a student in Texas, would he be such a bigot now?

This is precisely the kind of backsliding in progressive thought that secular liberals feared would accompany the reelection of a born-again Christian. Since he has received his divine mandate to rule from 51 percent of voters, these fears are more and more likely to become reality, as a good chunk of that percentage elected him based on his upstanding moral code and his willingness to force it upon everyone else.

While the same-sex marriage bans receive more attention than some rephrased concepts in textbooks, these small victories for intolerant homophobes need to stop. Slowly chipping away at the legitimacy of alternative lifestyles is as bold and repulsive as larger legal movements.

Language directly shapes reality. Even the ambiguous, but all-encompassing, minutia of word choice regarding who’s permitted to be married in these textbooks has disastrous effects on individuals’ perception of what is and is not acceptable.

When I asked my mom how her students reacted to the picture books featuring same-sex couples, she responded, “The kids were totally fine with it. I mean, they’re 5– whatever you suggest to them they’ll assume is right. And now, when they see gay couples — married or not — they’ll ask questions, but won’t be shocked or upset.”

So I’ve deduced that when these kids are adults, they’ll be rational and sensitive enough not to pass referendums discriminatory to human beings who happen to be attracted to people of their own gender. But those hundreds of thousands of kids from Texas might not be so rational.

Rove continued his prejudiced rant by saying, “We can’t allow activist judges to thumb their nose at 5,000 years of history.” I wonder if he remembers a time when textbooks used the phrase “man and wife,” denigrating women to an inferior, second-class status. We really thumbed our nose at history by changing that phrase to “husband and wife!” Why not thumb it again?

E-mail Jen Dionisio at jdd36@pitt.edu.