Calif anti-gay history referendum
faces uphill battle
09.06.2011 9:00am UTC
(San Francisco) At churches, shopping
centers, schools, and local tea party meetings in California, fired-up
volunteers have started gathering signatures for a ballot referendum that would
repeal the nation’s first law requiring public schools to include prominent gay
people and gay rights’ milestones in school lessons.
Organizers of the Stop SB48 campaign- Senate
Bill 48 was the law approved by the California Legislature and signed by Gov.
Jerry Brown in July – are telling would-be voters the new mandate would
inappropriately expose young children to sex, infringe on parental rights and
silence religion-based criticisms of homosexuality. Those are talking points
successfully used by proponents of Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that
banned same-sex marriage in California.
But so far, Mormon and Catholic church
leaders and conservative groups who spearheaded the Proposition 8 campaign have
not joined the effort to qualify the gay history referendum for the June 2012
ballot, leaving less-experienced Christian conservatives to lead the charge
without the organizational prowess and funding to hire paid signature
gatherers.
Political operatives say they can’t recall
any citizens’ initiative that made the state ballot without professional
petition circulators in almost three decades.
“If someone wrote a million-dollar check, we
would be guaranteed to get this on the ballot,” said Pacific Justice Institute
President Brad Dacus, whose legal aid firm wrote the proposed measure and is
co-sponsoring the signature-gathering effort. “That’s not the case at this
point… We are counting on people in churches and communities and families
making the extra effort to get it done.”
Supporters have until Oct. 12 to collect
504,760 signatures from registered voters to qualify the measure for the
ballot. Conventional wisdom among political consultants is that it will be
difficult to meet the requirement with such a short window and only volunteers.
Sacramento political consultant Wayne
Johnson, whose firm has worked on more than a dozen ballot initiative
campaigns, said that with the same-sex marriage ban tied up in the courts, a
presidential election on the horizon and many Christian parents with children
in private schools, conservative groups with the most cash and experience may
sit out this fight.
“We are in a different environment and a
different economy,” Johnson said. “How much of your resources and energy can be
devoted to preserving the status quo?”
Still, no one is ready to write off the
repeal attempt, especially if a donor steps up in the next few weeks to fund
professional petitioners. If ever there was a measure that could galvanize the
electorate, it’s one dealing with gay rights and school children.
“On an issue like this one, sometimes an
abundance of passion, on both sides, can make up for a lack of money,” said Dan
Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University
of Southern California and a former GOP campaign spokesman. “A well-organized
and very emotionally committed grassroots base may be able to get this on the
ballot even without significant funding.”
The new law takes effect Jan.1 but state
education officials say it is unlikely to be fully implemented until at least
the 2015-16 school year. It adds lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender people, as
well as European Americans and people with disabilities to the lengthy list of
social and ethnic groups whose “roles and contributions” California public
schools must include in California and U.S. history lessons and teaching
materials such as textbooks.
The law also prohibits any instructional
materials that “reflect adversely” on gays or particular religions.
Because of the state’s budget straits, the California
Department of Education’s timeline for adopting new textbooks has been pushed
back until 2015. The work of revising the history and social studies curriculum
framework that determines what students learn and at what grades has been
suspended until further notice.
Fears that kindergartners will be hearing about prominent gays in history are
misplaced, said Sherry Skelly Griffith, governmental relations specialist for
the Association of California School Administrators.
Currently, California students do not receive
any significant social studies until they study state history in fourth grade.
They begin learning about U.S. history in eighth grade, but do not study 20th
Century social movements, the most logical place for gay history to receive a
serious treatment, until they are juniors in high school.
Educators who devise the curriculum are unlikely to include the sexual
orientation of historical figures unless it is relevant, Griffith said.
“Frankly, there isn’t time to get into
people’s personal lives…” she said. “Your textbook needs to address broad-brush
themes.”
The group organizing the petition drive is
the Capitol Resource Institute, a nonprofit organization that has fought gay
rights bills, including measures that recognized slain gay rights leader Harvey
Milk’s birthday. Three years ago, the institute unsuccessfully attempted to
qualify a referendum that would have overturned a law prohibiting
discrimination in schools based on sexual orientation.
Founded in 1987 as an anti-abortion lobbying
group by two wealthy Christian businessmen from Orange County, former
California Senate Republican leader Rob Hurtt and banking heir Howard Ahmanson
Jr., the group has also championed a bill that would have made it more
difficult to obtain a divorce in California and opposed others that would have
made spanking a crime and stiffened penalties for hate crimes
Its annual income in 2009, the last year for
which information was available, was a little over $282,000.
Karen England, the institute’s executive
director, said that along with the Pacific Justice Institute, several other
staunchly conservative groups with long histories of activism have endorsed the
repeal and are rallying their members. England said she is convinced that the
group will succeed. “We are going to do what it takes to ensure victory to get
the referendum on the ballot,” she said.
Equality California, the state’s largest gay
rights group, has launched a web site to counteract the information being put
out by the campaign.
Executive Director Roland Palencia said his
group assumes the measure will be on the ballot, given the organizational
muscle that evangelical churches demonstrated during the Proposition 8
campaign. Gay rights activists will try to portray the backers of the repeal as
extremists who are out of step with most Californians.
“If it qualifies … we will put up a fight.”
he said.