Maine's Question 1, Education, and Historical Analogies

As longtime Cliopatria readers know, the issue of bias in public education long has concerned me. A few years ago, I publicly criticized the Brooklyn Education Department for its implementation of a new standard—assessing students for their “disposition” to “promote social justice”—that amounted to little more than application of an ideological litmus test. (Students were faulted for, among other things, not welcoming an in-class pre-election screening of Fahrenheit 911.) Efforts by FIRE and ACTA showed that such abuses occurred at other public institutions, such as Alaska-Fairbanks and Washington State (which used dispositions theory to drum out a student teacher who opposed racial preferences in hiring). Under congressional pressure, NCATE eventually abandoned its “social justice” standard.

That said, I don’t have much stomach for misleading claims of indoctrination, and so have been troubled by the ads run by Maine’s anti-gay marriage campaign, which has made the threat to schoolkids its major issue. (I’m a Maine voter, and have gotten thorough exposure to the campaign each week when I return home.) The campaign’s three most recent ads are below the fold:

Maine’s No on 1 campaign has (correctly) denounced the ads as untrue. Unlike California, the Maine educational code contains no mention of teaching “marriage,” as the state’s attorney general, Janet Mills, recently confirmed. According to the most recent poll, only around 30% of Mainers believe Yes on 1’s false charge that if the state’s voters don’t repeal the legislature’s same-sex marriage law, the state will require that the concept be taught in public schools. That number is key to the outcome of the election, since the same poll showed that around 75% of those who believe the Yes on 1 charges about educational indoctrination also support rejecting the law.

Even if the numbers look somewhat favorable in Maine, Jon Rauch has argued that advocates of same-sex marriage need to do more—that as the “indoctrination” tactic is likely to appear in upcoming referenda campaigns, a positive response needs to be developed to the issue of education, beyond simply claiming that the opposition is lying. That advice especially applies to states that have stray mentions of the word “marriage” anyplace in their educational codes.

The Maine campaign provides some guidance in this regard. In California, the performance of San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom (whose presiding at a marriage between two lesbians attended by young schoolchildren became a centerpiece of Prop 8 ads) solidified the image of gay marriage producing in-school indoctrination. Even without a Newsom-like figure, it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which a student was graded down or rebuked for stating that his or her religious beliefs considered same-sex marriage immoral. (It’s also easy to imagine how this type of situation would be easily handled—indeed, it provides an opportunity for a “teachable moment.” Teachers could be instructed to remind students that the First Amendment gives all students the right to voice such religious beliefs—just as the First Amendment prevents religious dogma from dictating civil law.)

Maine equality advocates have given the opposition no Newsom-like openings, and as the campaign has progressed, the Yes on 1 message has shifted from the alleged dangers of indoctrination to a straightforward desire to prohibit content. Yes on 1 spokesperson Marc Mutty (who is on loan to the anti-gay marriage effort from his normal position as p.r. director for the state’s Catholic Church) asserted Friday that the only way for the legislature to “blunt our concerns [was] by expressly prohibiting same-sex marriage from being discussed in public schools.” Among other things, Mutty’s standard would prevent American history or civics teachers from mentioning in their classes DOMA, the Bush campaign’s embrace of anti-gay marriage constitutional amendments in 2004, or Proposition 8—or, even, for that matter, passages from Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence.

Yes on 1 ads have gone even further than did Mutty. The second ad above objects to a children’s book that pictures a number of types of families, including one with two lesbians, who are described as “partners,” not as a married couple. The third ad objects to a sex-ed teacher answering students’ questions about her topic frankly; the ad never claims that any of the teacher’s discussions involved same-sex marriage.

Regardless of Question One’s outcome, same-sex families will continue to exist in Maine, sex-ed teachers will continue to exist in Maine, and same-sex marriage will continue to exist in some states and in Canada, while being a political issue both in Congress and in other states. The Yes on 1 educational message suggests that mentioning these undeniable facts is inappropriate. Teachers at religious schools (such as those in the first and third ads above, though they aren’t identified as such in the ads) often censor content according to religious principles, but such behavior is frowned upon in public school classrooms.

In this respect, the historical comparison is obvious: as with the teaching of evolution in the 1920s, there are again calls for teachers to pretend that known facts don’t exist, so as to satisfy religious dogma. Enforcing ignorance doesn’t seem to be a winning political position: even latter-day creationists don’t demand that public schools any longer ignore evolution; they instead want creationist “science” taught alongside evolution.

The Scopes analogy might not work politically in a society that doesn’t know anywhere near as much as it should about U.S. history. And it might be that some communities actually would welcome such state-imposed censorship. But it’s hard not to stress the dangers of censorship when the official spokesperson of the year’s most prominent anti-gay marriage campaign goes on record demanding that the state legislature explicitly prohibit any discussion, in all the state’s public schools, of a phenomenon that not only exists and will continue to exist, but which involves several key events in politics over the last two decades.