Homophobia is alive and unwell in North Hollywood
It's alive and unwell everywhere, but one protest against a Pride Day hits close to home
Writing this post is such a drag. Whoops — I just used the word “drag.” Now I’m probably going to get shunned in the state of Florida.
Or the suburb of North Hollywood, California.
Typically, given the size of my audience, I’m slaying to the choir. Any regular reader here will have sussed out my views by now. For better and worse, I tend to write in an echo chamber. Better for my sanity. Worse for my defenses.
Then came the past three days.
In 1979, I graduated from Saticoy Elementary School in North Hollywood. That was a long time ago, a happy time for me even though it required adjusting to a new school.
But if you go by the beliefs of some Saticoy parents and alumni, my life could have been ruined if there had been a Pride Day that June, as Noah Goldberg of the Los Angeles Times describes in this May 24 article:
Outraged conservative parents at an L.A. elementary school say they plan to keep their children home on the school’s Pride Day to protest the school teaching students about gay parents.
A group of parents at the North Hollywood kindergarten-through-5th-grade Saticoy Elementary School launched an Instagram page about a week ago calling out the school’s administration and urging other parents to keep their children home on June 2, the day the school plans to hold its Gay Pride and Rainbow Day assembly, according to the page.“
“Keep your kids home and innocent,” says a flier posted by the group, Saticoy Elementary Parents. “Videos will be shown to the students including one where it says, ‘some kids have 2 mommies, some have 2 daddies’. This has caused outrage among parents.”
The outrage centers on recognizing a reality that should hardly be shocking or in question in 2023. This isn’t even about the “indoctrination” bogeyman, educating kids about the past. This is about a simple choice: Can we even acknowledge that not every pair of parents is a straight man and woman, or must we choose exclusion over inclusion?
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