I just encountered a new argument against allowing gay/straight alliance clubs in schools, or at least it's one I've never seen before. It comes from a guy running for attorney general in Georgia, who is upset that a Federal judge in Georgia ruled that a school there had to allow such a club (as have judges all over the nation). Agape Press reports:
McGuire, a former corporate attorney and one-time state senator, feels the court's ruling in this case has turned the Equal Access Act on its head. "I think the problem here, and I think where the court substantially erred, is that the intent of the Act was never to allow organizations that advocate illegal activity [to have campus access]," he says. "And in Georgia, sex between minors is illegal; statutory rape laws apply."
GSAs and their ilk should be denied access to school campuses, the AG candidate says, because they promote activities that are against the law. Allowing such groups is "much like allowing a pedophile club or a gambling club to meet at school," he contends.
"So there really should be no clubs permitted in school, period, that deal with illegal activity," McGuire continues. "Homosexual activist clubs in schools are detrimental to students and to the moral well-being of society," he asserts.
The problem with this, of course, is that it completely misrepresents the purpose of GSA clubs, and this goes back to one of the primary difficulties that many religious righters have when dealing with any issue involving gays: the moment they hear the word "gay", the only thing they can think about is sex. They don't believe that there is any such thing as a sexual orientation or attraction, only the sinful choice to have sex with your own gender rather than the other.
To them, a gay person is just someone who has anal sex 24 hours a day. Some of the more moderate voices will stipulate that gays do sleep, probably the same 8 hours or so a day that straight people sleep, but they're sure that they do nothing but dream of having anal sex the entire time they are unconscious. So in their head, any time two gay people are in the same room, even in the presence of non-gay people, they're having sex. Or plotting how and when to have sex. Or conspiring to force someone to have sex, or watch them have sex, or whatever their delusion is.
This, of course, is not at all what a GSA club is about. A GSA club is about supporting gay teens in the face of bigotry, bullying and persecution. It's about teenagers helping one another deal with the pressures of social expectations, and it happens with the help of a faculty sponsor as well. It gives them a safe haven to talk about the difficulties of dealing with their parents, with other kids who mistreat them, and with the same kinds of issues that all teenagers deal with.
McGuire needs to go to a public high school and talk to the faculty sponsors for one of those clubs, or to one of the many teachers who have signs outside their room declaring their room a safe place for gay students. Any one of them will be able to tell him story after story of a gay student coming to them and needing their help - not to have sex, for crying out loud, but to handle a situation where they are being bullied by another student, or to handle mistreatment at home because they told their parents that they're gay, or something similar.
These are real kids with real problems, and having a group of other students and teachers who can help them through it may well be the only thing that keeps a gay teenager alive. And no, that's not being the least bit overly dramatic, I've seen it up close and it happens every day. Just knowing that there are other kids going through the same thing, or adults who went through similar things when they were young and came out okay, may save a kid's life. GSAs are not sex clubs for teens. They are a vital resource for our most vulnerable teens to find a little support in what can be a really ugly world, made all the uglier by people like McGuire who treat gay people as nothing but a set of genitals.
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It strikes me that bullying is against the law, too; does preventing the formation of a club that would stand against illegal activity mean that that McGuire is promoting illegal activity?
In Georgia it's against the law for minors to have sex -- so by McGuire's reasoning, proms are illegal, since they only purpose of such meetings is to encourage sexual congress. Holding a prom is like holding a gambling night, or allowing a breaking and entering training session, if McGuire's reasoning is taken to its logical and not distant conclusion.
He probably thinks Boy Scouting is about knife fights and arson, too.
He probably shouldn't go, because he'd end up ranting at the teacher.
Actually, this isn't the first time this was tried. At the very least, ("Long") John Silber shut down a similar GSA at the Boston University Academy (a high school affiliated with BU, which happens to be my alma mater) under the same reasoning: that it was a sexual organisation and teenagers shouldn't be talking about sex. I don't recall what came of that, exactly, but since BU is a private school I don't think the courts got involved.
The trouble is, aside from the obvious point that GSAs aren't about sex, is that, under that reasoning, we have to eliminate sex education from high schools as well. Sex Ed clearly has a lot more to do with sex than any GSA ever has. And, come to think of it, they mention sex in biology class, don't they? Hmm... So it makes no sense to eliminate something from schools just because it might be ever-so-tangentially related to sex, or at the very least it's not consistent.
Then again, I don't know MaGuire. Maybe he wants to get rid of sex ed and biology classes, too. Or, more likely, he's just trying to raise some anti-gay rabble to get out the vote. Don't you love election years?
That answers a questin I've been pondering for a while now. Apparently in Georgia, brain-death does not automatically disqualify a candidate from office.
How sickeningly stupid. I love your blog Ed, but these horrible, backwater, anti-gay, bigot reports can be so disheartening after a while.
The anti-gay enviornment today has the odour of Hitler Youth or something. Replace the Nazis with today's religous-self-righteous-bigots; the Jews with today's gays and throw in a large, apparently indifferant or bigot-sympathetic populace inbetween. How depressing.
I know everyone says this bigotry won't last and that may be true, but as state after state amends thier constitution to prevent gays from legaly marrying, it's hard for me to see any silver-linings.
Folks, high school kids think about sex all the time. Gay or straight, doing it or not, they are thinking about it. Especially the boys. My teenage daughter said the joke is, "How can you tell a guy is thinking about sex? He's breathing." So basically, coed schools are encouraging sex between minors. Of course, when you're dealing with a member of the America Taliban, you have to think that co-ed schools might be next on his list.
If we can dehumanize them into being less than ourselves then that just makes it that much easier to steal their rights
Make sure nobody forms any club in a public high school that might advocate for the changing of ny law whatsover...
This could be argued to be advocating illegal activity.
"And in Georgia, sex between minors is illegal; statutory rape laws apply."
I thought "statutory rape" was defined as an adult having sex with a minor, not sex between two minors.
Statutory rape: it varies from state to state. Age of consent varies, of course (in some states, older minors are legally capable of consent), and sometimes who one can consent to varies: in some states two persons below the Age can't consent to sex with each other, in other states it's strictly about consenting to sex with adults, and I believe there's even a state or two that has a layered system (one otherwise below the Age can consent to sex with someone of a similar age, but not to someone far their senior).