An Open Letter To All LGBT Students Of The Anoka-Hennepin School District

Dear LGBT Students of the Anoka-Hennepin School District:

This letter will help to clarify your rights, and also will instruct you on how to protect yourselves against those who mistakenly believe they can deprive you of your rights.

It is urgently important for you as LGBTQ students to understand that under the “No establishment of religion” clause of the United States Constitution, no religious superstition, hate, bullying non-acceptance of your gayness or any other religious stricture can be forced on you by means of any government entity including your public schools.

Deplorably, your public schools Superintendent has caved to many of the demands of certain adult, theocratic anti-gay bullies. If these anti-gay bullies, these adult theocrats, want their children to be raised in a religious environment hostile to LGBT human beings, then they have to send their children to anti-gay religious schools, not to public schools. They have no constitutional right — none whatsoever — to bully your public school administration into imposing a religiously-motivated anti-gay bigotry onto you. By contrast, you do have a right to a safe public school learning environment; one in which you may at times say “I am an out, proud gay student,” and never be harassed or assaulted for having said it.

The controlling legal standard for public school students’ free speech rights is that if something you say is not disruptive to the learning environment, you can not be stopped from saying it. The basis for teaching and learning in a public school is scholarly method and science, not the Bible and even more particularly not a nasty anti-gay bigot’s misinterpretation of the Bible. Ergo, for you sometimes to say “I am an out, proud gay student” is not disruptive of a public school learning setting, but for somebody to say “God hates fags,” – or anything that expresses that concept – however “polite” the language – is disruptive of and inappropriate to the public school learning environment and your right to a fear-free public school setting. If anti-gay bullying theocrats want for their children to be in school environments where people may say “God hates fags,” they have to send their children to that particular kind of religious school.

To emphasize the point that science, not anti-gay bigotry is the basis for teaching in public schools, I am now calling your attention to the booklet Just the Facts About Sexual Orientation and Youth. That booklet was produced by major medical and professional associations to educate school administrators, teachers and personnel and to counter the harmful effects of anti-gay bigotry. The organizations that endorsed this booklet are — get ready, this is a long list — the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Association of School Administrators, the American Counseling Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Psychological Association, the American School Counselor Association, the American School Health Association, the Interfaith Alliance Foundation, the National Association of School Psychologists, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the National Association of Social Workers, the National Education Association and the School Social Work Association of America. The American Medical Association is not on that list, but has a policy firmly against all forms of anti-gay bigotry and discrimination.

Hateful anti-gay bigots — including those who abuse God and/or Jesus as excuses for their repugnant bigotry — do not know better than the collective minds of all of those professional medical, science and educational organizations what is healthy for school communities in the 21st century. Obnoxious, anti-gay bigot pigs have no basis in law for torturing you or for pressuring for you to be tortured in public school settings.

I am now going to name some of the theocratic bullies that have been attempting to transmogrify your public school lives as LGBT students into living hells. The professional anti-gay bigot Tom Prichard of the so-called Minnesota Family Council has a history of telling lies about gay human beings. The MFC website makes clear that Prichard is gay bashing on the basis of religious motivations. A tab on his site’s homepage is labeled “Pastors” and then there are pages devoted to what these filthy anti-gay bigots have the nerve to call “The Truth Project.”

“The Truth Project” aims to shove anti-gay bigots’ uniquely hateful interpretation of the Bible down innocent gay victims’ throats. It is a product of the anti-gay hate group “Focus on the Family,” whose executive Tom Minnery was called out by Senator Al Franken for falsifying evidence when testifying against the inalienable rights of gay Americans. Again, the public school standard for determining “truth” is scholarship and science, not the Bible. This is not to say that there are not huge numbers of religious people, including Christians of course, fully accepting of LGBTers and supportive of their equality. (Here is a list of 236 gay-welcoming churches in Minnesota).  But it is to say that the cowardly anti-gay bigots hiding their hate behind their veils of phony and fraudulent religious excuses have no constitutional right to impose – or to cause to be imposed — a theocratic anti-gay regime on you through and in your public schools. Another shameless, lying anti-gay theocratic bigot who has been trying to make your lives hell in Minnesota is Barb Anderson, also of the so-called Minnesota Family Council.  These and other bullying, lying, anti-gay theocrats may have cowed your irresponsible school superintendent, but you must not be afraid of them because the Constitution is on your side against the religiously-motivated, mean-spirited, anti-gay tyranny they want to impose on you.

A recent, disturbing article in Rolling Stone magazine – School of Hate; One Town’s War on Gay Teens – makes clear that you have not been adequately instructed on how to gather evidence for legal actions against anti-gay bullies and school administrators who fail sufficiently to protect you against anti-gay bullies.

Every single time you are a victim of anti-gay verbal harassment or of a hate-motivated physical attack, you must create a written record of the harassment and/or of the attack, who you reported it to and what they did about it. If school officials have not taken measures adequate to stopping a anti-gay tormentor from tormenting you, then you must create a written record of your complaint about the tormentor and of the official’s response. You can create a useful record with letters. Make copies of the letters with your complaints to school officials. Mail one copy of each letter to yourself. Keep that letter mailed to yourself inside its sealed envelope. The Post Office cancellation stamp on the unopened envelope is your legally-valid documentation of the date you sent the letter.

If you are having ongoing problems with anti-gay bullying, you must create as thorough and detailed as possible a record of the bullying and of school officials’ inadequate responses. Such a detailed record with names, dates and times will help you to win eventual court cases against your tormentors and their enablers in the public school system. When school officials see that LGBT students are organized and empowered against bullying in this way, they will become far less likely to cave to the anti-gay demands of bullying adult theocrats. The school officials will see that their dereliction of duty to uphold your constitutional rights is about to cost them money. Here, you can read of a bullied gay student awarded $100,000 by a court. Here, you can read of a school having to pay $225,000 for not doing enough to stop bullying.  There have been dozens, and dozens, and dozens of these cases. Your public school officials will see that you have the knowledge and the evidence to go to a competent school bullying attorney and to say “This public school is not adequately protecting me. Here is the record of all the bad things that have happened to me in this public school. Will you represent me in a lawsuit against the school?”  What wins money in lawsuits against public schools is the fact that bullied students and/or their parents or guardians have let school administrators know about the bullying, yet the administrators have not done enough to protect the victims. That is what will make creating a thorough record so empowering for you as an LGBT student in a public school.

Additionally, cowardly theocratic anti-gay bullies will try to make you feel isolated and alone, without support. But they are not going to succeed in torturing LGBT public school students that way any longer in the United States. You have human rights supporters all over the country and the world. Your human rights supporters will leap into action in your defense if bullying theocrats continue to try to make your lives hell in the Anoka-Hennepin School District. If you are experiencing anti-gay bullying in those schools, and school officials are not adequately protecting you, contact me with the story. I will expose your tormentors to the world and activate the human rights community nationwide on your behalf and in your defense.

Image: A Gay-Straight Alliance school bus from Seattle Pride, 2008. By jglsongs.

 

New York City– based novelist and freelance writer Scott Rose’s LGBT– interest by– line has appeared on Advocate .com, PoliticusUSA .com, The New York Blade, Queerty .com, Girlfriends and in numerous additional venues. Among his other interests are the arts, boating and yachting, wine and food, travel, poker and dogs. His “Mr. David Cooper’s Happy Suicide” is about a New York City advertising executive assigned to a condom account.