As California school districts discuss how to implement opt outs due to the U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming parents’ right to withdraw children from discussions on LGBTQ+ issues that conflict with their “sincerely held religious beliefs,” it’s important to understand how California parents have historically been misrepresented, which has resulted in the creation of unconstitutional state laws. I witnessed this firsthand as a school board member in Orange County.
In 2018, while serving on the Orange Unified School Board, I reviewed the new Teen Talk, considered the most state-compliant curriculum under the California Healthy Youth Act (AB 329). Having worked in public education since 1990—and even co-writing an AIDS prevention curriculum for incarcerated youth—I was alarmed by what I found. It contained teachings about gender being based on one’s feelings. The Teen Talk Video told kids, “You can be gender fluid, gender queer, gender non-conforming, or no gender. School is a place to… change and experiment.” It used the Genderbread person to teach kids that gender is ever-expanding and ever-evolving. It normalized polyamory and introduced expansive plus sexualities like pansexuality—terms that were unfamiliar to most parents.
When I brought this forward, parents were shocked. At a May 30, 2018 meeting, after strong public testimony, our board voted 4–3 to halt the program. A week later, the ACLU sent a letter reprimanding us, claiming we fostered “an atmosphere of LGBTQ bias” and citing a statistic that “89% of California parents support Comprehensive Sex Education.” Curious, I contacted the UC Berkeley professor behind the study, Dr. Norman Constantine. He confirmed the 2007 survey only measured support for contraception and HIV / STD prevention versus abstinence-only education. The survey did not ask about gender identity, pansexuality, or non-monogamous relationships—the very content embedded in the state-recommended curriculum, Teen Talk.
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