The Politicizing and Sexualizing of History

In July of 2011 Governor Brown approved a first-in-the-nation bill that requires California public schools to add lessons about gay history to social studies classes.

More specifically, the law puts “sexual orientation” alongside women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and other classifications as groups that must be included in lessons about their members’ social contributions. Starting in the 2013-14 school year, this legislation also prohibits schools from using instructional materials that reflect adversely on gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals.

When he signed the law, Brown declared that “history should be honest.” In all likelihood this new requirement sponsored by San Francisco State Senator Mark Leno will make classes even more politicized than they already are.

Significantly, SB 48 places homosexual, bisexual, and transgender individuals alongside various racial and ethnic groups—implying that “sexual orientation” is a purely genetic trait and that teachers could find themselves in hot water if other possible causes for these “orientations” are considered.

Despite decades of ideologically motivated attempts to find a purely biological basis for homosexuality, it has become clear that genetics is only one among many possible causative factors—like parental dynamics, abuse, and cultural mores. The inclusion of bisexuality and transgender folks into this omnibus classification makes a genes-alone, same-as-race assumption even more problematic.

One wonders whether presenting the cultural component for homosexuality in ancient Greece’s Spartan culture would fit into or violate this law’s inclusive-but-non-discriminatory requirements. (I’ve never heard anyone address this obvious example of the impact of culture on “sexual orientation.”)

Even before SB 48, students have regularly been given misleading information about AIDS as an equal opportunity disease—in the name of political correctness. In fact, the vast majority of these cases impact homosexuals and IV drug users.

The Center for Disease Control’s website notes that among American men 13 and over, almost 80% of new HIV infections in 2009 and 2010 involved homosexual relations—a statistic that could “reflect adversely” on a now-specially-recognized class of individuals.

One also wonders if California’s new history standards would permit teachers to honestly discuss the fraudulent and even criminal activities undertaken by the bisexual sado-masochist Alfred Kinsey—an individual whose “contribution” to society can be measured by the proliferation of pornography and the frequency with which adults now abuse children, a group Kinsey grotesquely sexualized.

I doubt that Dr. Judith Reisman’s books about the perverse zoologist’s legacy (“Sexual Sabotage” and “Kinsey, Crimes & Consequences”) will be on the reading list of SB-48 conforming classrooms this fall—or any information that conflicts with PC renderings of the past.

In sum, history designed to boost the self-esteem of select groups isn’t “honest” history.