southernhybrid
Contributor
I just caught up with this thread, so let's look at it this way. When I was a child in the 50s, learning to read, all of the text books were about white children, or European backgrounds with very light colored skin. Anyone else here old enough to remember the Dick and Jane series that were used in many if not most public schools back then? My entire grammar school was all white, and we didn't even know what gay was, since gay folks were so deep int he closet back then.
There was a little girl in my 5th grade class who was obviously gay, as she wrote love letters to another little girl. I doubt she knew what being gay meant, but she did know that she was attracted to another little girl in the class. When the girl who received the letters asked her father about them, he told not to ever talk to the girl who was writing her the love letters. Wouldn't it have been better if he had explained that some people are naturally attracted to the same sex, when it comes to romance and she could simply tell the other girl that she wasn't interested in a romantic relationship with the other girl, or she could explain that she was only interested in boys when it came to romance. I think the letter writer was likely going through early puberty, as girls as young as 9 sometimes experience puberty. She was probably beginning to feel emotional/romantic feelings for the other little girl. But, in those days, we had no idea about anything other than heterosexual parents, and children who looked like us. In those days, few of us even knew anything about LGBTQ ID until we were older teenagers, often post high school. It horrifies me to think that the Republicans and their white Christian Nationalist influences want to return to those days of total ignorance. How horrible this would be for children who feel themselves identifying as a different gender than the one assigned at birth or a budding homosexual child, who would be led to think there is something wrong with the way they feel. Ok. I'm ranting.
My point is that one can learn how to read from text books that contain children and adults of different races and different sexual orientations or gender identification, etc., without making it the main point of the texts. It would just make the textbooks more inclusive, since we live in a world full of people who are minorities, when it comes to race, sexual orientation, gender ID, religious beliefs, ethnicity, etc. If the text books were more inclusive, just maybe the minorities wouldn't be seen as immoral or too different to be part of society. The goal would be to promote tolerance toward one's fellow humans, nothing more and nothing less. Yes. I'm being very idealistic, but when it comes to children, it's not bad to promote idealism.
I would have loved to have learned to read from textbooks that included children and adults who were different from myself. When you're not exposed to other cultures, and people with different identities, it's too easy to be prejudiced or simply ignorant of those folks. To me, learning about our differences is a positive thing. Ignorance isn't really bliss, after all.
I agree that the bill the Repugs are trying to create is just another attempt to demonize Democrats. Meanwhile the Republicans are trying to promote the idea that little White Christian Children are all being hurt by Democrats trying to promote equality. Damn. How did we let them get this far on their road to trying to establish a far right Christian theocracy, especially considering that Christians are becoming fewer in numbers and the non religious are the fastest growing group in the country?
