Debating Gay Issues in School and on the Air

First Jerry Falwell meets “Teletubbies.” Now this.

“When you send your children off to school or allow them to watch educational television, the last thing you expect them to learn is deviant sexual behavior,” proclaims a mailing from Christian evangelist D. James Kennedy, another prominent leader of America’s Religious Right.

Falwell’s recent Tinky Winky snit was so unconditionally absurd that few beyond his immediate circle of narrow-minded zealots took it seriously, and he earned every pasting he got from late-night comics for insisting that the spongy little Teletubby was a closet homosexual aiming subliminal pro-gay messages at preschoolers.

Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss as casually Kennedy’s well-organized antigay harangue, with its backup from Donald E. Wildmon and his American Family Assn.

Kennedy is a silky Presbyterian minister whose sprawling, Fort Lauderdale-based evangelical empire includes a broadcasting branch that features “The Coral Ridge Hour,” his weekly TV show that airs on approximately 500 stations and two national cable networks. He also produces a radio show and separate radio commentary.

His target these days is “It’s Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School,” Debra Chasnoff’s widely hailed 77-minute documentary showing young kids discussing homosexuality in classrooms with teachers, and sometimes with each other. Endorsed by educators galore as a teaching tool, it’s being offered to PBS stations for airing after June 4, something Kennedy intends to block.

Chasnoff isn’t fooling him.

“Is there something dark masquerading behind this veil of goodwill?” asks a narrator ominously in Kennedy’s video that attacks “It’s Elementary” by twisting and quoting portions out of context while seeing it as part of a secret “gay agenda.” And in a recent mass-mailing to PBS stations, Kennedy mislabels Chasnoff’s smart, rewarding, enormously valuable film “a propaganda program . . . that will encourage children to embrace homosexuality.”

In addition, the program resorts to “anti-Christian bigotry” on behalf of advocating homosexuality, charges Janet Folger, national director of the Center for Reclaiming America, another branch of Kennedy’s ministry.

“This is the Joe Camel of the homosexual movement,” said Folger on Thursday from Fort Lauderdale. “Only, unlike Joe Camel that targets teens, this video targets children as young as 5 or 6 years old. And unlike cigarettes, there are no warning labels.”

The charges against the program are utterly asinine.

But especially dangerous coming now, when PBS is already drifting far to the right, as its coming batch of conservative-minded “National Desk” documentaries affirms. And when the Corp. for Public Broadcasting has just asked Congress to increase its federal subsidy by $100 million over four years.

It’s a time when no one in the public TV family is spoiling for a messy rumble over a gay issue. With that in mind, it’s noteworthy that “It’s Elementary” will not air on the PBS network, but is being offered instead to individual PBS stations by another distributor, with San Francisco’s KQED-TV serving as the program’s “presenter.”

A KCET spokeswoman said that station planned to air “It’s Elementary,” but hadn’t decided on an air date. A KOCE-TV spokeswoman said the Orange County public station had made no decision about the program.

Although it’s too early to get a national reading, PBS stations are known for clinging to the cutting edge of timidity. Those especially fearful of teeing off congressional conservatives, as well as donors and underwriters in the private sector, may not be inclined to embrace a program accused by Kennedy in his mailing of “recruiting . . . children for the homosexual lifestyle.”

Or a program that is “pro-homosexual,” as Wildmon charged in a recent newsletter to his supporters that included a pitch for donations to finance his own new video, which he plans to distribute widely, explaining how Chasnoff’s film is “targeting our children.” And it is.

Targeting them for education.

Education Is Needed to Counter Rhetoric

A swell idea given the antigay violence in the U.S. dramatized by last year’s grisly torture and murder of 21-year-old college student Matthew Shepard. It’s a condition of extreme bigotry crying out for more and better schooling of kids to rebut the ignorant, inflammatory rhetoric of Falwell and others who, while professing Christian love, nourish hatred of those whose sexual orientation they loathe and publicly brand as sinful.

Homosexuals are all but invisible in school curricula, said Chasnoff (winner of a documentary short subject Oscar in 1991) this week from her San Francisco headquarters. “So kids grow up not knowing anything about gay people except what they see in the media and pick up on the school playgrounds.”

Filming in 1995, Chasnoff and her co-producer, Helen Cohen, did find six elementary and middle schools in California, New York, Massachusetts and Wisconsin where some very creative teachers were providing classroom lessons about gays to students.

With these teachers showing great sensitivity, and the act of sex a forbidden topic, the results on film are striking. That includes the children’s uninhibited candor. In one sequence, for example, a lesbian and gay man visit a classroom and answer questions. “When I think of gay,” says a fourth-grader, “I think of a boy walking funny, like a girl.” Later in the program, a boy in third grade doesn’t understand the fuss, wondering aloud while chatting with a classmate: “Who really cares if you’re gay?” And a little girl recites a tender Mother’s Day essay about her two moms.

“It’s textbook propaganda,” argued Folger. “They use authority figures to exploit the natural trust of young children, and they make use of peer pressure all to the ultimate goal of saying homosexuality is good and those who disagree are bad.”

On the contrary, homosexuality is not promoted by the program, but understanding and tolerance are.

Nor is anything here remotely coarse or graphic. “Our goal,” said Chasnoff, a lesbian and parent herself, “was to show people that it was possible to talk about gay issues in schools in an appropriate way.”

Which Kennedy finds inappropriate. In his mailing, he calls the film “child abuse” and urges an end to this “tidal wave of immorality and deception.”

Speaking of Joe Camel as a sales pitch, if homosexuality can be equated with choosing to smoke, then wouldn’t it figure that Folger herself could change her own sexuality as easily as buying a pack of cigarettes? “I’m heterosexual,” she replied. “I have no desire to be anything other than heterosexual.”

Meanwhile, Folger said that 25,000 Kennedy supporters had signed petitions objecting to “It’s Elementary.”

The impact of this latest preemptive crusade by Religious Right warriors remains unmeasured, as does the backbone strength of PBS stations that in the past have seen their primary role as raising funds, not consciousness.