No bears to poke

Crossposted at Equality Loudoun

Loudoun Out Loud Kickoff:
Leave a comment below if you want to attend.

A bit of background: As recently as 2005, some members of the Loudoun County School Board were discussing a policy that would have prohibited the presentation by our public school drama departments and clubs any work that acknowledges the existence of GLBT people. That ridiculous situation, largely created by former delegate Dick Black and some of his family members, was provoked by a student’s original work. See Equality Loudoun archive. Although the policy eventually adopted by the board did not include unlawful viewpoint discrimination, the debate (which included threatening hate mail and some atrocious behavior at School Board meetings) did result in a chilling effect. The message was, as one drama department head put it, “Don’t poke the bear.” That era of self-censorship has now ended with the announcement that The Laramie Project has been selected as the spring play at Broad Run High School.  This is wonderful news, and when we have all the details we’ll post them here. This award-winning play has been presented by many, many high school drama departments – as it should be.

Here is some more wonderful news: Loudoun will now have a PFLAG support group, and counselors in our schools will have appropriate material to provide to GLBT and ally students seeking support.

Metro DC PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), is starting a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth and parent support group to meet in Sterling.

Loudoun Out Loud Kickoff:

Sunday, Jan. 23, 4-6 p.m.

Leave a comment below if you would like to come and you will be provided location information.

The groups will meet every fourth Sunday during the same time.

It’ll be interesting to see who actually opposes these things and decides to make an issue of it. Would those really be good campaign issues? Advocating that kids be exposed to bullies and told they don’t deserve any help? Preventing parents and children from trying to keep their families together? I get the feeling there aren’t many bears left to poke, not ones of any consequence. We’ll see.

[Note: Meeting location information redacted at the request of organizers in favor of soliciting RSVPs. – P13]

3 thoughts on “No bears to poke

  1. Epluribusunum

    but this sort of thing brings out both the very worst and the very best in our neighbors. I remember being blown away by the response of people who went to the school board meetings to speak, many for the first time ever.

    A dear friend of mine explained good and evil to me. It’s pretty simple, and doesn’t require understanding any sectarian listings of the varieties of sin: That which decreases suffering is good, and that which increases suffering is evil. Ironically, the young woman who wrote and directed “Offsides” understood that perfectly. I guess that’s the real reason the play was so threatening.

  2. stevensrmiller

    I’ve been invited to speak at the kick-off and will also be sure to go to the play. The play will have extra significance since the first time I ever spoke publicly in Loudoun was to the school board in 2005, when then Delegate Dick Black had created a stir over a student production that depicted two male characters about to kiss each other as the lights went down. The principal argument other speakers made against such a play was that, by one scripture or another, it was about sin. My reply was that, if we were going to operate our schools according to scripture, we would eventually have to segregate students according to the denomination of the minister who consecrated the marriages of their parents, since some religions don’t recognize marriages consecrated by ministers of other faiths and, therefore, the children of those marriages were themselves the products of sin.

    Not being a student of sectarian laws (I found mastering the laws of New York and Virginia quite challenging enough, thank you), I’m not qualified to say for sure what is sin and what is not. But I have my opinions about right and wrong, and one of them is that it is wrong to regulate our schools according to what a member of the legislature thinks is sin. Each of us can teach our children what we choose to teach them about what is sin and what is not, in the privacy of our homes and the churches of our choice.

    Meanwhile, our schools must be places where our children, particularly those on the verge of becoming adults, can safely explore the complexities of their own human natures. Drama and literature are tools that we’ve used for a long time to conduct just such explorations. In an embarrassing episode I hope never to see repeated, our school system flirted with a ban on using those tools so absurd it would have prohibited productions even of some works by Shakespeare.

    Fortunately, that’s not what happened and, instead, today we are all adult enough to see a play like The Laramie Project for its value to our children. And maybe the rest of us, as well.

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