From: buckmr@aix.rpi.edu (Ron Buckmire)
Subject: FAMILY VALUES article in Los Angeles Times 7/30
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 19:10:55 GMT


Chad Jones on Gaynet@athena.mit.edu: 

The following is excerpted from a column in today's (7/30/92) Los Angeles Times,
 section E page 1.

'Family Values' Debate Is Test of State's Pluralism
by Tim Rutten

	Decency and common sense suffered a particularly ominous setback in Sacramento
this week, when the
State Board of Education appeared to cave in to a vocal group of religious extre
mists and ordered
its curriculum commission to revise a new set of guidelines for health educat8on
 in public
schools....

The guidelines' critics were particularly incensed by the wording of a paragraph
 of the 103-page
document that read:
'The traditional family, with two married parents and one or more children, is o
ne model.  Others
that are a part of contemporary society include blended families and families he
aded by
grandparents, siblings, relatives, friends, foster parents and parents of the sa
me sex.?
According to testimony by David Llewelyn, director of the Western Center for Law
 and Religious
Freedom--an organization that provides legal representation to a variety of righ
t-wing religious
groups--that paragraph offends because 'it treats the traditional family as the
equal of other kinds
of families.'...

I don't know about your neighborhood, but that paragraph rather concisely descri
bes the families
that live near me.  But, for the Board of Education, objections expressed by Lle
welyn, [Rev. Lou]
'heldon and others were enough to send the guidelines back to never-never land f
or revision.
There is much that is disturbing about that decision.  But perhaps most troublin
g is the way in

which those who oppose not only legal rights for gays and lesbians, but also rec
ognition of their
very existence, continue to batter the appropriate separation of church and stat
e....
Despite its virtues, theology is an imprecise, often misleading guide to the pra
ctical resolution of
public policy questions, particularly in a pluralistic society such as ours.

That, I think is worth recalling because today in California those who publicly
oppose extending
basic legal protections against discrimination to gay and lesbian people are alm
ost exclusively
members of relatively small, sectarian groups.

Last year, their views were decisive in persuading Gov. Pete Wilson to veto a me
asure that would
have extended existing legal prohibitions against discrimination in employment t
o gays and lesbians.
 I asked the measure's sponsor, Democratic Assemblyman Terry Friedman of Los Ang
eles, whether he
thought Wilson's decision and that of the Board of Education had anything in com
mon.
'I think there probably are a lot of people, myself included, whose support for
gay rights is
directly rooted in their own religious beliefs,' he said.  'So, I don't think an
yone wants to
exclude religious values from this or any other debate.  The danger comes when a
 single group tries
to impose its particular religious views on everyone else.  Often,  though, it i
s hard to know
precisely where to draw that line....

'Their [the opponents of the new curriculum] particular religious convictions ha
ve led them to
conclude that only one kind of family is morally acceptable.  But their desire t
o promote one kind
of family distorts the facts, and shouldn't be acceptable to any of us.'...

The American tradition of separating church and state has evolved a considerable
 distance since the
founders conceived it as a barrier to the manifest injustice of an established c
hurch.  In our own
century, enlightened and conscientious courts have construed it as a barrier to
the state?s
intrusion into liberty of conscience as expressed in religious practice.

More recently, as our common appreciation of pluralism as a condition to be valu
ed and not simply
endured has deepened, we have come to respect among our lawmakers a variety of e
xpressions of
individual conscience, so long as we are confident that they, in fact, are indiv
idual and not
dictated from the pulpit.

That distinction is crucial, particularly in the debate over gay rights.

Sometime in the next few months, the state legislature will send to Gov. Wilson?
s desk a reworked
version of Friedman's anti-discrimination bill, now called AB 2601.

How he chooses to deal with it will be a test not only of political wills, but a
lso of California?s
fidelity to democratic pluralism itself.

- -------------------end of article-------------------------------------------

Chad Jones
UCLA Department of Physiological Sciene

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