‘Family Values’ Debate Is Test of State’s Pluralism

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 extremists and ordered its curriculum commission to revise a new set of guidelines for health education in public schools.

The guidelines will set the direction for health and sex education in California schools, as well as for textbooks yet to be written.

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 one model. Others that are part of contemporary society include blended families and families headed by grandparents, siblings, relatives, friends, foster parents and parents of the same 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 right-wing religious groups--that paragraph offends because “it treats the traditional family as the equal of the other kinds of families.”

The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, who heads Traditional Values Coalition and testified against the framework, was more pointed in an interview with a Times reporter. He believes the guidelines “advocate and promote homosexuality as an acceptable and healthy lifestyle.”

I don’t know about your neighborhood, but that paragraph rather concisely describes the families who live near me. But, for the Board of Education, objections expressed by Llewelyn, Sheldon and others were enough to send the guidelines back to never-never land for revision.

There is much that is disturbing about that decision. But perhaps most troubling is the way in which those who oppose not only legal rights for gays and lesbians, but also recognition of their very existence, continue to batter the appropriate separation of church and state.

As it happens, a few weeks ago Llewelyn and I were part of a panel convened to discuss the issue of legal rights for gays and lesbians before an audience at a Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles public library. During the 90 minutes or so of discussion, I didn’t say much. At the time, I ascribed my silence to my irrational, but deeply felt inhibition about public speaking.

Later, though, it occurred to me that I had had little to say about Llewlyn’s objections to legal rights for gay and lesbian people because his arguments essentially were theological.

It is not that I disdain theology--quite the contrary. Rather, as a person with a traditional religious education, I still esteem it as the “Queen of the Sciences.” Theology, I think, is remarkable among human intellectual endeavors because it forthrightly confronts two irreducible characteristics of the human condition: the tragic fact of our mortality and the persistent miracle of human goodness in an imperfect world.

But despite its virtues, theology is an imprecise, often misleading guide to the practical resolution of public policy questions, particularly in a pluralistic society such as ours.

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

Last year, their views were decisive in persuading Gov. Pete Wilson to veto a measure that would have extended existing legal prohibitions against discrimination in employment to gays and lesbians. I asked the measure’s sponsor, Democratic Assemblyman Terry Friedman of Los Angeles, whether he thought Wilson’s decision and that of the Board of Education had anything in common.

“I think there probably are a lot of people, myself included, whose support for gay rights is directly rooted in their own religious training and beliefs,” he said. “So, I don’t think anyone 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 is hard to know precisely where to draw that line.

“I think, though, that it is relatively easy to see that the controversy over the new health education involves issues of church and state. The opponents of the new curriculum are trying to reshape the way public education in this state presents the facts about contemporary family life. That paragraph to which they object does nothing more than describe the reality of family life in California today.

“Their particular religious convictions have lead them to conclude that only one kind of family is morally acceptable. But their desire to promote one kind of family distorts the facts, and that shouldn’t be acceptable to any of us.

“It is a little harder to make the case that opposition to laws prohibiting employment discrimination against gays involves the church-state issue. I think what people seldom understand is that the opponents of these measures are a narrow group of extremists whose views are based on fear and hatred of gays and lesbians.”

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 church. 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 valued and not simply endured has deepened, we have come to respect among our lawmakers a variety of expressions of individual conscience, so long as we are confident that they, in fact, are individual 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 once again will send to Gov. Wilson’s desk a reworked version of Friedman’s anti-discrimination bill, now called A B 2601.

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