City School Board Assures Gay Rights

San Diego school trustees Tuesday revised policy to prohibit hiring or on-the-job discrimination against gay and lesbian employees and to prohibit discrimination against gay or lesbian students in any educational program.

The 4-0 vote, with board member Ann Armstrong absent, came despite almost 90 minutes of often vituperative arguments to the board by religious advocates strongly opposed to adding new language to an existing non-discrimination policy, especially to protect teachers.

Speaker after speaker invoked biblical passages to assert that homosexuality is a sin, that changing the policy would promote pedophilia and allow gays to infiltrate schools to seduce children, and that trustees should put the policy to a vote of city residents.

“Who is being persecuted, the Christian or the homosexual?” demanded Brenda Savage, whose husband, Pete, said the policy “would take my rights away. . . . I can’t teach my children that (homosexuality) is wrong, immoral and an abomination to God.”

David Walden scolded trustees, contending that non-discrimination for gays and lesbians is “none of their business . . . that it never has been right,” and his father, Johnny, said he was “here for the Lord” and has been against homosexuals ever since he was picked up by a man while hitchhiking as a Navy recruit in 1949.

Nevertheless, board members voted quickly for the policy, with Trustee Shirley Weber speaking for her colleagues in taking opponents to task for misinterpreting the new language and for showing less than solid concern for minority rights.

“I wish people would read the policy,” Weber said. “It is not a special privilege” for gays or lesbians “but is talking about a non-discrimination policy in terms of employment,” promotions or extracurricular activities for students “so that they can be without fear of being harassed or being intimidated.”

“It doesn’t encourage pedophiles or anything like that. . . . I think that people have gone in a lot of different directions here” in talking about the policy.

Weber, a professor of Africana Studies at San Diego State University, then referred to her own experience as an African-American to defend the board.

Referring to demands for a public vote, Weber said she would “hate to put that on the ballot” because the “majority does not always have the right information.”

Weber added that, if a proposal for integrating schools were to be put to a public vote, “indeed, if many of our constitutional rights were to be voted on . . . I think I know what the results would be.”

Weber said her “rights as an African-American to certain things in this city” might be in jeopardy if majority rule were the only basis for decisions.

The policy was proposed by schools Supt. Tom Payzant, who said in an earlier interview that it is an outgrowth of a debate four years ago over whether HIV-infected students or employees should be allowed to remain in school.

Several speakers backed the board Tuesday.