In Gay Rights Debate, Concern About Children Is Never Far Away : Lifestyle: When activists urge an end to the military ban, their opponents ask whether the Boy Scouts will be next. Arguments grow about schools, day care centers.

Whenever the debate about homosexuality grows tedious, gay rights opponent Lon Mabon knows a sure way to fire people up again.

He talks about children.

“It cuts it right to the bone,” said Mabon, the architect of an anti-gay rights initiative rejected last year by Oregon voters. “You’re saying, ‘Do I want my children influenced toward homosexuality? Do I want it taught to them?’ All the peripheral arguments start to fade, as the reality of the right and wrong of it hits again.”

Of course, gay activists differ with Mabon over the right and wrong of it, but on this much they agree: Beneath nearly every gay rights issue lurks the volatile question: “What about the children?”

When gay activists urge an end to the military ban on gays, their conservative Christian opponents ask whether the Boy Scouts will be next. When gay civil-rights protections are proposed, opponents argue that schools and day care centers may be forced to hire homosexual pedophiles.

Often the debate is no further than the local school board, as a growing number of communities wrangle over what to say about homosexuality in school programs on sex education, AIDS prevention and multiculturalism.

Gay activists say putting an end to gay-bashing requires teaching tolerance as early as elementary school. But efforts to do that have provoked a backlash from the religious right, which says “tolerance” is code for attempts to recruit children into homosexuality.

A confrontation is building. Religious-right groups nationwide have begun focusing on grass-roots politics, often starting at school boards, and opposition to gay rights has become one of their biggest rallying cries.

Gay and lesbian activists, meanwhile, are starting to fight back--despite widespread uneasiness, among both straight and gay populations, when children and sexuality are mentioned in the same sentence.

“Lesbians and gay men must develop the courage to confront this artificially constructed taboo head-on by taking responsible positions that put us openly in association with children and youth,” said Suzanne Pharr, a gay rights organizer for the Women’s Project in Little Rock, Ark.

The debate erupted recently in New York City, where school board elections on May 4 continued a controversy begun last fall by a proposed “Children of the Rainbow” curriculum.

The curriculum, championed by Schools Chancellor Joseph Fernandez to promote multiculturalism, required that tolerance of gays and lesbians be taught as early as first grade.

One passage told teachers not to assume someone’s sexual orientation or to speak of lesbians and gays as “they” or the “other.” The curriculum’s optional reading list included “Daddy’s Roommate” and “Heather Has Two Mommies,” children’s books that have been the subject of censorship battles in at least five other cities because they depict homosexual parents.

When a neighborhood school board in Queens rejected the curriculum, Fernandez suspended the entire board. Parents nearly came to blows, and Fernandez received death threats. Opponents of the curriculum mailed thousands of letters to parents warning that first-graders would be taught about the “homosexual lifestyle, including oral and anal sex.”

The curriculum was withdrawn for revision, and Fernandez’s contract, due to expire this month, was not renewed.

But the controversy lived on in a raucous campaign for the city’s neighborhood school boards. Of 543 candidates for 288 seats, 87 were backed by conservative Christian groups and 84 by progressive ones. Fifty-one conservative-backed candidates won, as did 50 progressive ones. Five openly gay or lesbian candidates also ran; three of them were victorious.

Jill Harris, a public-defense attorney, was one of those lesbian candidates; she won. During the campaign, she tried to play down her sexual orientation, saying she ran for school board because she feared the religious right was going to take over.

“I care about what happens to the kids in this city. The fact that I’m a lesbian is just one thing that’s true about me,” she said.

By gaining public office, gays and lesbians can erase stereotypes and ease people’s fears, she said. “We do the work. We’re not there to push some homosexual agenda.”

Dolores Ayling disputed that. As executive director of Brooklyn-based Concerned Parents for Educational Accountability, she helped several conservative Christian school-board candidates.

Ayling considers the Rainbow curriculum an effort to persuade society not just to tolerate homosexuality but to condone it. And that, she says, tramples the rights of parents who want to teach their children that homosexuality is wrong.

“Taking over my child’s mind is not a civil right,” she said. “Am I supposed to say ‘OK, anything goes, teach whatever you want?’ There’s got to be a line drawn somewhere.”

One of the religious right’s arguments--that gays try to recruit children into homosexuality--draws a quick rebuttal from gay activists. They cite studies showing that the most common sexual abusers of children are heterosexual men. Pedophiles, even those who molest boys, are rarely homosexual in their adult relationships.

But even if parents get past the fear that their child will be molested or seduced by a homosexual adult, divisive questions remain:

Can children--not to mention adults--learn to be tolerant even if they don’t approve of gays and lesbians? Or would society’s greater tolerance of homosexuality be interpreted by children as tacit approval, and would that in turn encourage more youths to become gay?

More to the point for parents, would it encourage their child to become gay?

“I don’t think there’s a parent alive who wants their child to be gay,” said Arthur Kropp, director of People for the American Way, a liberal constitutional watchdog group. “Why would you want your child to be somebody that so many people hate, because of nothing more than sexual orientation?”

Gay rights opponents key in on such parental concerns, despite scientific evidence that homosexuality is at least partly determined by genetics.

Mabon’s group, the Oregon Citizens Alliance, plans to try again in November, 1994, with another ballot initiative called the “Minority Status and Child Protection Act.”

The extreme language of last year’s failed initiative--requiring Oregon schools to teach that homosexuality is “abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse”--has been toned down. The new measure would prohibit teaching that homosexuality is the social equivalent of minorities based on race or religion.

What hasn’t changed, Mabon said, is his concern for the minds and bodies of children. He considers the nurture-vs.-nature question irrelevant.

“Some folks are born with a predisposition toward alcoholism, but if a person doesn’t drink there’s no chance of becoming an alcoholic. If someone has a predisposition to homosexuality, that doesn’t mean they have to give in to it,” Mabon said.

“If you started at the kindergarten level teaching that homosexuality is normal, good and acceptable . . . then later, once the sex drive starts to kick in and most kids are experimenting with sex, more kids will become homosexual.”

Gay activists see it differently. Yes, a more tolerant society would produce more openly gay teen-agers and adults, said Robert Bray, spokesman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. But he stressed the word “openly,” saying tolerance would not make more people gay--it would only make life easier for those who already are.

“More would come out of the closet, because they’d be liberated,” he said. “If we lived in a society where diversity was respected, then people wouldn’t have to live lies.”

Greater acceptance of gays also might save young lives, not just by reducing violence directed at homosexuals but by easing the stigma of being gay, Bray said. A 1989 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found gay and lesbian teen-agers were three times as likely as heterosexual teen-agers to attempt suicide.

“It’s not that gays and lesbians are born with some innate desire to kill themselves,” said Alex Cleghorn, 20, of Seattle. She remembers well the fear and isolation of growing up lesbian in a hostile world.

“The environment is what causes these suicides--the environment of intolerance promoted by our parents, our peers, our church,” she said. “It’s feeling like you’re a misfit.”

Janet Seldon and Shari Cohen, lesbian partners in San Francisco, hope a more tolerant society will keep Jordan, their 4-year-old son, from feeling outcast. Jordan is proud of his two moms, and Seldon wants to keep it that way.

“Sex has nothing to do with it,” she said. “What kids care about is feeling safe and feeling loved, and everything stems from that.”

Although gay rights activists have made modest political gains at the national level, the religious right’s greatest success has been in grass-roots organizing.

Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, claiming 250,000 members, is helping 70 local chapters in 33 states hold workshops to teach people how to get involved in the political process.

They have a model in Vista, Calif., where last November’s school-board election produced a three-member majority of fundamentalist Christians, including one who proposed deleting all mention of homosexuality from the district’s sex-education programs.

No score card exists for measuring the religious right’s political influence at the school-board level. Candidates do not always make their views known until a vote comes up on, say, book censorship or AIDS education.

Likewise, the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, before the New York election, counted only eight openly gay or lesbian members of local school boards around the country, all of them in California. But gay activists look to other liberal groups to support their cause in the name of civil rights.

Because U.S. public education is structured around local control, the debate will live for years, as each community weighs its own morality in seeking a balance between the right of adults to express their sexuality and the right of children to . . . well, be children.

Suzanne Pharr suggests an ethical standard to make the debate less hateful. Surprisingly, for an issue suffused with sexuality, her bottom line has nothing to do with sex.

“Is their use of power and violence and control to violate the integrity, autonomy and wholeness of another person?” she asked. “If so, then we know we oppose that behavior. . . . All people must have authority over their own bodies.”