Mercedes Schneider writes here about the decision by Willie Carver, Kentucky’s 2022 Teacher of the Year, to resign.
Carver testified before Congress and described the indignities he endured because he is gay. Carver is a highly qualified, highly experienced teacher. He loves teaching. But he is afraid to return to the classroom because of the state-sponsored bigotry that threatens teachers and students like him.
Carver told members of Congress (in part, open the link):
Identity is rarely discussed by direct means. No teachers come out as straight. They are married to opposite sex spouses whose pictures sit on their desks or whose names come up in stories about vacations or weekend trips to the grocery store.
LGBTQ teachers and students will not be afforded this freedom. They will be required to deny their existence and edit the most basic aspects of their stories, unlike their classmates and colleagues.
Few LGBTQ teachers will survive this current storm. Politicizing our existence has already darkened our schools.
I’m made invisible. When we lost our textbooks during lockdown, I co-wrote two free textbooks
with a university professor, made them free to anyone who wanted them, and found sponsors to print them. I wasn’t allowed to share them at my school. Other schools in Kentucky celebrate similar work by teachers, but my name is a liability.
I’m from the small town of Mt. Sterling, KY and I was invited to meet the President of the United States. It was not advertised to my students and colleagues. My school didn’t even mention it in an email or morning announcement.
This invisibility extends to all newly politicized identities. Our administrators’ new directive about books and lessons is “nothing racial.”
We all know how to interpret this.
Works by white people living lives as white people are never called racial.
Works by Black and brown people living lives as Black and brown people are always called racial.
The politicization of identity erases their identities.
Parents now demand alternative assignments when authors of texts or materials are Black or LGBTQ; we teachers are told to accommodate them, but I cannot ethically erase Black or queer voices.
We ban materials by marginalized authors, ignoring official processes. One parent complaint removes all students’ books overnight.
Endangered educators
My Gay Straight Alliance (GSA), a campus group dedicated to discussing and helping make schools safe for LGBTQ students, couldn’t share an optional campus climate survey with classmates. I was told it might make straight students uncomfortable.
Students now use anti-LGBTQ or racist slurs without consequence. Hatred is politically protected now.
When my GSA’s posters were torn from walls, my principal’s response was that people think LGBTQ advocacy is “being shoved down their throats.”
Inclusive teachers are thrown under the bus by the people driving it.
During a national teacher shortage crisis, I know gay educators with perfect records dismissed this year.
A Kentucky teacher’s whiteboard message of “You are free to be yourself with me. You matter” with pride flags resulted in wild accusations and violent threats. During this madness, his superintendent wrote to a parent, “This incident … is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.” The situation became unimaginably unsafe. He resigned.
Last month, a parent’s dangerous, false allegations that my GSA was “grooming” students were shared 65 times on Facebook. I felt my students and I were unsafe. Multiple parents and I asked the school to defend us. One father wrote simply, “Please do something!” The school refused to support us.
There are 10,000 people in my town; one fringe parent doesn’t represent most parents, who trust us.
Student suicides
School is traumatic; LGBTQ students are trying to survive it. They often don’t. Year after year, I receive suicidal goodbye texts from students at night. We’ve always saved them, but now I panic when my phone goes off after 10:00.
Meryl, a gentle trans girl from Owen County High, took her life in 2020. She always wanted a GSA. Her friends tried to establish one, but the teachers who wanted to help were afraid to sponsor it. Meryl’s mother Rachelle runs an unofficial GSA, PRISM, from the local library.
45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered suicide this year. We chip away at their dignity and spaces to exist. The systems meant to protect them won’t even acknowledge them.
I recently attended Becky Oglesby’s TED Talk. She described surviving a tornado with first graders, how they huddled, her arms around them, as their school walls lifted into the darkness.
I sobbed uncontrollably. I realized that for fifteen years, I have huddled around students, protecting them from the winds, and now the tornado’s here. As the walls rip away, I feel I’m abandoning them.
But I’m tired. I’ve been fighting since my first day in a classroom. Fighting for kids to feel human. Fighting for kids to be safe. Fighting to stop the fear by changing hearts and minds.
I’m tired. I don’t know how much longer I can do it.
It is not safe to be gay in Kentucky or Florida or most states in the South and Midwest. Nor is it safe to be Black or Brown in the many states that have banned teaching about the history of racism.
Willie Carver has accepted a position at the University of Kentucky where he will work in student services.
Censorship and harassment does eliminate homosexuality. Nor does it turn all students white.
Lying about history doesn’t change history. It just spreads ignorance.
One word: SICK!
So sorry this has happened. It’s WRONG and really stupid.
But then this is TAINT-Tucky.
I graduated from Boise Public schools and graduated from Boise Junior College which is now named Boise State University. Discrimination exists in Idaho.
…………
[Idaho State Journal] National report shows Idaho schools “unsafe” for LGBTQ students
By RILEY BUNCH rbunch@idahopress.com Jan 23, 2019
A new report by a national organization that advocates for LGBTQ student safety in schools shows that Idaho schools are unequipped and “unsafe” for non-gender-conforming students.
The organization GLSEN recently released state-level data from its biennial National School Climate Survey, which documents experiences of LGBTQ youth in schools including school resources that are available to them. The survey is conducted online throughout all 50 states with a sample size of 23,000 students between the ages of 13 to 21.
According to the report, 71 percent of LGBTQ students experienced verbal harassment at school based on sexual orientation and 60 percent experienced verbal harassment at school based on gender expression….
State Rep. John McCrostie, D-Boise — an openly gay lawmaker and longtime Idaho schoolteacher — said the statistics were not surprising. His hometown of Mountain Home did not feel like a safe space to come out as a young person, he said, and even when he began his teaching career there later in life, he feared being fired if anyone found out.
Eighty-four percent of LGBTQ students reported regularly hearing homophobic remarks in school, and 74 percent reported regularly hearing negative remarks about transgender people…
https://www.idahostatejournal.com/news/local/national-report-shows-idaho-schools-unsafe-for-lgbtq-students/article_21ef4ba1-e113-50b9-a266-389700bb8748.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share
Humans love to hate. If someone else does not walk, talk, look, eat, speak the same language, etc., like then apparently it is appropriate to hate that individual.
Humans hate what they fear. They fear that someone who lives a different life style or is of a different color or talks different will take their jobs, become more successful they are, will be happier than they are. It is easier to hate what one fears than to accept the differences in someone elso.
Humans love to hate because their religion has told them to hate what is different. Religion has become the root of all hate. Enough said on that subject.
It is too bad we humans cannot accept what is different and live in peace.
States with punitive policies for LGBT teachers as well as those that ignore the value of hiring an ethnically diverse teaching force will be missing out on many excellent candidates. I am sure Mr. Carver can find a job in a state where his skills and expertise will be a value, and his personal life will not be held against him. Just because a teacher is gay does not imply that he or she will be “grooming” students to become gay. It is a absurd idea that is being promoted in some states. Students need competent, compassionate teachers that have a thorough background in the subject they teach. A diverse workforce can actually promote a greater understanding and more tolerance of individual differences. Our country needs more tolerance, not less.
All this from “good Christians” who “love freedom”
I believe Jesus had only two commandments–love God and love your neighbor, to put it simply. So much for “good Christians.”
That’s what he said, that these two were the whole of the law.
Millions of Christians glom onto the “Jesus forgives” aspect and ignore everything else.
Just watch any late night Evangelical “convention” with people like Joel Osteen
The whole thing is about making people feel good about themselves because no matter how badly they behave, they can always ask Jesus for forgiveness and he will grant it.
For these people, religion is basically a Get out of murder free card.
People seem to ignore the fact that forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting, nor does it mean that there are no consequences for your actions.
They had just better pray that there is no Hell and that the Old Testament God (God the Father) is not making the decisions, because if he is, they are going to Hell for sure.
Here are some detestable quotes from the Bible. Men who wrote it have the same hates and prejudices as people do now. The BIG problem is that the Bible can be quoted to justify anything.
…….
Leviticus 18:22
22 “ ‘Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.
Romans 1:32
32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Romans 1:27
27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Leviticus 20:13
13 “ ‘If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
Carol, these quotes from the Bible demonstrate that same-sex relationships are nothing new.
Hell is never mentioned in the Old Testament. Seems to be a derivative of Greek thought.
And as long as they send $10 a month to people like Osteen or Pat Robertson of to their local church,, they will be saved.
It’s basically just another version of indulgences.
I always mention this stuff whenever the Evangelicals cone to my door. You should see hiw fast they run away.
What I have always wondered is how the people who wrote the stuff in the Bible knew so much about Gods sexual preferences.
God didn’t write the Bible. Fallible men did. We have learned in our time that some of the biggest homophobes are repressed homosexuals. Remember the GOP Congressman who got picked up for soliciting in a mens’ room—he said he had a “wide stance.”
Gay adoption is discrimination against children — Pope Francis
If I saw a restaurant owner refuse to serve a gay couple, I wouldn’t eat there anymore. As governor of Indiana, if I were presented a bill that legalized discrimination against any person or group, I would veto it. — Mike Pence
2000: During his congressional campaign, Mike Pence said, “Congress should oppose any effort to put gay and lesbian relationships on an equal legal status with heterosexual marriage.”
2004: Mike Pence co-sponsored a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would define marriage as solely between one man and one woman.
how strange that some people do not mellow with age and become more tolerant through the wisdom acquired by aging, but instead glom onto something to hate and then oppose and hold onto it like a dog with a bone
As a former fan of Francis, he’s all talk. The Merrick Garland of the Vatican. His flowery words have done nothing to change policy with respect to this and almost every other social issue. Time to tune him out. He does nothing but deliver platitudes. They’re nice. Just don’t mean a damn thing.
Same here, Greg
Francisly, I don’t give a DAM
Another crime is that CHURCHES do NOT pay their fair share of taxes.
Amen to that!
Seems like if corporations are people, then surely churches must be.
Tax Churches at the individual income tax rate. Also tax all their property.
And no more tax write offs for fake charity.
You have a typo, censorship and harassment DO NOT eliminate homosexuality.
Jennifer, who wrote that? I didn’t see it.