From March 1997 to December 2009, I fought with the Oklahoma City Public School District to have protections for GLBT students included in the policies on nondiscrimination, bullying, and harassment, and, as was common when it came to other groups to which our students belonged, to have the district hold staff development sessions about the existence of Gay students in our schools, and their needs.

The district could not outright refuse to protect Gay students, but it could look for ways to not actually say they were covered by policies, or even mention them, because there would be a backlash from ministers, politicians, and some parents.

As one administrator explained, for him to actually mention gay student in policies would go against his personal, political, and religious beliefs, leaving the Gay students the victims of those same beliefs held by others.

It was permissible to allow the Gay students to be the objects of other people’s prejudices.

In the Buckle of the Bible belt, if you intended to move up the administration ladder or get re-elected to the School Board, you could not rock the boat. And being pro-Gay to any degree would produce that rocking.

Proof of this can be illustrated by the obstruction to any progress coming from two Lesbian administrators who had ambitions for administrative promotions, and actively interfered with any progress. One was successful in her bid for promotion while the other failed, subsequently assuming the role of advocate, but, having to rewrite her recent past and her collusion with an obstructive principal, actually became a continuing hindrance.

This left the protection of Gay students and addressing any harassment or bulling directed toward them up to the individual beliefs of people in the school community- teachers, students, parents, and administrators-, and in the buckle of the bible Belt, obviously the Gay kids were not held in high, or any esteem.

They were inherently sinful, perhaps given over to Satan, but definitely not equal to the straight kids. The assumption was that all kids were heterosexual, and those who went in any other direction had fallen into sin or had decided to dabble in the acts characteristic of abominations, and deserved the negative treatment meted out by the “good”, God fearing people.

Besides the harassment I faced and the reluctance for political reasons to adding the words “sexual orientation” and making these students’ inclusion unquestionable, on multiple occasions the reason for not doing it was because the federal nondiscrimination language did not include them.

They were not listed among race, color, creed, national origin, disability, or marital status.

The administrators and Board members claimed that since the federal government did not include sexual orientation in its nondiscrimination language, the school district could not go beyond that even though the Department of Education’s equal rights office explained that where the words “student” and “students” appeared  they included all of them, and that the list of protected classes in the government policies was the minimum with local communities able to add to that list as applicable.
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They just could not reduce that list.

The powers that be claimed that teachers, parents, and students knew that the language was inclusive, although it was obvious from attitudes and actions that this was not the case.

The words “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” needed to be there.

Eventually it became obvious that, even though the administrators and Board might have seen the importance of adding the words, they had to find a way to do it without political backlash.

At the meeting where the language was finally added, some Board members and the district’s legal counsel brought up much of the information that had been supplied to them over the years as if they had just discovered it. One even went so far as to say he had accidentally come across the very same studies he already had copies of when he surfed the net over the previous weekend, and was surprised at what he had found.

But the overriding reason and possible cover story to make it possible to add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to district policies as contained in the Student and Parent Handbook was that the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act had recently been passed in Washington, and the district needed to be in compliance with federal law.

Twelve years of submitted studies and testimony could be conveniently ignored, but the district had to be in compliance or face the same possibility of litigation they had been ignoring even though they had repeatedly been given examples of litigation resulting from discrimination, bullying, and harassment directed toward Gay students in other municipalities.

Now we have Senator Al Franken of Minnesota and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten advocating for a Student Non-Discrimination Act in the overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act because many GLBT students live in fear of harassment and abuse.

Current civil laws don’t protect them.

Al Franken has been working for years to establish statutory protections against discrimination in public schools based on a student’s actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.

Perhaps, just as with the Oklahoma City Public School District, if this becomes part of federal law, school districts will move into compliance and will have the “excuse” to do so without fear of a backlash based on the personal, religious, and political beliefs of others.