L.A. school board president says anti-gay protests make students afraid

L.A. school board president says anti-gay protests make students afraid - The Washington Post

On June 2, more than 19 years later, Goldberg, the president of the Los Angeles Unified school board, waded through a crowd of protesters upset that the district’s educators were celebrating Pride Month in part by reading “ The Great Big Book of Families” at an assembly.

Goldberg listened to the reading of the 2010 picture book, which describes all sorts of families: those with a mom and a dad, some with single parents, and others headed by foster parents, adoptive parents or grandparents.

On one page, it describes families that “have two mommies or two daddies.”

That’s when Goldberg realized what the protesters were so upset about: families like hers.

Goldberg expressed her disappointment four days later at the board’s regularly scheduled meeting on June 6. She felt compelled to denounce the protest outside Saticoy Elementary School, which Goldberg says is part of a growing effort across the country to drive LGBTQ+ people back into the closet. Her fiery, six-minute speech married Goldberg’s decades-long career as a politician with the lifelong activism that started with her work as a leader of the free speech movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s.

“I’ve been confronting this issue my entire life,” Goldberg said in the speech that has since been viewed more than 1 million times. “I’ve been threatened. I’ve been harassed. I’ve been denied jobs because of who I am and who I love.”

Goldberg then turned her attention to the protesters outside Saticoy Elementary, including some who accused educators of trying to groom students for pedophiles by teaching them that gay couples raise children. That’s when Goldberg’s voice changed from confident declaration to emotional yell.

“What do you think that did to them?! What do you think that did to every gay teacher, every gay custodian, every gay worker in this city, every gay kid?”

She answered her own questions.

“It made them afraid! It made them afraid! How dare you make them afraid because you are!”

Goldberg, 78, was elected school board president earlier this year, coming back to where her political career started four decades ago. After working as a teacher for 16 years in Los Angeles, she was elected to the school board in the early 1980s and served eight years, some as president, according to a UCLA Center X article. In the early 1990s, she ran for and won a seat on the L.A. City Council, helping to lead the city into the early 2000s before being elected to the state assembly, where she held office for six years.

Goldberg told The Washington Post that she’s faced discrimination because of her sexual orientation throughout her career. She gave an example from the years she served in the state legislature: Since she was open about it, people sent her hate mail that often focused on her being a lesbian. Some threatened her life. She forwarded threats she considered serious to law enforcement but shrugged off the rest.

“Just idiots just mouthing off because they could do it anonymously,” she told The Post.

In 2019, she came out of semiretirement to run for and win a special election for a seat on the Los Angeles School Board, and she won a full four-year term the following year. In January, she was elected as board president.

Goldberg ascended to the position as conservative lawmakers and activists across the country try to reshape how sexuality, gender and race are taught in the classroom. Republican politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, have endorsed education bills targeting what he has maligned as left-leaning “woke” ideologies. Some districts with conservative-majority school boards are following suit by trying to get books removed from library shelves and insisting educators call students by their deadnames.

Some of the L.A. protesters earlier this month wore T-shirts that said “Leave Our Kids Alone” and waved signs that accused educators of “sexualizing” children, KTLA reported. They denounced the assembly centered around the picture book as inappropriate for elementary schoolchildren.

The day Goldberg spoke at the school board meeting, three people were arrested 15 miles away outside the Glendale Unified School District’s headquarters as school board administrators also discussed a Pride Month resolution, Glendale police said in a news release. About 500 people were in attendance, according to KABC in Los Angeles. LGBTQ+ supporters waved rainbow flags and clashed with opponents outside of the headquarters.

At the L.A. meeting, Goldberg yelled at times during her six-minute speech. She said the protesters made students and staff who are part of the LGBTQ+ community feel unsafe.

“We are going to stand up and say to people shouting outside of a school and to the media … that you frightened LGBTQ kids and adults in every school in this district and in this city. And we must take much more care about how we elevate an assembly reading a book with one line, one sentence, one sentence that said, ‘Also, there’s families that have two mommies and two daddies,’” Goldberg said.

During her comments, Goldberg displayed emotions ranging from sadness to amusement to anger to disappointment.

The district would never condone the sexualization of students “in any way, shape, or form,” she said. “And those of you who believe that this might happen are allowed to read the curriculum materials, are invited into the assemblies with your children, are invited not to have your children go to the assemblies. I do not believe in forcing a parent to have a child attend assemblies that they feel would be violating their values.”

Goldberg described the frenzy over what’s being taught in schools as a manufactured crisis. Transgender people, drag queens and books about sexuality and gender aren’t a threat to children, she said.

“We pose no risk,” she added, “and the folks that are trying to say that we pose a risk are trying to create fear and anxiety for political gain and for no other reason than that.”