Fox News' Nightmare: The Queer Youth Leadership Awards

Appeared in the Good Times newsweekly

by John Laird

Wednesday, 09 May 2007

In the state capitol, the issue of civil rights for gay Californians has been among the biggest modern civil rights struggles. The first openly GLBT legislator, Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica, was elected to the State Assembly in 1994. Her struggle to pass a bill to protect gay students from discrimination in California’s public schools was enacted in 2000—after a struggle that spanned three legislative sessions.

Then-Assemblymember Kuehl was finally got the bill passed by the State Assembly on her third try, with the bare-minimum of 41 votes. The battle to enact that law, and the subsequent struggle to implement it across the state, shows just how difficult the issue of discussing or protecting gay public school students still is. In fact, today there are school districts that merely pay lip service to the law, and large lawsuit settlements have been in the news in the last few years about students that are the objects of school harassment.

Just last week, now-Sen. Kuehl’s attempt to pass Senate Bill 777, which would create a standard in state law of non-discrimination protection for California students, led a conservative panelist on the Fox News Channel to proclaim the bill would “prohibit all references about ‘mom and dad’ in school curriculum.” That kind of unreasonable response shows just how far we still have to go on this issue.

That’s why the Santa Cruz County Queer Youth Leadership Awards so important. Celebrating its 10th anniversary May 19, the awards honor gay students for their work on equal rights in schools, and acknowledges efforts made by organizations and key allies toward the same goal.

As the master of ceremonies at a past years’ Queer Youth Leadership Awards, I recall one of the awards recognizing a high school student who had been systematically harassed at his school—and who stood up to the bullying in a way that lead to awareness and changes at his school.

The event has a broad base of sponsors—from religious organizations, schools and elected officials, to the United Way and local businesspeople. The Queer Youth Leadership Awards are important because they represent a clear community statement that bullying and harassment of students based on their sexual orientation in not within the acceptable standards of this community. The awards are worth supporting—as is this year’s legislative effort that would embody that standard in state law. For more information about this year’s Queer Youth Leadership Awards, visit www.qyla2007.org.