(Originally posted Monday, November 10, 2008 )
Santa Rosa, Calif. (AP) — During the battle over Proposition 8, the constitutional state ban against gay marriage, parents groups had protested loudly that it was unfair to foist the topic of gay marriage onto schoolchildren. Those groups are now rejoicing that the proposition has passed, and that schoolchildren are safe to return to much less troubling topics like the Iraq War, Chernobyl, Abu Ghraib and the Holocaust.
“It was very difficult for me as a teacher to explain gay marriage to my students,” said Santa Rosa fifth-grade teacher Margie Prendergast as her students sat in the other room watching The Sorrow and the Pity. “I mean, how do you tell a child that a princess can marry a princess? It’s just absurd.”
“I wish I was dead,” said Jonah Brooks, aged 8, after hearing what the Holocaust was. “I think at night that somebody’s going to kill me. I’m cold all over and have nightmares.”
Helen Schiffren, a 40-year-old upstate California homemaker, concurred with Prendergast.
“What people don’t understand when they’re making these decisions is that there are children in the schools who are innocent,” said Schiffren, whose 10-year-old daughter April had just seen a film of Inuits clubbing seals to death. “My daughter is innocent. Why does she have to be dragged into this?”
When asked how she liked the movie, April Schiffren said only, “The horror. The horror.” She then shook her head, walked away and refused to answer any more questions.
Coach Jed Stevens of John Milton Elementary School in San Luis Obispo said that California had done the right thing.
“What people don’t realize is that when marriage is redefined, it affects society at every level, even the level of children,” said Coach Stevens, whose class was enjoying a special viewing of Bambi. The kids emerged from the film later crying hysterically.
“Why did Bambi’s mother have to die?” said 8-year-old Robert Peters. “Coach Stevens said it was the circle of life. But what does that even mean to me? I wish I had a gun.”
Prendergast said that gay marriage would definitely affect kids, who, if it weren’t for school, would have absolutely no other way of knowing about what adults do, even in this digital age, where information feeds back at lightning speed.
“Everything kids know they know from their teachers and parents. They have no other ways to think for themselves and we must shield them from life’s most traumatizing and confusing topics like adult sexuality,” said Prendergast, right before her class asked her what Abu Ghraib was. Prendergast went into it in excruciating detail.
“Wow,” said Sam Singer, one of Prendergast’s 10-year-old students. “People turn into real monsters when they’re angry. Now I wonder day or night if somebody’s going to water-board me. If Ms. Prendergast is keeping out the worst stuff, then I already don’t want to live anymore.”
“Kids reflect us,” Schiffren said. “They are little perfect replicas of us. We have to protect them. For God’s sake we must, we must, we must.”
Beauty is Imperfection 