Equal rights are family values

   Discrimination is a losing proposition. It may win in the short term, yes. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, however, "The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice."

   King's words are most pertinent because of the scintillating statement made by the NAACP recently in supporting gay marriage, a few days after President Obama did the same.

  Actually, what the NAACP said was bolder than is commonly portrayed. It resoundingly denounced laws that "codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the constitutional rights" of gay, lesbian or transgendered individuals.

   What is even remotely radical about equal treatment under the law?

    It was radical before the Emancipation Proclamation, before the 19th Amendment and  women's suffrage, before the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. But not now, surely.

    Two surveys show what a losing proposition this form of discrimination is — if not now, soon.

     The first is scientific, done by Gallup, whose Values and Beliefs survey found the Republican Party increasingly marginalized based on its allegiance to hard-line positions sculpted by the religious right.

     One striking example was the finding that 82 percent of Catholics find birth control morally acceptable. Another was that 54 percent of Americans find same-sex relations morally acceptable.

     What New York Times political blogger Charles Blow found most compelling in the Gallup numbers was how political independents increasingly are turned off by the "family values" thrust of the GOP.

     "Public sentiment is slowly drifting away from the Republicans in a way that must be giving the party's long-range strategists sleepless nights," he writes.

     Possibly just as significant are the findings of Terry Cassady. He's no pollster, but a high school teacher in Burnet, deep in the heart of blushingly red-state Texas.

     Bothered by the political bastardization of the term "family values," he decided to ask his students what they believe those values to be. Surprisingly, the vast majority identified things like family togetherness and commitment — "love each other," "be open to each other," "Dad should show he loves Mom in front of the kids."

    By contrast, one of Cassady's brightest students took it upon herself to diagram "politicians' family values" based on the vibes she detects: "anti-abortion," "anti-gay rights." She stuck in "pro-education" as if to give denote lip service, then added "church" (as if to denote "for show") and "large family, and usually homeschooled,"

    Gentlemen, we — make that you — have a disconnect, between what you as politicians extol as family values and what are the true values that matter to America's young.

    See it in the "It Gets Better" campaign on YouTube aimed at boosting the self-esteem of gays, lesbians and transgendered individuals. See it in the 34,840 signatures, at last count, on the Teens Against Bullying "It Begins With Me" digital petition.

    But the bullying that should concern us doesn't just happen in school halls. It also happens in legislative halls.

    A few days ago, though the votes were there, including key Republican defections, GOP leaders in the Colorado House killed a Senate-passed bill that would have legalized same-sex civil unions. Gov. John Hickenlooper promoted it aggressively. One poll showed more than 70 percent of Coloradans support civil unions. A minority of a minority blocked it. 

    Back to the bold statement by the NAACP. It was made despite pronounced ambivalence among many blacks about gay rights, and against the expected outrage which came from some black ministers.

    The thing is: Though those pastors are entitled to their beliefs, ours is not a clerical government. This is a government of laws, not on the dictates of men in cloth. That's the kind of government the founders and their kin fled.

      Sure, the standard "family values" appeals can defeat gay marriage in North Carolina and other states, but they can't win in the end, especially when the more accepting attitudes of today's young are extrapolated.

     Discrimination is for losers. Winners make history. 

     Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email:jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.      

Who are the bomb throwers here?

  So odd for Greg Abbott to parse words.
  The Texas attorney general said he didn't call Planned Parenthood a terrorist group. He just said the law should treat it like one.
   Regardless, the Fifth Circuit Court dismissed the comparison and put the kibosh on a destructive law that would do nothing but impede women's health care.
   The court ruled that Texas could not exclude Planned Parenthood from the state's Women's Health Program, a Medicaid pass-through. The gambit endangered the entire program because the federal government would not let the state discriminate against qualified providers of health care for women.
  The Republican-controlled Legislature had promoted this discrimination, and Republican Abbott was defending it, because some Planned Parenthood affiliates perform abortions. 
    Tax dollars can't fund abortion. Planned Parenthood affiliates that perform abortions do so with every fiscal precaution federal law requires.
    But Texas officials claimed that the nature of funding couldn't guarantee that tax dollars didn't go to abortion or the advocacy thereof. Abbott compared it to what the federal material-support statute makes a felony: giving money to terrorist groups, even if the funds are used for peaceful purposes.
    Once again, I don't understand why Abbott would bother to explain his atrocious analogy. Listen to the foamy and deceitful rhetoric of the rabid-right constituency that supplies his party its life force. "Terrorists" sounds mild.
    You want to talk terrorism? Meet Emily Lyons. Like Planned Parenthood itself, she is the face of women's reproductive rights. The sad thing is that she is missing the face she once had.
    A bomb detonated at the Birmingham, Ala., women's clinic where the nurse worked in 1998. Horribly disfigured, one eye gone, Lyons was the lucky one among the casualties. A police officer died: a notch on the belt of Bible-toting, Bible-quoting bomber Eric Rudolph.
     Lyons didn't show up to work that day 14 years ago seeking to wage ideological warfare on behalf of abortion rights, though she certainly supports them.
    "A woman has the right to decide for herself," she told me in a mild-mannered phone interview back when Rudolph was still on the lam.
   Lyons came to work to do what nurses do: serve patients' needs. 
   Abortion is a medical necessity. Most hospitals that deliver babies perform medically necessary abortions. That would make them "abortion clinics," and their physicians "murderers" based on the words of war against Planned Parenthood and others.
    U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel wasn't in a mood to award propaganda points to those who choose to ignore the possible result of Texas' ideological hit on a health-care provider. Some things are self-evident — such as Planned Parenthood's comprehensive health care services for low-income women who have no other options. But it helps to hear it from a judge.
   In blocking the state from carrying out its designs, Yeakel wrote that his ruling was "particularly influenced by the potential for immediate loss of access to necessary medical services by several thousand Texas women."
   Yeakel wasn't talking about abortion. He was talking about birth control, pap smears, fertility counseling, HIV testing, sex education, and any number of services that draw low-income women to Planned Parenthood's doors.
      When people compare what these services to terrorism, they implicate the women served and the professionals, like Emily Lyon, who serve them.
    Hear the "amens" to an analogy the Texas attorney general says he didn't intend, and be sickened.
    Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email:jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Vocational education? Bring that on

Time magazine recently had a jointly inspiring and confused commentary on what's wrong with education. The thing on which we'll focus here is what's inspiring. In the meantime, we need to dispel some confusion. 

Time's Joe Klein makes an impassioned statement on behalf of  vocational education, which scandalously has shrunk from the scene in public schools in the last 30 years.

The confused part of this plea is in his assigning blame. Klein would have us believe this condition is the fault of the "education establishment." A headline also makes liberals villains, saying that vocational education is "dismissed by the left."

Let me say first that if my liberal brethren were to blame for this, shame on us. But we aren't. And whatever share of blame it might have, the "education establishment" isn't to blame either for what's become of vocational education. That establishment is only responding to the whims of its bosses: state legislatures and (since No Child Left Behind) Congress and the White House.

There. Blame away.

Blame "school accountability," which could be called "the quest for educational uniformity." Blame duped taxpayers as well for assenting to the bogus notion that standardization is education and competence is excellence. Another wrong notion built into "accountability": that "college readiness" is what every effort should be about, by law, as if mind-numbing standardization could possibly produce it.

Blame high-stakes testing that forces schools to emphasize "test criteria" at the exclusion of everything else. This is most pronounced, of course, in "failing schools" (meaning: in pockets of poverty). They constantly are forced to ramp up their emphasis on basic skills and whatever the states demand of them.

And what do the states demand? That the schools produce students headed toward college through the straits denoted by the pillars of ACT and SAT.

The states insist that all students be directed toward college-level algebra. The states insist on increasing core-subject regimentation — so much English, so much science, so much math, so much this, so much that. 

Vocational education? Who has the time?

Time — the magazine — takes readers to a stunningly successful program that runs up against the college-track conveyor-belt fixation and bursts right through.

An agriculture sciences program at the school on the Navajo Reservation in Kayenta, Ariz., turns students on to real-world challenges like veterinary medicine and animal husbandry, while making them better overall students.

Unfortunately, one subtext of the expressed appeal behind such a program is slightly misguided — the subtext that this is solely about directing students toward careers — in this case the careers defined by a rural and agrarian lifestyle.

Careers certainly are worthy considerations. But a problem with education, and education "reform," is that too much of the attention is on careers. While we want students to imagine themselves in said fashions, the key to success in education isn't occupation; it is fascination. If we can't get students interested in something, they aren't going to try to learn the things we want them to.

As Time points out, while vocational programs too often are seen as places where scholastic hopes go to die, the Kayenta students in the voc-ed program are blowing state standardize tests out of the water. Why? Because the disciplines in question present an "alternative way to teach them math, science and reading" — you know, through fascination.

This — relevance, multidimensional learning — is how we "fix schools," rather than devising another, tougher test, more intense "alignment" between what the state requires and what schools do.

Recently Tom Pauken, chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission, speaking to the Texas Association of College Technical Educators, made the case for more vocational and technical education. At the same time he denounced the one-size-fits-all underpinning of "standards" as now enforced:

"We have accepted for too long this misguided notion that everyone should go to a university. That flies in the face of reality and human nature. We have different talents and different abilities."

He is right. To assign a broad-based system like public schools to focus on one end result —college — is a fool's errand.

Vocational education? Oh, my goodness, bring that on, along with a host of cross-curricular endeavors that allow students to see how learning translates into living.

Anything that supplies technicolor and relevance, anything that is hands-on and collaborative, anything that isn't bubbling in test sheets and prepping for bubbling in, is better than anything "school accountability" has ever brought us.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.