San Diego School Responds

Earlier today I posted about the theocratic FFN's Gary Randall using the fact that parents, staff, and some students from San Diego Cooperative Charter School marched in the local Gay Pride Parade, to incite anti-gay hysteria by telling us that "homosexual activists" were exploiting kids.

On the web, I could find no information about SDCCS marching in the parade, except by other conservative Christians.  So I wrote the principal, Wendy Ranck-Buhr, and asked her to respond.  As I suspected, I wasn't the first person to ask about the parade, and she kindly sent me a fact sheet on the school's participation in the Gay Pride event.  It follows, in its entirety:

Our school, San Diego Cooperative Charter School (SDCCS), has recently come under attack for participating in the San Diego Pride Parade. The bulk of this criticism comes from James Hartline who initiated this call for community action against our school based on assumptions and not facts. Here are the facts: 

• SDCCS has marched along with many city officials and community leaders in the San Diego Pride Parade for several years. It is our intent, consistent with our belief in human rights and equal treatment, to continue to do so.


• The SDCCS parent community organizes our participation in the parade event as part of our community outreach. A general invitation to participate in the parade is announced to all friends and families of the San Diego Cooperative Charter School community. Anyone who volunteers to participate does so based on their own personal decisions. No one is required to participate.


• Children who participate do so based upon decisions made by their parents.


• Children who participate walk with their parents in addition to other adult members of the SDCCS community.


• Children who participate in this event walk the parade route with their parents and hand out pencils to hundreds of other children along the parade route.


• Children who participate do not miss school. The Pride parade occurs on a Saturday during the summer break.


• Our school did not bring a bus to the Pride parade or organize participation as a “field trip” event. The yellow school bus that is shown in some of the photos of our school in the parade line-up belongs to another school. We do not have a bus of any kind.


• Some of the responses that we have received at our school suggest that the staff at SDCCS may be of questionable backgrounds and not appropriate candidates for working with children. Every staff member of SDCCS is fully qualified for their position and also undergoes the same background checks, fingerprinting and medical testing as all other employees in public schools.


• It is a fact that we are in the same building as a family planning clinic. This is a fact about our physical location that we communicate to all of the families who choose to attend our school. The clinic is picketed every Wednesday and we make every effort to keep our students away from the picketers and their signs. We have also been actively seeking a new location for our school and will continue to do so.

The San Diego Cooperative Charter School community believes that all families, regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation have both a right and a responsibility to be actively involved in the education of their children. Our participation in the Pride parade demonstrates our commitment to this belief. 

As you can see, both Mr. Randall's, and other conservatives characterizations of SDCCS's participation in the parade are grossly distorted, and in many ways completely false.  It is they who have put "children are under assault" by seeking to exploit their image of innocence, and who "seek to re-engineer society as we know it."

They are asking us to us to believe that they are returning society to a past moral state (which in fact never existed), when in fact they are trying to create a society infused with their religious dogma, and enforced in large part with violence and repression.  They would have us believe that this is a decent society, but to believe that is pure blackwhite doublethink.

tags: homophobia  homosexulaity  theocracy  theocrats  gay  

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