My kids are pretty well indoctrinated (if you will) that marriage is about love, not sex, so it’s like a “Duh!” that anyone should be able to get married. When their friend’s dads got married, however, you can bet I discussed it with them — here was an opportunity for them to understand first hand how inequality hurts real people. It’s not abstract for them, it’s real. Same for the kids in the class.

When we study holidays in school, we learn about lots of practices and beliefs that we don’t necessarily share. Only a very few people get exercised about that.

Of course for many anti-marriage folks, our very *existence* is political (and many gay folks agree, hence National Coming-Out Day). So we can never really please them.

The more we try to censor reality to “respect” their beliefs, the more we act like biology teachers inserting creation “science” into the curriculum, to the detriment of both science and religion. Evolution is true on a scientific level. Same-sex marriages are happening, period.

The moral or theological interpretation of these events should happen at home between children and their parents. Isn’t that the kind of discussion the “family values” people want?

For anyone interested, the school’s site is http://www.creativeartscharter.org

This was a rare moment, not because it was a same-sex marriage (presumably, those will continue far into the future), but because it was an exercise of human dignity and equality that has only recently been won. This was a lesson in civics and citizenship.

I’m not sure how I’d have called it, were I an administrator at the school in a position to nix the idea (the teacher in question was surprised by her students, as readers who don’t click through to the article might not know; it was an idea hatched by parents and another administrator and the partner of the teacher).

But I did wince when I read about it (and that was before I read that the Yes on 8 folks made hay with it).

Sigh.