The ultra-conservatives trying to revoke marriage equality in Maine look set to use the excellent LGBT-inclusive diversity-education film That’s a Family!, by Academy Award-winning filmmaker (and lesbian mom!) Debra Chasnoff for their own bigoted purposes, Frank Hogarth of San Francisco’s Beyond Chron reports. (Jeremy of Good As You independently confirmed a payment to Chasnoff’s Groundspark organization in Stand for Marriage Maine’s campaign filings, and that led him, and thus me, to Hogarth’s piece.)
The film shows not only families with lesbian and gay parents, but also interracial families, adoptive families, and others of various types. Its message is one of inclusion across the board. It’s pretty obvious, however, that SFMM will use the film to try and demonstrate all the horrible things our kids will supposedly learn if marriage equality continues in Maine. That’s a Family caused a ruckus two years ago in Evesham, New Jersey when the school board voted to remove it from its elementary health curriculum. Expect extracts from that debate to surface again.
Worth a read, to cheer you up, is Hogarth’s earlier piece on how Protect Maine Equality has more effectively addressed the right’s “OMG, gay marriage will be taught in schools!” hysteria than did No On Prop 8. “Same-sex couples will not stop having families if Question 1 passes, and schools will still have to teach kids the reality that not all families fit the image of a heterosexual couple with biological children,” he writes, much the same point I made in my own article on the subject. Editorials from yesterday’s Maine Sunday Telegram and Saturday’s Bangor Daily News take similar stances. Clearly we’re on to something here (and I make no claim to be the originator of these arguments).
For more on Groundspark, see my interview of Chasnoff about her latest film, Straightlaced, and an earlier one about the 10th anniversary of her It’s Elementary. You can also view trailers for all of the films at the YouTube channel of film distributor New Day Films. Each film targets a different age range, and deals as appropriate with issues such as family diversity, bullying, name-calling, and gender stereotypes. (I recapped all of them in my post on New Resources for LGBT Families.)
As it happens, Chasnoff will be honored by the New Directions in Documentary Film festival being held this week at Wellesley College, her alma mater and mine. Chasnoff is no newbie filmmaker working in her garage, but rather an Academy Award-winner with a strong following. I think that if SFMM misuses her work, it will be to their own detriment.
After the jump, a clip from That’s a Family: