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Monday, February 11, 2013

Lake County's Bigoted History

I should have learned a long time ago that it never was good for Lake County to make national headlines. The possibility the school district may ban all school clubs to make sure a pro-gay club isn't allowed to operate at Carver Middle School leaves me hiding me head in shame once again.

I'm not sure where to start on the bad publicity surrounding this, but a good place is probably the sad history of the Lake County schools' brushes with national attention. I was in high school when the America First controversy garnered attention from across the nation. Those who did not grow up in Lake County can read that link to the New York Times (that's the New York FRIGGIN' Times) for background. The short version is that the School Board, after seeing the Christian Coalition get three members elected on the five-member board, voted to require history classes teach that America was morally superior to all other cultures in the world. It is hard to believe this whole episode happened in the early 1990s.

As someone who lived in the county at that time, I cannot overstate the extraordinary embarrassment foisted upon everybody living there by this utter nonsense. This should not be forgotten by School Board members considering taking a stand firmly on the side of homophobia in a world changing faster that street-front of 441.

As that Times article notes, a political solution was eventually found to the problem with the political ouster of these School Board members, in a Republican primary no less.

But something left unexplored in this article is the long list of specific embarrassments we suffered thanks to this crew. I myself testified in front of a School Board committee at one point because the district, which at the time beamed Channel 1 into classrooms each morning, was planning to censor a report on AIDS which discussed condoms. Because I attended hearings in Tavares, I was one of the only students in the district to see the full report—it did get censored—but I still cannot fathom the logic that mentioning sex in front of teenagers in the context of a terrible and fatal disease was going to be arousing, but going to school uneducated about the dangers of unsafe sex would keep youngsters on the path of the righteous.

If only this was the darkest part of history for education in Lake County. No, that distinction belongs to the entire 28-year reign of Sheriff Willis McCall.

The wickedness of McCall's time as a "law and order man" in Lake County could fill books, but his most notorious interaction with the learning of children likely came in 1954, when the sheriff ejected five Croation children out of a Mount Dora school because they appeared colored. This happened the same year that the Supreme Court declared desegregation illegal in the famous and surely-known-even-in-Lake-County verdict for Brown v. Board of Education. Yet in a public hearing, McCall said the children weren't allowed in white schools, even pointing directly at a 13-year-old girl and declaring he didn't "like the shape of that one's nose."

Right now, school officials in Lake County are concerned the actions of the School Board today will make the county appear out of step with the rest of America. Unfortunately, such action would be par for the course.

In an interesting historic twist, Lake County's Chistian Coalition majority was booted from office by voters the same year Willis McCall died. I naively hoped at a younger age that the county's days of discrimination and its philosophy of supremacy was sent to the hells of history in 1994. Sadly, that does not appear to be so.

It is important to note that a Gay-Straight Alliance, as students at Carver Middle School wish to start today, is devoted to promoting tolerance, not to recruiting homosexuals. It does not seek to "make" kids gay. Likewise, any fears one might have that sexual experimentation was going on within a middle school should want groups like this to be sanctioned and sponsored by professional faculty. That's the way to ensure student's conflict about their personal identity are dealt with in an appropriate setting, not through putting themselves in private, potentially predatory situations.

The issue of fairness should also be considered. The School Board never batted an eye about the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (nor should it have). It also hasn't ever stopped clubs with no academic purpose whatsoever to form. At one point, Leesburg High School had a Dungeons and Dragons club.

But I hope above all that the School Board, the next time it meets, considers how their decision on this matter will be viewed in 20 or 60 years. Despite his political popularity at the time, the actions of Willis McCall are viewed universally as monstrous bigotry today. Lake County already looks behind the time on tolerance by entertaining a ban on student groups. If such a ruling is truly put into place now, will the decision in the future be viewed any differently than the actions of McCall?

My genuine fear is that history will see this ban as a continuation of hateful policies. After a few decades pass, there will be visible a clear line from banning Croatians to boasting superiority to banning gays. In every case, brave voices always stood up and said these policies were wrong. Will the Lake County School Board stand with the brave or the bigoted?

5 comments:

  1. Have you submitted this to the local Leesburg paper? I think it would attract the widest audience there... ergo doing the most good.

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  2. Welcome back, Jake. I don't remember anything about America First, and McCall's name only vaguely rings a bell. I guess I'm not as up on my Lake County history as I should be.

    --Tom

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  3. I'd think it history best forgetten, if Lake County didn't seem destined to repeat it. You may have been a little young for America First. I was in 9th grade at the time. We really only suffered through two terms of a Christian Coalition majority on the board, but that was denigrating enough. Years later when I was at the DC, America First loomed large in political discussions. If you ever wondered why the CC didn't maintain a strangle-hold on such a seemingly ideal place for fundamentalist politics, that fiasco was why. The Coalition way over-played their hand here.

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  4. Jake, I have been a teacher in Lake County for a long time, including during the Christian Coalition. By the way, I consider myself a strong Christian. However, what they proposed, and did, has nothing to do with Christianity or anything else that designed to help students in school. You hit the nail on the head when you said that kids with conflicts should certainly have professional faculty to guide them, as well as guide the other kids into understanding the differences of human nature.
    Sissie

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  5. The board see's it as a club just for gays to hang out, a place to go to feel safe among their own kind. This is the fear... that they would be promoting physical behaviors in school and tolerance towards it where there is to be none, not even between heterosexual kids. School is for learning not for messing around with your sexuality either way. If kids spent more time in their studies and less time worrying about who is dating who they would go so much further in life. Now the flip side of this.. dealing with the horrible hate crimes that DO go on in school. They are not just towards gay kids .. it covers kids with disabilities and kids with the wrong clothes or who don't hang out with the IN crowd .. There NEEDS to be a an anti bulling group in the schools.. More needs to be done to the kids who do it so their is FEAR of hurting another child in school.. We would not have half the problems we have now if the administrators would actually punish the kids instead of giving a warning or turning their backs because they are bully's too. I do not think they will ban all the clubs.. If they do there will be an all out war between lawyers and parents and teachers and you name it. I support the kids and their endeavor I am sure they will make a positive change in the schools..

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