The high-voltage controversy promises to dominate next fall’s local school-board elections. But unlike the hundreds of towns across the country embroiled in their own sex-education arguments, the Des Moines debate could spill over into the 1996 presidential campaign. Already Republican Pat Buchanan, campaigning for the conservative Hawkeye vote, condemned Des Moines’s proposed curriculum for putting “homosexuality on a moral par with traditional marriage.” And Congress seems certain to get into the act. Last year two amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act sought to bar funding to public schools that include homosexual issues in their curriculums; both were eventually defeated in a House-Senate committee. Now the key. Lou Sheldon, head of California’s Traditional Values Coalition, says that House Speaker Newt Gingrich has agreed to hold subcommittee hearings on gay issues -including education – this fall. Gingrich’s of-rice declined to comment, but scheduling hearings has little risk for the speaker.
The Iowa debate mirrors others around the country. Religious conservatives believe that mention of gays and lesbians should come accompanied by a moral condemnation. Gay and lesbian advocates believe that frank discussions of homosexuality’s existence are appropriate for most age groups. In between lie confusion and am-bivalence. Fairfax County, Va., residents emerged three months ago from a bruising fight over the content of sex-education courses. Board conservatives were able to win the battle to have abstinence emphasized in more courses, but they lost the war to eliminate lessons promoting tolerance for gays and lesbians.
In Des Moines, the three-page proposal suggested that school lessons avoid “heterosexual bias in language” and include, among other things, the historical contributions of gays and lesbians. A school employee intercepted the document and took it to Horn, who gave it to WHO radio talk-show host Jan Mickelson, the Rush Limbaugh of Des Moines. Mickelson focused his attention on the fact that some of the proposal’s language was lifted from materials produced by Project 21, a gay-rights group in San Francisco. “My toleration ends when you (a) get in my face; (b) use my tax kids with gay-rights propaganda,” says Mickelson.
A group of 100 local clergy condemned the school hoard’s document for attempting “to raise homosexual behavior to an acceptable level.” Superintendent Gary Wegenke was forced to kill the proposal. But Wegenke refused to back down from the district’s five-year policy forbidding discrimination against gay and lesbian staff and students –infuriating Horn. “I can tell you,” he told The Washington Post, “school-board elections will never be the same.”
Wilson, for his part, is trying to raise $40,000–more than four times his usual campaign war chest. He hired a former gubernatorial campaign manager, received an endorsement from D.C.’s Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and is gearing up to run as “a school-board member who happens to be gay, not as a gay school-board member.” Opposing him is the newly formed Concerned Parents of Des Moines, whose members in-elude those in Iowa’s chapter of the Christian Coalition. With a mailing list of 6,000 homes, the group is raising money and looking for candidates, who will be screened by a group of more than 50 local pastors. Once, school-board elections in Des Moines turned on issues like textbooks and repairs to buildings. Now taxpayers can choose to push a hot-button single issue instead.
