Textbooks meeting the bill's requirements would not be incorporated into California classrooms until 2012. Social science courses would then include "an age-appropriate study" of the "role and contributions" that lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people have made to the "economic political and social development" of California and the United States.
Schools are already required to teach the historical and social roles of blacks, women, American Indians, Hispanics, Asians and other ethnic groups.
...
Advocates said subjects might include the history of the civil-rights movement and the 1978 assassination of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, and textbooks could specify the sexual orientation of such well-known Americans as authors Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin and Willa Cather.
Measure would add gay history to texts, from The Seattle Times.
Here's a fairly common response I saw when digging through the internet.
This is an obvious attempt to indoctrinate the children of California into total acceptance of all forms of sexuality. At early elementary ages, children are very impressionable, especially when information comes from adults - and this info would come from teachers. Many people (especially Christians) in California see these forms of sexuality as perversions. Rather than allow a child's parents to instruct him or her in sex or religion, the California State Senate has decided what children should think about sex and religion. After growing up under these ideas for 14 years in public schools, California students will be well-bred secular humanist progressives.
Homosexual agenda advances in schools - SB1437 and SB1441 pass in California, from redstate.com
There's nothing new about this conversation. There are actually three parties to it, and not two: (1) gay rights advocates, (2) those who have made it their career and callings to oppose gay rights, and (3) the vast majority of the public who doesn't care much one way or the other, but could be swayed if necessary. Both extreme groups are talking to the middle group, hoping to win a heart or mind.
The anti-gays (I'll call'em) have a slight positional advantage. They have tradition on their side, and they can point to the gays and say that gays are demanding "special treatment." In the anti-gay framework, that makes sense: gayness is something that should be treated poorly by default. To ask for it even to be treated "equally" (whatever that is) would be to ask for special treatment. The indifferent majority might agree with them--people's sense of social justice usually involves "picking yourself up by your bootstraps," and self-actualization. The indifferent majority, by definition, has not faced gay discrimination and therefore won't be able to easily understand how rooted in our culture it is.
The gays also have an advantage, though. We have that same tradition of gay invisibility. With that has come a slew of negative consequences for GLBT folks. And especially for GBLT kids. The anti-gay folks can only point to hypothetical (and somewhat vague) harms that will arise if we remove that invisibility. We gays, on the other hand, can point to very real problems that invisibility has created. The indifferent majority can associate with those problems: nobody wants to see their son or daughter picked on, nobody wants a kid to be suicidal.
I think, and I hope, that I've just described the balance that will play itself out. The indifferent majority, when forced to tilt one way or the other, will decide that gay kids need more support than straight kids who don't approve of homosexuality. Or, more accurately, gay kids need more support than those parents who don't want their kids to approve of homosexuality. Of those two groups--suicidal and socially abused children, and morally offended parents--it's not hard to decide which group should just suck it up.
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