Subject: Letter to the Leader-Telegram Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2005 17:29:12 -0500 Message-ID: <BDD0A3EABE40F04A8C7200805EDE5A6A0219F0DC@PEPSI.uwec.edu> From: "Nowlan, Robert A." <RANOWLAN@uwec.edu>
Greetings, Everyone:
I thought I'd send you all a copy of the letter on the
controversy surrounding Beth Franklin's class to the _Leader-Telegram_
as it's hard to tell if it will ever show up in that paper, and what it
might look like even if it did.
Bob
To the Editor:
Eau Claire Memorial High School English teacher Beth
Franklin shows her class before and after head shots of a local
community leader who has undergone a biological sex change. Franklin's
aim in so doing is to emphasize the point that transsexual people do
live and work in this community and that they are often not only
extensively misunderstood but also subject to considerable prejudice,
discrimination, and abuse. Franklin does this in conjunction with the
national day of silence campaign dedicated toward bringing attention to
the violent ways gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people have
been and continue to be silenced. A local uproar ensues that makes
Franklin's point better than anything she does in class. People who
obviously know next to nothing about transgenderism, including
transsexuality, protest what Franklin has done simply by showing these
photos to her class. Seemingly, sheer exposure to photographic images
of a fellow citizen of this community, who does exist, and who has been
an active and courageous leader across this state on issues of
diversity, broadly conceived, is too traumatic to bear for the fragile
sensibilities of a few students, and of their parents. According to the
illogic at work here, these students, and their families, are so
weak-minded, weak-willed, and weak-spirited, that they have now been
scarred for life, beyond hope of repair, simply from having to confront
visible evidence of what is a mere fact of life, and hardly a new
phenomenon, as transsexuals have existed in many communities across the
world for many, many decades now. It seems, moreover, that these
parents, and their unfortunate children, maintain the cockeyed notion
that if they pretend transsexuals do not exist, then transsexuals simply
won't exist. I myself would love to believe that if I pretended idiots
and bigots didn't exist, then they wouldn't, but I know far better than
this.
Leader-Telegram editor Don Heubscher's wimpy editorial on
this issue doesn't really help too much either. Why should a teacher
like Franklin need to obtain parental permission to do something as
innocuous as this in her classes, or to clear with parents and guardians
beforehand every single thing she plans to do in her classes that might
possibly disturb, or offend, some student, some parent or some guardian,
some relative, some citizen, or some taxpayer? Huebscher seems to
operate under the misconception that a high school is a continuation of
daycare, and that teachers are not trained and educated to teach,
including about the real world in all of its actual disturbing
complexity and controversy, but rather that their job is to serve as
babysitters for innocent little children who must be protected from
anything that might in any possible way prove upsetting to them-and
especially anything that might force them to have to consider any idea,
any perspective, and any bit of knowledge that their parents, or
guardians, have not already taught them.
Finally, it would be laughable if it were not even more
absurd, and in fact frankly insulting to many, to read reactions from
those who feel they need to speak, and write, as representatives of that
supposedly thoroughly beleaguered and highly oppressed minority-i.e.,
Christians-on this issue. Not only do they blithely assume that they
speak for all Christians everywhere, when they certainly do not, but
also they act as if Christians were not the vast majority of people
living in this country, and even a greater percentage of those living in
the Eau Claire area (up to 90%!). From this paranoid perspective,
instead of Christian churches appearing on every other street corner
throughout this city, we instead have gay bars and clubs and lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and transgender community centers in all these places;
and every neighborhood has at least one, or so it would seem according
to the fantasy world these people live in. And, continuing along these
lines, instead of expressly Christian schools like Regis and Immanuel
Lutheran we seemingly have expressly glbt high schools and colleges here
in Eau Claire. Not only that, I guess these people imagine that at UWEC
instead of one student organization representing glbt students and
twenty representing Christian students, the ratio is the reverse. My
God, Christians everywhere are having to hide in the closet, and local,
state, and federal laws mandate legal discrimination against Christians,
at least unless they are willing to become, or act, publicly, like gays,
lesbians, bisexuals, or transgendered people! Being 'out as a
Christian' in this God-forsaken community overrun with gays, lesbians,
bisexuals, and transgendered people-and the social institutions that
everywhere enforce their hegemony-means Christians in Eau Claire must
now fear being bashed if they every let it slip in public that they
might be Christian, or if they are ever out walking the streets of our
city and run into a group of glbt people 'out for some fun' who
recognize, or mistake the former, for Christians. Fortunately, most
actual Christians in this community find these people who purport to
speak for all Christians absurd, as they should-and as we all should.
Wake up Eau Claire; don't make this city a laughing stock for the rest
of the world that would far dwarf any absurdity surrounding the prospect
of how Wisconsin will be ridiculed for legalizing the hunting of feral
cats.
Bob Nowlan
Eau Claire