What’s Wrong With The Harvey Milk High School?
By Cathryn Crawford (09/14/03)
I grew up thinking that segregation was over, done with, a thing of the past, but apparently I was mistaken. It seems that we have a new form of segregation here in the United States. The Harvey Milk High School in New York City underwent 3.2 million dollars in renovations this summer and has opened now as the first ever taxpayer funded school for gays and lesbians. It’s been around for twenty years as an “alternative program”, but now it’s an official public school, and it’s expected to have 170 students by September 2004.
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks it’s a wonderful idea, which is not surprising coming from someone who once said that he “…couldn’t understand why anyone would carry a gun; guns kill people…” His take on Harvey Milk: "It lets them (gays and lesbians) get an education without having to worry. It solves a discipline problem. And from a pedagogical point of view, this administration — and previous administrations — have thought it was a good idea and we'll continue with that."
It’s an interesting perspective. Here we have a school that is founded and based solely on the basis of the student’s sexual orientation. There is no pretense of academics playing a role in who is admitted – you simply have to be a gay, lesbian, transgender – in other words, you have to be something other than a homophobic (because you know, we all are) straight person.
The reasoning behind the school is that many gay and lesbians are made fun of and ridiculed for their lifestyle choices – and I’m sure that’s true. Just like I was made fun of because I wore different colored socks every day to school when I was in high school. That was a lifestyle choice, too, and I didn’t ask for a school where I would only be with other people who were colorblind. That seems ridiculous. Somehow, however, people don’t find this idea ridiculous – despite the fact that this is a public school which is allowing segregation based strictly on one aspect of the student’s life – an aspect that has nothing to do with education. It smells putridly of racial segregation – and members of both sides, blacks and whites, supported that segregation, just as gays and lesbians and straights support this segregation.
My question is –what is next? Will New York next create individual public schools based on things like religion or race in order to keep kids from being made fun of? Are we going to see all Christian or all Muslim or all Hispanic schools? It’s a distinct possibility, because our government has a nature that is ravenously hungry for power. When you give it an inch, as the saying goes, it takes a mile. If you set a precedent that says that it’s all right to segregate children for their sexual orientation, it is going to inevitably lead to other things, because that is the very nature of our government. That’s why there are limits and laws – that’s why we have a Constitution. If we allow this to happen in this one small school in New York City – if we allow the government to fund segregation yet again – we are taking the first step backwards on a long road that we were beginning to near the end of. Is it worth it?
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