girls gone feral

I am back in the habit of arguing with stupid people on the internet! If I ever was out of it.

This time it is an argument on change.org over, of all things, Maryland's Montgomery County Public Schools.

If you've ever had anything to do with Maryland or the DC area, you know that Montgomery County is ridiculously liberal. It is also one of the best educated and and wealthiest counties in the country, with towns like Bethesda, Rockville, Potomac, and Silver Spring. Its public school system is extremely good and also well-funded. I attended MCPS schools until sixth grade, and a lot of my friends went all the way through. It was a far cry from the Bible Belt.

Apparently, MCPS has a flyer program that allows community members to distribute flyers to school students twice times a year. Because the school system is a state actor and because it's opened up the flyer program as a "public forum," the school can't exclude any particular viewpoint from distributing flyers except in when it would cause serious disruption, such as overt hate speech. So when an "ex-gay" organization, PFOX, submitted a flyer that just said "don't be mean to ex-gays, instead you should respect their personal decisions, and by the way we're an organization that supports people with unwanted homosexual feelings," the school said "okay, sure, whatever, put it in the box." And the flyers went out to the student body.

Of course, the queer community is completely outraged. I would be too, if this were actually the school system passing out the flyers. Instead, though, the school system is just also allowing people to flyer-spam the students. Their viewpoint-neutral outlook enables PFLAG and other queer organizations to also send out flyers to kids (on the link, scroll down to David Fishback's first comment).

Most of the Change.org commenters seem to be under the impression that the school can keep the flyer program but require that flyers be "fact-checked," which would enable the school to ban PFOX's flyer because "ex-gay" programs don't work (interestingly, though, the flyer itself never actually asserts that ex-gay programs are effective, just that some people choose to enter into them, which is probably true. It also stops short of actually saying it's wrong to be gay, just that some gay people don't want to be, which is also true). But the lawsuit that decided that MCPS had opened a "public forum" in the first place involved a Christian evangelical organization sending out information about their religious-based club, and held that schools couldn't exclude that organization. If you could require that all the viewpoints in flyers be scientifically validated, I'm pretty sure you could exclude organizations whose primary beliefs are that evolution is a lie and God impregnated a virgin who gave birth to a human form of God who then died and rose from the dead. But the commenters JUST DON'T GET that the Constitution has a different idea than they do of when governments can engage in viewpoint discrimination.

In any case, the upshot is that tons of people are signing a petition yelling at MCPS for allowing something that they didn't really have much of a choice but to allow, unless they wanted to abolish the flyer program entirely. And I appear to be the only queer person in the world who thinks that the harm in preventing PFLAG from sending out flyers to schoolkids outweighs the harm of allowing PFOX to send them out. Because apparently when confronted with both sides, and in the context of one of the most gay-friendly public school environments in the entire country, kids STILL can't be trusted to figure out which position is the correct one. They also appear to think that the flyers are dangerous because parents could read and believe them, but from what I can tell the flyers were handed out at school and kids had no obligation to take them home.

I sort of want to start a counter-petition encouraging MCPS to keep the flyer program open.

Oh, and the worst part? Even Feminist Law Professors is getting this all wrong. "Do you think that the school system would distribute a flier with its report cards from a nonprofit that said that we could achieve world peace if only everyone embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior? That certainly isn’t a slur or a threat either, but, like the flier from the ex-gay group, it would contribute to an atmosphere of intolerance–in this case, of religious minorities." UM, YES ACTUALLY. THAT WAS THE POINT OF THE ORIGINAL LAWSUIT AGAINST MCPS. YOU ARE A LAW PROFESSOR. RESEARCH YOUR GODDAMN LAW. And also, why does Feminist Law Professors not allow comments? I will have to make do with trackback.

ETA: In case anyone was skeptical of my claim that the schools, and the students, were fully aware of the problems with PFOX, here's an interesting open letter from PFOX to MCPS from back in 2007, complaining that teachers were encouraging kids to throw the flyers in the trash. PFOX threatened litigation over it. So: a) the fact that PFOX is sending out flyers to kids is not news, and b) no reasonable kid could think the flyers were endorsed by the school. I note that even though PFOX can threaten to sue when teachers tell kids to throw out the flyers, they certainly can't prevent the kids themselves from throwing them out, which, undoubtedly, most of them do.