Another tragedy

Reports are emerging of the tragic suicide today of a Rutgers freshman who jumped off the George Washington Bridge, after classmates without his knowledge broadcast on the internet video of him in an encounter with another male (New Jersey Star-Ledger, North Jersey Record).

This is on the heels of similar tragedies in California and Texas.

Our hearts go out to the student and his family. It's our hope that as more states pass protections such as the Dignity for All Students Act, more students and communities will become aware of the life-threatening costs of this kind of bullying and harassment.

Road trip to Hobart and William Smith Colleges

On Monday this week I traveled with Alan, our Executive Director, to Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS) in Geneva, New York. Right next to Seneca Lake, it’s a beautiful campus and a great place to get an education.

Alan’s visit and speech Monday night was sponsored by HWS’s Center for Community Engagement and Service-Learning. First-year student John Monaghan, who has contributed to this blog, was the driving force behind making it all happen.

While Alan talked a lot about LGBT issues and what it means day-to-day to not have rights and responsibilities that New York gives to everyone else, his focus was just as much about how age and experience (not having it that is) should never be seen as a barrier to making a real difference on an issue a person really cares about. Alan himself is not too many years removed from the ages of HWS students so a big part of HWS having Alan there was to have a real life example on campus of someone they can easily relate to who can talk about the nuts and bolts of what it really means to “make change happen.”

This, plus next week’s Presidential Primary and the excitement everyone was feeling about the national focus on their generation and the role they’re playing in the elections, made for a great discussion.

Before the event, HWS President Mark Gearan and his wife Mary opened up their home to a smaller group of students, faculty, alumni and parents for a dinner and informal Q&A session between students and Alan.

Our thanks go to John Monaghan, President Gearan and Katie Flowers, the associate director of HWS’s Center for Community Engagement and Service-Learning, for having us on campus.

Go here to read the piece the Colleges posted on Alan’s talk.

Abstinence funding in New York, the NYCLU’s findings and LGBT youth

Yesterday, the New York State Department of Health and the New York Civil Liberties Union made important and related announcements about abstinence funding in New York State. (Full disclosure: the Pride Agenda endorses the NYCLU’s recommendations as they relate to the state of New York.)

First, state health commissioner Dr. Richard Daines announced that New York would be rejecting federal grants for abstinence-only sex education because the policy was “based on ideology rather than sound scientific-based evidence that must be the cornerstone of good public health policy.” Second, the NYCLU put out a report providing an analysis of these programs in New York State.

To get an overview of both, read Jennifer Medina’s piece in today’s New York Times.

According to the NYCLU, New York received about $10.0 million in federal funding in fiscal year 2006 and matched it with about $4.0 million of its own to fund dozens of abstinence-only programs across the state. New York apparently has been the third largest recipient of federal funds behind only Texas and Florida.

The NYCLU’s analysis of programs in New York reveals that:

1. Abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula used across the state contain serious medical inaccuracies and employ fear-based teaching methods.

2. The same curricula demonstrate serious bias in terms of gender and LGBT youth

3. At least 19 of the funded programs focused a significant amount of programming on after school recreational activities with no direct relation to sex education.

The programs in New York make use of four abstinence-only curricula and go by the names: Facing Reality, WAIT Training, Choosing the Best and Sex Respect. (To see who is using these curricula across New York State and to view a county-by-county breakdown of where abstinence-only funding has been going, go to pages 31 and 32 of the NYCLU’s PDF of the report.)

In terms of LGBT youth, pages 19-20 of the NYCLU’s PDF of the report provide details of how these four curricula display bias. Not surprisingly marriage between a man and a woman is presented as the only acceptable form of sexual relations, which of course totally excludes LGBT people from having any sort of intimate relations. Facing Reality encourages teachers to feel comfortable passing moral judgments on LGBT populations and Sex Respect only mentions LGBT issues within the context of HIV/AIDS. The NYCLU concludes that “these curricula ignore or demonize the experiences of an already marginalized, but significant, population."

One of the key NYCLU recommendations we want to highlight is the need to pass the Healthy Teens Act. This bill did in fact pass the Assembly this year, but stalled in the Senate. Sponsored by Assemblymember Gottfried and Senator Winner, it creates a grant program to provide age-appropriate, medically accurate, LGBT culturally competent sex education in New York public schools.

We thank the NYCLU for doing the research that made this report possible and we thank the New York State Department of Health for reversing course and refusing federal funds that perpetuate ignorance and harm New York’s youth.

The Assembly passes the SAFETY Act

The NYS Assembly voted 113-0 today to pass the Safe and Fair Treatment for Youth Act, known as the SAFETY Act (A.1613), which ensures that youth in New York State Juvenile Justice facilities are protected from harassment (from staff and/or peers) based on race, national origin, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender and sex.

From the Pride Agenda's memo in support of the bill:

Unfortunately, in recent years many children in facilities operated by the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) have been verbally and physically bullied and harassed simply because of who they are, sometimes by other youth and sometimes by staff. One youth reported being called “stupid faggot” by a staff person; another tells of how she avoids showering for fear of harassment and discrimination. The harassment experienced by LGBT youth is particularly ironic, since many become involved in the juvenile justice system because of the oppression connected with their sexual orientation or gender identity and expression, such as when they are kicked out of their homes or abused by a parent or guardian and then turn to life on the streets.

There is no companion bill to this one in the State Senate and there is not likely to be one this year (the session ends next Friday), but the Assembly has taken an important first step by recognizing that juvenile justice facilities need to be fixed in order to be truly effective tools of rehabilitation for disenfranchised LGBT youth.