Marriage classes?

The Willamette Week reports on the newest lie the desperate anti-gay rights crowd is circulating--that if same-sex marriage is legalized, it will be taught in schools.

"Beginning in kindergarten, children will be taught that marriage between two men is the same as marriage between a man and a woman," the letter says. "Sex-education classes will be required to teach homosexuality as a legitimate option."

The school system's response is hysterical:

This was all news to Gene Evans, spokesman for the state schools. "The Oregon Department of Education couldn't require kindergarten teachers to do that even if we wanted to," Evans says. "The curriculum is set through a public process, and right now there is no marriage curriculum in any grade."

At Alas, a Blog, Ampersand has some fun with this. That "marriage" is taught in schools is one of those wingnut beliefs that confound everyone else. Some of the rhetoric that pours in for my cat from the American Family Association would lead you to believe that kids take classes in marriage, which would cause a normal-esque person to think that these are classes where kids learn how to quarrel over the dishes and distribute remote control rights. Or even just what marriage is. You can almost imagine a teacher, pointer in hand, gesturing to a poster with a one male and one female stick figures, much like the ones on restroom doors, are holding hands. "Kids, this is a marriage." And now, horror of horrors, there will be male and male and female and female stick figures holding hands! "Kids, all of these are marriages." It gives one pause to imagine that those who view themselves as the only people who know how to raise children think that children old enough to be in school are still too stupid to have figured out that people get married.

But that's not what they mean by it, I think. The idea that schools "teach marriage" comes from the reality that schools teach sex education. Books that taught everything from basic sexuality to actual sex techniques used to all be grouped under the term "marriage manual", and still are in more conservative circles. I think this is one of the things that confuses conservatives in the sex ed debates. Marriage manuals are more holistic and more prescriptive than sex education classes and textbooks. Sex education aims to avoid prescriptive teaching, outside of teaching the positive value of preserving personal health.

But conservatives who are more familiar with marriage manuals than standard sex education teaching might be seeing it as a prescriptive exercise. And if same-sex marriage is legalized, they fear that same-sex marriage will be taught, which means, under the marriage manual model, that homosexual bedroom techniques will be discussed. I wonder if there is a way to get people to understand that bedroom techniques of all sorts are not taught in sex education classes.