EDITORIAL PAGE COMMENTARY

AT ISSUE: D-11 sexual conduct policy

District 11's school board has been asked to adopt a sexual conduct policy that promotes abstinence and affirms heterosexual marriage.

Does our diverse society share these or other common values? Should our schools be the place to teach them? Should students have the right to express opinions -- and criticism -- about the policies?

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Will Perkins: Sexual conduct policy sends right message

Promote abstinence. Discourage promiscuity. Affirm traditional marriage. These three positions are all we have asked the District 11 school board to ratify in order to provide an over-arching policy statement defining the goals of the district. Our primary objective is to better support our children as they make the serious choices that often affect their lives.

To us, it seems a reasonable proposition. The empirical evidence supporting the positive social and health benefits of these positions is indisputable. To the 7,500 and counting who have formally endorsed this position before the board, it seems a reasonable proposition. They desire a district that will publicly reinforce the standards and values they seek to establish in their homes.

However, our detractors find the proposed sexual conduct policy unreasonable. They claim we seek to censor freedom of student press. Yet, we've clearly stated this would not attempt to conflict with existing state law, which is very clear about protecting free speech.

They claim we've constructed a thinly veiled plot to persecute homosexuals. Yet, our proposal calls for discouraging promiscuity of every sort and refers to marriage only in the manner currently prescribed by state law.

They say we seek to impose religious views on others. Yet, nothing in our proposal contains any mention of religion or endorses anything not widely accepted by liberals and conservatives alike as principles that strengthen a society.

They charge that we seek to limit what students are allowed to discuss and debate. Yet, what we have asked for is a clarification on what positions the faculty endorses, not discusses, in the classroom.

They say we don't need such propositions -- that they already exist in the form of sexual education curriculum and implicitly extend elsewhere. If so, then why not explicitly codify them?

There are those who will point out that this policy will leave some out in the cold. We admit that every values-based policy will have its opponents, and this is certainly a values-based policy. However, these values do not stem from hate, bigotry or antagonism. Rather, we maintain, these are positive mainstream values which the majority of taxpayers can willingly support. What else can we ask of a pluralistic society? And what, except standard-less nihilism, have our critics offered instead?

Our issue has never been with the Lever staff or District 11 students. We do not seek to squelch discussion on the difficult issues our youth face in today's complex society. Rather, we contend it is only proper that the school district provide some guidelines and policy-affirming practices which will strengthen our future generations. Our parents need assistance, not opposition, from public education in developing the character of our youth. Our community doesn't need more problems stemming from illegitimate pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and fragmented families.

We need positive, not reticent, measures from our District 11 leaders. Promote abstinence. Discourage promiscuity. Affirm traditional marriage. By consolidating the fragments of the sexual conduct policy, which the board says does exist, into a comprehensive policy that applies whenever sexual conduct is the topic, the board will ally themselves with the broad majority of this community and protect the children in the process.

Perkins is chairman of the board of Colorado for Family Values.

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F. Mike Miles: Whose traditions to follow?

In times of rapid change, people instinctively seek something to hold on to. They drop anchor, fearing to be set adrift in waves of new technology and shifting mores.

It seems we need the firmness of tradition to help us make sense of the world, to help us deal with new information or the unfamiliar -- the communications explosion, geneticism, immigrants resisting assimilation, homosexuality. Tradition is important.

Thus, the "Traditional values" supported by Colorado for Family Values resonate in many members of this community. Anger towards homosexuality seems to be one manifestation of CFV's attempt to keep their tradition intact and undoubtedly seems justified from their point of view. But such a point of view is based on fear and invalid claims to be the keepers of shared values.

Tradition is important, but whose values are we to follow? Claiming to represent traditional practices, people in this country once tried to keep blacks from using the same bathrooms or restaurants as whites. Had we been lured by the siren song of traditional values we would have denied women the right to vote and would have denied them the opportunity to proudly serve our country as pilots and astronauts.

Traditional values drove Native Americans onto reservations. A lot of pain has been inflicted on minorities everywhere because of inflexible adherence to someone's or some group's traditional values.

The keepers of these sorts of traditional values should consider the transiency of some of their present views. Our history respects not tradition based on provincial customs, but that which reflects the breadth of this nation's peoples. Our history respects not the values of an era, but those that have spoken to generations of Americans as free people.

Tradition is important, but I know of no traditional values that have endured except the ones based on justice and humanity. And while I hold all "traditional values" suspect, I support those embedded in the oldest written Constitution still in use, the United States Constitution: a Constitution in which free speech is guaranteed and equal protection under the law sacrosanct.

I support a way of life backed by a system of law and numerous Supreme Court decisions that have protected minorities from oppression and injustice. I support the values voiced centuries ago by a prophet who welcomed both Jews and gentiles, the weak and oppressed, warning men not to reject the commandment of God for the sake of blind transaction.

"Whose traditional values?" is a question this community will continually face as it grows. Issues such as District 11's student publication policy and, perhaps now, a student conduct policy will test our core philosophy with regard to fundamental rights and values. Other issues concerning minorities and disadvantaged will also test our support for human rights. Now, as society becomes more diverse and its problems more complex, it is even more important to approach the question of values from a broad perspective. Let us hoist anchors, not drop them. Let us put to sea with sails of tolerance and rudders crafted by the common good.

Now is the time for leadership. District 11's school board showed leadership in drafting a student publication policy that will preserve freedom of expression for students. As a community, we need other leaders who will take a similar stand for human rights. We need leaders who will enter the debate on the side of justice and humanity. For in the absence of true leadership by elected officials, the community will be dominated by those with money and a personal agenda. And the "traditional values" they promote will bring injustices to many.

Miles is vice chairman of the Pikes Peak Human Relations Coalition and teaches advanced government and economics at Fountain-Fort Carson High School.

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L. Martin Nussbaum: Affirm chastity and free press

Several years ago Focus on the Family ran an advertisement in national papers entitled, "In Defense of a Little Virginity." Focus is still defending virginity, and so am I. The question before our community now is not whether students should be sexually active but whether we should cut down the civil liberties to defend public virtue.

An October 1996 article in the Palmer High School Lever on the lives of teen-aged homosexuals has caused some to question whether student editors should enjoy editorial liberty to publish such pieces if School District 11 endorses an abstinence-based sexual education policy. Others question whether the district should endorse any sexual values. In fact, it is both possible and desirable simutaneously to promote chastity and preserve a free student press.

My law school professor, Dean Mark Yudof, correctly observed that a school cannot NOT inculcate values. Even if it sought to, a school cannot remain value neutral. Because this is so, schools should carefully consider which values to inculcate and thoughtfully determine strategies for persuading students to make those values their own while crushing those who dissent.

Most public schools consciously inculcate the values of honesty and punctuality. They inculcate values of sobriety, industry and equality. If schools can inculcate these values, they certainly ought to also inculcate the value of chastity. Teen promiscuity and teen pregnancy are social and moral scourges. They destroy relationships, spread deadly STDs, drive the demand for abortion and beget a generation of unfathered and underparented children. If District 11 teaches the risks of smoking, drinking and drug use, it ought also teach the greater harms arising from casual coupling.

Why should student journalists be allowed to dissent from and even to criticize policies and values endorsed by a government school? Why should those teaching the value of chastity allow their students to publish criticism of the value? A few clarifications help.

First, public high school journalists generally do not have a constitutional right to freedom of the press because the press right is "owned" by the school district as publisher and not by the students themselves. The Colorado Legislature has, however, restored a free student press by granting student journalists substantial editorial freedom. This statute bars a school district from restricting the content student articles except when those articles are defamatory, false, or obscene; or when they promote gang activity, unlawful acts or invasion of others' privacy.

Second, civil liberties are difficult to appreciate because their exercise often offends. Some believe that churches and the Sunday morning traffic they bring should be zoned out of nice neighborhoods. Others think school principals should bar student editors from writing about homosexual students. Legal protections for speech, press and religion mean that speech, press and religion are allowed existence and expression even when they offend a constituency.

Third, the boundaries of student journalists' editorial discretion ought not automatically coincide with the substance of each district-endorsed policy. The district has at least an unstated policy of not favoring one religion over another. Yet one Lever editor this year wrote lovingly of her Methodist Church and another endorsed Catholic education.

Freedom of the press, like freedom of religion and freedom of speech, should be understood in part as a truce between warring factions. It is a truce which allows each faction to exist. Lincoln got it right when he said that those "who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."

Civil liberties protect the competition of ideas which, in turn, allows truth to emerge. There are knowable truths even in a pluralistic society. Smoking is unhealthy. Racial bigotry is wrong. Teen promiscuity is disastrous. If a District 11 abstinence policy is wise and true, students openly discussing and questioning and writing about that policy cannot defeat that wisdom and truth. Our schools should be safe places for such discussions, safe places where those who appropriate the schools' values and those who respectfully dissent from them know they are welcome.

Nussbaum is a Colorado Springs attorney whose practice emphasizes religious liberty issues. He is also the father of the Lever's editor in chief.