Ah, the Bonaventuran Trinitarian Aspect: Things tend to come in threes or in numbers divisible by it.
Although, because he was a monk his belief was Biblically based with examples like the three members of the Holy Family, three nails at the crucifixion, three days between death and resurrection, twelve Apostles, and the six days of creation, we might easily dismiss it, we do so while ignoring that these days the Trinitarian Aspect applies to celebrity deaths.
Regarding myself, my three major frustrations form my Trinitarian Aspect and they are connected by the common desire of people not wanting to know what is not already known, even as like Schrodinger’s cat, it is both useful and not until you look at it.
Although my 2009 Civil Court case was ostensibly about my claim that I had been wrongfully dismissed from my teaching position as it was based on fabricated evidence and documentation, it would have had a broader application to all teachers if the union leadership did not get mired in the Gay teacher getting fired part of it, but saw how the Gay teacher was fired and how the process, applied as it was to many teachers, had unfairly arrived at that conclusion.
Although by contract a teacher cannot be dismissed without just cause, which means any accusation upon which the dismissal is based must be accompanied by evidence to support that, what the contract does not cover is how this evidence is collected and how it is reviewed both in closed and open sessions of the school board.
The process had generally been that if for whatever reason beyond gross and obvious incompetence an administrator wanted a teacher dismissed be it political, religious, or personal differences, or the administrator would like the job open to someone with whom they have a bond such as a friend or relative, in lieu of real evidence, what they needed would be fabricated.
Meanwhile, after collecting what the administration considered evidence, the teachers would be shown the evidence and given the option to go before the board and deal with accusations and defenses in public, potentially losing their appeal, and being unable to get another job in the field because of the dismissal and the reasons for it on their record.
The popular option offered to teachers was to offer the chance for avoiding all that by simply accepting the dismissal quietly and leaving, maintaining control of the narrative until they left if their dismissal was not immediate, and gossip began. In exchange for this silent departure, all the documents except the good ones on file would be handed to the teacher to destroy and even really bad teachers could get employment elsewhere. .
Even if the evidence was so totally fabricated as to be obvious, this was usually the one chosen because the administration of the district controlled the hearing according to a process and that prevented a teacher from presenting evidence the administration thought might disprove their charges or answering questions about things that needed clarification. Prior to the hearing, all the teacher’s evidence had to be handed over to the administration’s attorney who would excise any evidence in favor of the teacher and return what remained to the teacher or the teacher’s representative, if there was one, and was the only evidence the teacher was allowed to present.
There were other procedural actions that were allowed and disallowed such as who could speak and who could answer questions during a dismissal hearing, but the application of the rules was dependent on how the situation would affect the mostly predetermined outcome.
With teachers quietly leaving, this system was never exposed until the Gay teacher decided not to go quietly and fought the dismissal in court where raw, unredacted evidence could be presented to the judge without administrative editing.
When the Gay teacher won both at the district and appellate court level, the union leadership was glad the Gay stuff was over, and they could move on. What they failed to see was that when the standard procedure was challenged, all that it was based on was exposed, and, therefore, being so exposed could be ended and a fairer and more just process would have to be devised that did not victimize teachers.
Because the School Board chose to appeal the appellate court’s decision to the state Supreme Court, and the principal at the school to which the Gay teacher had been assigned after his win had claimed to have evidence to show the teacher was actually incompetent, the union leadership decided the district court and the appellate court wins were pure luck, so they would not invest time or money in a case whose luck might run out at the Supreme Court level.
The teacher could not afford to pursue the case on his own and saw that this unnecessary prolongation of the case was a distraction from the actual issue—the safety of Gay kids in school—keeping attention on him rather than his goal.
A year later, after the teacher had left the system, the evidence he had accumulated since he had been assigned to his final school to which he was exiled for his winning the court case, showed that not only his evaluations and certain negative documents in his file were fabricated, but it was the same with any other teacher under that principal who the principal wanted to eliminate and, by having “weeded out” all the bad teachers, could polish his image as an effective educational leader who took no shortcuts in educating the children under his career. This evidence that union could have used at the Supreme Court level to show the continuance of the already revealed unfair practices of administrators when it came to teacher evaluations and dismissals was used in another case filed by other teachers and students against that principal that showed he was extremely creative with record keeping, changing grades and attendance records to serve his purposes, and had, indeed, fabricated the basis of his ridiculous number of teachers he put on Plans of Improvement and potential dismissal.
This principal lost his job and the chance of any future employment in his chosen career anywhere as the case had been public and would follow him wherever he went.
But, because it was a Gay Thing and thankfully over, the tunnel vision of union leadership was a betrayal of the teachers and support for the system used against them.
For their own comfort, the leadership chose to support the district and eventually that principal until with egg on their face, they had to admit they had been wrong in that case but carefully avoided any discussion of the effect of that on all teachers.
II
Teaching in various places in different states, I met people of many cultures that I had the privilege of experiencing and years of their families’ presence in this country and on this continent. Teaching Immigrant children and their families opened my eyes to the many more reasons people come to this country besides coming here for opportunity. Some came to stay alive. Some children had come here alone, sent in their desperation by their parents to a relative they barely knew in a place foreign to them on multiple levels.
I am generations away from being an immigrant, so, the interaction with my students and their parents was an education.
When I returned to Massachusetts, I did what I had found was something I just did over the years. I tried to get involved in my community, not just live in it.
During the Trump years when anti-immigrant words and deeds multiplied, living in a city with a large immigrant population, a city whose character was formed by refugees and immigrant for generations, I started attending meetings dealing with the political assaults on immigrants regardless of their status.
Accidentally, as opposed divine direction, as I was researching something, I came across a Massachusetts law from 1843 that was still on the books as it was never actively removed and is, like those weird laws on eating ice cream while walking backward, not whistling in certain places or any of those laws that were at one time necessary for some now obscure reason but are no longer, yet are still on the books and applicable when convenient.
Congress is an example of the Perry Mason aha move of surprising everyone by applying and unused, obscure, but still existing law or rule.
Granted it came at a certain time, but it is still there.
General laws: Part 1:Title XV: Section 102:
“(a) All persons within the Commonwealth regardless of sex, race, color, creed or national origin, shall have, except as is otherwise provided or permitted by law, the same rights enjoyed by white male citizens, to make and enforce contracts, to inherit, purchase, to lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, penalties, taxes, licenses, and exactions of every kind, and to no other.
I have presented this law at many immigration meetings and have sent copies to immigrant and legal advocacy groups like the local ACLU with no or simply dismissive responses.
At an immigration ally forum, I took the opportunity to publicly present this law to a panel of immigrant and legal experts for their thoughts, but they instantaneously decided that because it was written in 1843 and refers to White men, it is obviously a dedicated law applying only to former slaves.
Nowhere in this law does it mention race other than white men who were at that time the benchmark of rights and generally still are considered to be. Without specifically mentioning former slaves, “All persons within the commonwealth” covers all races and women.
According to that law, women had the vote in Massachusetts since 1843, but because Susan B Anthony, in spite of having family in New Bedford and perhaps not aware of the law, hopefully not ignoring it, chose to vote in New York state, which had no such law, instead of the one where she could have applied that law and sealed the deal, making it clear the law applied equally to women.
This law was written not by Twentieth Century progressives, but by those from the first half of the Nineteenth when people making the laws were in the majority White men.
GLBT people and other groups should have never been forced to fight for their rights as they already had them.
If the law was not used in the past when it should have been, we can rectify this error of oversight by using it now and insisting it be followed.
As people are demanding the state institute some form of this law in whole, part, or in increments, they will not even consider looking at it, dismissing it without consideration, not answering phone calls or written inquiries, digital or hardcopy, regardless how many.
It might not be as useful as I might think it is in the skirmishes about social justice, but how will that be known if no one looks at this law or takes longer than the time between the last word of the law being read out loud and the response begun to consider it. There was no time for thought or any requests for the source from which I pulled the law.
III
Taken in its entirety, it was a 25-year process.
From 1997 to 2009, The Oklahoma City school district refused to broaden its policies on bullying, harassment, and nondiscrimination to include, at first, sexual orientation and then, also gender identity as people became more informed about gender. In justifying its reluctance, district spokespeople, individual administrators, and school board members employed the standard, unfounded, baseless, and theoretical tropes that such inclusion would result in the promotion of wild promiscuous sex, Gay students and their parents, seeing the chance for instant riches, would file an unending number of frivolous lawsuits and would attempt to take over and then seek revenge for all past transgressions, real or imagined, and Gay students would take over the school and make all school activities into Gay events with nonstop Gay Pride parades and decorations omnipresent in the schools.
Gay books would become required reading, and little children would be taught how to be Gay and unlike in other subject areas the kids might resist learning, in this case, they would demonstrate their eagerness to learn with their desire and follow up actions to give up their overriding, natural, God-given sexual orientation and become Gay. With the ability to actually do that in the classroom, any teacher who accomplishes that should be recognized for excellence in education.
However, in spite of the prophesies which were often accompanied with Bible verses to give them weight, the words “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” were finally added and none of the predictions have come true.
Because these words were added in December 2009, while seniors may have ended their school years with these protection in their final semester, the first graders beginning their education the following academic year, began their school years with those protections and in May 2022 will graduate as the first class in the city and the state to have had these protections in place with nothing negative or society destroying taking place during that time.
When Oklahoma, or any state legislatures for that matter, starts bringing up all the tropes about GLBT people, with an obsessive emphasis on the Ts, like books in school libraries and positive information in schools, this was a twelve year case study that shows that in those twelve years not only was it obvious the threats never materialized, but it was so obvious that this once reluctant school district with no prolonged advocacy added “gender expression” approximately halfway through those twelve years.
For twelve years so far,
“The Oklahoma City Public School District (OKCPS) does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, alienage, veteran, parental, family and marital status in its programs and activities, or in its employment decisions, and provides equal access to the Boy Scouts of America and other designated youth groups.”
And the world still turns.
Those proposing anti-gay legislation are making the same claims from the past, just as theoretical and unfounded as then, but still have nothing observable or measurable to support their claims.
The Oklahoma City Public Schools is observable and measurable evidence to refute those claims.
They may attempt to lessen reality by saying that the problems have yet to materialize, but, when they originally made the claim they would happen, the claim was that they would happen instantly.
In spite of the present apoplectic rantings that allowing Transgender kids to play on a team or not making laws that do not allow them to play on teams that correspond with their actual gender will be unfair for girls, with the inclusion of Gender Identity during those twelve years where Trans kids were not forbidden to play on the appropriate team, none of what was supposed to have happened did in those twelve years.
Inclusion caused no harm.
Now that state’s governor has chosen to ignore this evidence from his own capitol city and pass bills to actively exclude Trans kids from playing sports to solve a problem already proven not to exist.
Since the middle of the first decade of the 21st Century, the OKC Public Schools have had the biography of Bayard Rustin and a book on the Stonewall Rebellion in their high school libraries, close to 18 years now. The books were donated during the time a State Representative, Sally Kern, started her crusade to remove “Homosexually themed” books out of the general collection of books in public libraries and placed in a separate area because people who read those books would either be shocked to their core with their religious beliefs assaulted, or would turn to a life of lewdness and promiscuity, and totally remove any such books from school libraries.
The arguments then are the same as those offered now as red states go after books in school libraries.
There has been no noticeable increase in student activity, no one has decided because of a book they want to be gay.
Those books have had no negative impact on the schools as they, like all, other books except those required in the curriculum, are available, not required, so no one is being forced against their will to read Gay stuff.
And, although some student may want to include Bayard Rustin on a Black History Month poster, that is not the same as the predicted threat that this would be an attempt to highjack the theme of the display and make it something Gay.
Placing the books in the libraries and the inclusive language in school district policies, case study if you will, did not take place in a liberal state, but in the Buckle of the Bible Belt, Oklahoma City, and spans 12 measurable and observable years.
That’s a long time for a study.
This info could be used, and any demand in OKC that this inclusion end cannot be justified when compared to the actual years 2009-2022.
The frustration is that, once again, pointing this out to the very people who could use it and, had they, might have prevented a foolish discriminatory law, fell on deaf ears.
It may be only one citable situation, but, unlike the bigots’ theoretical threats and predictions, it is observable, measurable, and real.
But reality is useless if it is never presented to offset fantasy, and it is rendered useless in this case by people just not seeing a bigger picture.
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