Families & the Community

Same-Sex-Marriage Cases Hold Implications for Schools

By Mark Walsh — March 25, 2013 8 min read
Plaintiff Sandra Stier, center, listens to her partner, Kristin Perry after a court hearing in June 2011 that challenged California’s Proposition 8, which limits marriage to a man and a woman. The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a pair of cases on the same-sex marriage issue.
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

For Kristin M. Perry and Sandra B. Stier, the schools their children have attended have been one more place to be involved parents and a visible same-sex couple.

“I have been a PTA president and I volunteered in the classroom all the time,” said Ms. Perry, who noted that the family of two lesbian mothers and four boys—ages 18 to 24—has had mostly positive experiences in the liberal enclave of Berkeley, Calif.

“On a couple of occasions, I can remember a child would say a homophobic thing to one of our kids, and the teacher would use that as a teachable moment,” she added. “We are in a part of the world, on purpose, where we get a pretty positive response as a family.”

California Challenge

Still, Ms. Perry, 50, and Ms. Stier, 48, would like to be married. They are one of two couples who sued to challenge California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative narrowly passed in 2008 that withdrew the right to same-sex marriage in that state.

“When we go to a high school football game, the [straight] couples around us are talking about an upcoming anniversary or a mother-in-law visiting,” Ms. Stier said. “Because we’re not married, we’re excluded from some of the most common social constructs and from one of the core institutions of our society.”

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court takes up their case, Hollingsworth v. Perry (No. 12-144), which asks whether California’s limitation of marriage to a man and a woman violates the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. In a second case, United States v. Windsor (No. 12-307) the justices will weigh the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, or DOMA, which defines marriage for purposes of federal law and benefits as “only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.”

Among the scores of briefs filed by parties and “friends of the court” on different sides of those cases are several that address same-sex marriage and the schools. The issues include schools’ treatment of same-sex parents and their children, the impact of the debate on gay students and on those who object to same-sex marriage on religious grounds, and the influence of the trend on the curriculum.

In short, as with many other divisive social issues, the nation’s schools are part of the battleground over same-sex marriage.

“Marriage rights for same-sex couples is one of the great American debates right now,” said Suzanne B. Goldberg, a law professor and the director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University. “As such, it has important consequences for American education.”

View of Households

Nearly 1.3 million Americans are members of same-sex couples (regardless of marriage or other legal status), according to a friend-of-the-court brief filed by Gary J. Gates, a scholar at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, law school.

Almost one-fifth of same-sex couples are raising children—more than 125,000 households, with a total of 220,000 children under age 18, according to U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed by Mr. Gates, a supporter of same-sex marriage.

Ms. Stier, who works in technology for a government agency in the San Francisco Bay Area, grew up on a farm in Iowa and had what she has described as a difficult marriage to a man for 12 years. She brought the two oldest boys into the relationship with Ms. Perry.

Ms. Stier first met Ms. Perry in 1996, when both worked for the same agency and were in a computer-training class together. Ms. Perry grew up in a small town in California. She has long worked in the field of child advocacy and is now the executive director of the First Five Years Fund, a Washington-based group that pushes for high-quality early learning.

Ms. Perry said the couple likely will move to the nation’s capital—where same-sex marriage happens to be legal—when their youngest sons, twins who are high school seniors in Berkeley, go to college next fall.

“These are rapidly changing times for educators,” Ms. Perry said. Public schools should let parents teach their children their own beliefs about same-sex marriage, she said, “but it is a good thing for students to have their families validated in school.”

Education Rationale

The couple recall a key line of argument put forth by proponents of Proposition 8 in 2008. In the official voters’ guides for the ballot initiative, sponsors said, among other points, that the measure was “simple and straightforward. … It protects our children from being taught in public schools that ‘same-sex marriage’ is the same as traditional marriage.”

That point, Ms. Stier contends, was a scare tactic designed to inflame public opposition to same-sex marriage. “I feel strongly about how hurtful that was,” she said.

Lawyers for the Proposition 8 sponsors dropped any reference to the education rationale from their main brief filed with the Supreme Court, instead focusing on arguments that the measure “advances society’s interests in responsible procreation and child rearing.”

But a final brief from the sponsors filed in reply to the other side’s arguments says that “there was nothing improper about the official Yes-on-8 campaign. … True, the campaign argued that Proposition 8 would ‘protect our children,’ but explained that it would do so by protecting the traditional definition of marriage, not by protecting children from gays and lesbians.”

“And it is hardly improper that Californians who in good faith oppose redefining marriage would also oppose their young children being taught that same-sex marriage is ‘the same as traditional marriage’ or otherwise ‘okay,’ ” says the brief filed by Washington lawyer Charles J. Cooper, a former assistant U.S. attorney general under President Ronald Reagan.

Ms. Perry and Ms. Stier were joined in their lawsuit by a gay male couple, Jeff Zarillo, 39, and Paul Katami, 40, of the Los Angeles area. They have no children, but have expressed the desire to adopt when they can legally marry.

The two couples are represented by the high-profile legal team of Theodore B. Olson, a former U.S. solicitor general and a well-known conservative, and David Boies, a liberal who had faced off against Mr. Olson in the Bush v. Gore election case in 2000.

They won in federal district court in San Francisco, in a 2010 ruling about Proposition 8 in which Judge Vaughn R. Walker said that the campaign had played on fears that children exposed to same-sex marriage in schools might become gay.

In also striking down Proposition 8 in 2012, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, also rejected the education rationale for the ballot measure. The judges held that nothing in California law before or after the proposition required the public schools to teach about same-sex marriage.

The private sponsors of Proposition 8 appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, and one issue for the justices is whether those sponsors have legal standing to defend the measure.

Lessons ‘Unavoidable’

Lynn D. Wardle, a law professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, said the 9th Circuit court was perhaps naive to think that the legalization of same-sex marriage would not filter its way into school curricula.

“It is unavoidable,” he said. “Whether [in lessons] about sex education, or relationships, or institutions in society, marriage pops up pervasively throughout the curriculum.”

Mr. Wardle, who helped write friend-of-the-court briefs in both the Proposition 8 and DOMA cases on the side of opponents of same-sex marriage, expressed concern that once a state recognizes same-sex marriage, the views of parents who object to their children learning about it will be cast aside.

He pointed to a 2008 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, in Boston, in a case known as Parker v. Hurley. In that decision, the appeals court said a Massachusetts school district did not violate the rights of parents or children by exposing students to books promoting tolerance for same-sex marriage, including King and King, a book about a prince who wants to marry another prince. The court noted that the school district was seeking to “educate its students to understand and respect gays, lesbians, and the families they sometimes form in Massachusetts, which recognizes same-sex marriage.”

Meanwhile, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a Washington-based group that often defends religious speech by students in public schools, filed a brief on the side of same-sex-marriage opponents that expresses concern for students who might object to gay marriage on religious grounds.

“Regardless of how the court rules, school administrators are still going to have people on both sides of this issue in their schools,” Eric Rassbach, the deputy general counsel of the group, said. “It would be a mistake for them to decide that religious views should be suppressed.”

Education groups that have filed briefs on the side of supporters of same-sex marriage say their concern is for how the debate will affect gay students and the children of same-sex couples.

Diverse Families

A brief from the California Teachers Association and its parent, the National Education Association, argues that Proposition 8 has undermined the California education code’s requirement that schools teach tolerance and respect for gay and lesbian students.

“By codifying animus into law, Proposition 8 lends legitimacy to the view that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is socially acceptable, further aggravating existing social tensions within schools,” the unions’ brief says.

Meanwhile, a brief filed by the Washington-based Family Equality Council, the New York City-based Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, and other groups argues that both Proposition 8 and DOMA stigmatize gay students and families headed by same-sex couples.

“The idea of what a family is has evolved enormously over the past several decades in this country,” said Emily Hecht-McGowan, the public-policy director of the Family Equality Council, which advocates for gay parents. “Many children do not come from intact families with a biological father and mother. They’re being raised by grandparents, stepparents, and same-sex parents.”

“The job of educators is to make sure all of those children feel validated and accepted,” she said.

Related Tags:

A version of this article appeared in the March 27, 2013 edition of Education Week as School Angles Seen in Same-Sex-Marriage Cases

Events

Jobs Virtual Career Fair for Teachers and K-12 Staff
Find teaching jobs and other jobs in K-12 education at the EdWeek Top School Jobs virtual career fair.
Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Families & the Community Opinion Why Educators Often Have It Wrong About Right-Leaning Parents
Stereotypes and misunderstandings keep educators from engaging constructively with conservative parents, write Rick Hess and Michael McShane.
Rick Hess & Michael McShane
5 min read
Two women look at each other from across a large chasm.
Mary Long/iStock + Education Week
Families & the Community Opinion Chronic Absenteeism Has Exploded. What Can Schools Do?
The key to addressing this issue is rebuilding the relationship between families and schools.
8 min read
Image shows a multi-tailed arrow hitting the bullseye of a target.
DigitalVision Vectors/Getty
Families & the Community Leader To Learn From Absenteeism Was a Big Problem in This District. A New Strategy Is Getting Results
Sharon Bradley remembers how it felt to miss school for reasons outside her control.
11 min read
Sharon Bradley, director of student, family and community services for Plano ISD, listens to members of the Character, Attendance, and Restorative Education (CARE) team discuss their current projects in Plano, Texas, on Dec. 14, 2023. The CARE department focuses on equipping students and adults with the tools, strategies, and resources that support a safe, engaging, and collaborative learning environment through character education, attendance recovery, and restorative practices.
Sharon Bradley, the director of student, family, and community services for the Plano, Texas, school district listens to staff members on a special team that focuses on helping students and their families address a range of challenges that may get in the way of regular attendance and engagement at school.
Shelby Tauber for Education Week
Families & the Community Leader To Learn From A Former Teacher Turns Classroom Prowess Into Partnerships With Families
Ana Pasarella maximizes her community's assets to put students first.
8 min read
Ana Pasarella, the director of family and community engagement for Alvin ISD, oversees an activity as Micaela Leon, 3, a student in Alvin ISD’s READy Program, draws on a piece of paper on Alvin ISD’s STEM bus in Manvel, Texas, on Dec. 8, 2023.
Ana Pasarella, the director of family and community engagement for the Alvin Independent school district in Texas, oversees an activity as Micaela Leon, 3, a student in the district's READy Program, draws on a piece of paper inside the district's STEM bus in Manvel, Texas.
Callaghan O’Hare for Education Week