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Public schools in California will be required to teach students about the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans starting Jan. 1 after Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday signed a controversial bill to add the topic to the social sciences curriculum, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
Textbooks now must include information on the role of LGBT Americans, as well as Americans with disabilities, though California’s budget crisis has delayed the purchasing of new books until at least 2015.
“History should be honest,” Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement. “This bill revises existing laws that prohibit discrimination in education and ensures that the important contributions of Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life are included in our history books.”
The governor called the legislation, SB48, introduced by Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, “historic.”
The law — the first of its kind in the nation — adds the two groups to an existing list of minority and other groups that are required to be part of the social sciences curriculum.
The Democratic-controlled Legislature passed a similar bill in 2006, but then governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it, reports The New York Times.
This time, however, California has a Democratic governor, and the legislation came on the heels of a highly publicized string of suicides among gay teenagers, including a 13-year-old boy from the state’s Central Valley.
Advocates for the legislation said they believed the shift would help make schools safer for gay and lesbian students, who are often ostracized.
“There is an increasing awareness in the public and among elected officials that we have to do something to address the problems of bullying, and the negative consequences” for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students, said Carolyn Laub, director of the Gay-Straight Alliance Network.
Some conservative lawmakers, however, continued to oppose the bill, saying that curriculum should be left to individual school districts.
“It’s a sad day for our republic when we have the government essentially telling people what they should think,” said Tim Donnelly, a Republican state assemblyman from San Bernadino. Mr. Donnelly said the law prohibited schools from presenting gays and lesbians “in anything other than a positive light, and I think that’s censorship right there.”