Two Escondido Teachers Put At-Risk Youths at Risk

 

Homeless.

40% of children who are homeless had been evicted from their family homes because their parents refused to accept them being gay or transgender according to homeless surveys. Studies show that gay and transgender teens are 120% higher at risk of being forced from their homes by their parents than any other group.

Prostitution and drug addiction.

Survival on the streets most always results in those gay teens resorting to prostitution in order to survive according to studies by various agencies such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the National Network for Youth. Coping with the harshness of rejection by family, living homeless and depending on prostitution for survival most often leads to drug use and drug addiction.

In cases where a parent refuses to accept their child’s identity, eviction is not always the punishment. The child may remain in the home, but according to interviews with unwelcomed gay teens, they report physical and/or emotional abuse while remaining in the home. Many of these become runaways, all suffer emotional scarring and often psychological trauma.

This is the tragic result of those parents who cannot tolerate having a gay or transgender child. While we can assume most parents in this day and age are enlightened and loving enough to accept their children should they discover their child is gay or believes they could be transgender, the reality is that there are many parents who do not.

That is why it is important to accept a teenager’s understanding of their own parents and their own family situation. That is why it is important to allow the teen to determine if it is best to share the child’s sexual identification and if so, when to discuss it with the parents. Only that teen has a full understanding what the parental reaction will be and what the risk of consequences might be.

US District Judge Roger Benitez disagrees.

Benitez agreed with two Escondido Middle School teachers that it is instead the right of teachers to violate the teen’s privacy and be allowed to contact the parents to report to the parent that their child believes that they are transgender or gay. Those two teachers filed a lawsuit challenging the policies of the Escondido Elementary School District and the State of California.

Those policies attempt to protect the child by assuming the child knows their parents and their homelife better than anyone outside of their home. The policies also assume that the teen has better insight into their own body and that the teen has the right to question their own sexuality. Therefore, the existing policies prohibit school personnel from going behind a teen’s back to inform the parent if they overhear or are directly told by the student that the student believes they are gay or might be transgender.

The teachers had stated that instead such policies are a violation of their rights. Conservative Christians, they argue that their religious freedom and their freedom of speech is being violated if they are not allowed to pass on to the parents how the teen refers to their own sexual identity. Without understanding the teen’s family’s dynamics, without understanding the teen’s biological makeup much less apparently not understanding the conclusions of science and not understanding statistics revealing potential consequences, these two choose to interfere.

Benitez sees their point. He adds his concern that teens who have these sexual identities are possibly mentally ill as well.

“(These policies) harm the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention…They harm the parents by depriving them of the long-recognized 14^th Amendment right to care, guide, and make health care decisions…and by substantially burdening many parents’ 1^st Amendment right to train their children in their held religious beliefs.”

“And finally,” he continued, “they harm teachers who are compelled to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs…”

For the record, the 14^th Amendment defines national citizenship, guaranteeing due process and equal protection under the law to all persons. It does not apply to this situation nor support the teachers’ argument. Additionally, it is debatable that the Constitutional right to Freedom of Religion gave citizens the latitude to enforce their “sincerely held religious beliefs” on others. In fact, it exists for the very opposite reason.

Benitez has an extremely conservative perspective on issues and judgements. It is routine for his decisions to be overturned in appeals court. In the past eight years he has had four significant decisions overturned, as well as a decision in 2010 where he was refusing to uphold the Constitutional requirement for separation of church and state by ruling that public schools should be allowed to hang religious posters and banners inside classrooms.

Hopefully the Court of Appeals will toss this ignorant and harmful ruling into the same trash bin.