California’s School Safety and Violence Prevention Act of 2000 requires schools to prevent anti-gay violence in the schools. Given the grim statistics about antigay violence in the schools many have agreed (or succumbed) to develop diversity training programs. Now the same right-wing groups that opposed the California laws designed to ward off antigay violence in the schools are taking aim at diversity programs.

According to the Los Angeles Daily Journal, schools in the Marin County city of Novato started diversity training in elementary schools. The school required students to see a children’s play called Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry. The play, produced by a nonprofit theatre group called Fringe Benefits, simply tells kids that racial and gay slurs are hurtful and wrong.

This radical idea so angered some parents that they enlisted the right-wing Pacific Justice Institute (PJI) and sued the school district. They claimed the show violated their parenting and religious rights and it subjected their children to sexual harassment.

Brad Dacus of the PJI said that one third-grader who saw the play “came home and told her mother that she was a lesbian” because she learned that girls who hang around girls are lesbians.

Fringe Benefits has performed Cootie Shots at 136 other schools. The play consists of short skits, poems and songs about race and culture. One skit talks about diverse families, while another deals with children who tease a girl because her older brother is gay. Another skit is a takeoff of Rapunzel that has the distressed princess come down from her tower to play with a tomboy instead of waiting for a prince to rescue her.

Despite this blatant effort to promote GLBT conversion, thousands of straight school children in California who have seen the play have not rushed home to disclaim either their homosexuality or heterosexuality. Instead, straight students have become a little more respectful of their peers, while GLBT students have felt a little comfort. And that’s very important to the parents and children in Novato schools. In 1999, for example, students attacked 17-year-old San Marin high school student Adam Colton, beating him unconscious. What made the incident draw national headlines was that they carved the word “fag” into his stomach and arm with a ballpoint pen. Victimized students, both straight and openly gay, have reported numerous incidents to the school board. With such diversity programs in place the school district has reported some positive change.

The unfortunate part here is that the near death of a student and brutal assaults haven’t stopped the efforts of some vocal parents opposed to diversity programs to intimidate school districts with lawsuits and recalls. As I predicted last year when the Grossmont High School District added tolerance for gay students to its diversity program, at the next election a right-wing slate of three defeated nine moderate board candidates.

But the right wing’s prospect of getting relief in the courts looks dim, at best.

First, when a teacher claimed that it violated her religious rights to share a women’s restroom with another woman (who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery), the federal appellate court dismissed it summarily and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the woman’s appeal.

And in a case handed down a few weeks ago, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that a school district did not act illegally when it refused to excuse a student from a mandatory health education course. The seventh-grade health-education course in Fairfield, Connecticut’s, public schools includes drugs and family life. A parent objected to his son having to take the course.

The father complained that he wanted his son removed from the entire class because the curriculum contradicted his religious beliefs. He objected to the entire curriculum, especially the part dealing with “respect for others’ feelings, rights and differences” and “discussion of behaviors which demonstrate respect for self and others.”

The father contended that the class is anti-religion because “it doesn’t support a married man and woman together as the basic unit of the family. The school teaches that the family unit can be composed of anything or anyone.”

While the court noted that parents have a right to control a child’s education, such as deciding whether to send a child to public or private school, parents cannot dictate the curriculum to a school district.

In the only case where the Supreme Court allowed parents’ religious concerns to trump a state law, the Supreme Court held that requiring Amish children to attend school beyond the 8th grade was unconstitutional because the Amish showed that the law would “threaten their entire way of life.”

The same result should apply in all cases where the right wing challenges tolerance and diversity classes. Teaching kids that it’s wrong to kill gay people hardly threatens anyone’s entire way of life.