Live & let live.

Pushing, shoving, name-calling - the stuff of playground skirmishes - has broken out among the adults: New York City school leaders, bureaucrats, politicians, and parents are jeering and jabbing. But what might have begun as a fracas born of bureaucratic bungling has now become a major battle in the culture wars: When does the struggle to prevent discrimination against homosexuals become an effort to gain social approval of homosexual relationships? The fight in New York may prove instructive elsewhere.

The immediate focus of the New York skirmish is a multcultural curriculum, "Children of the Rainbow," that Schools Chancellor Joseph Fernandez sent to the city's thirty-two school districts for implementation. One section urged that primary school children, including first graders, be introduced to the idea that same-sex couples be seen as normal family units, and it urged teachers to include references to gays and lesbians in all curricular areas. Heather Has Two Mommies, a story book listed as a reading resource, s about a child conceived through artificial insemination being raised by two lesbian moms.

Development of a multicultural curriculum began several years ago as an effort to teach tolerance and reduce prejudice in the public schools; along the way it acquired the units on gays and lesbians and homosexual family groups. It has now become the occasion for a confrontation between Fernandez and District 24 in Queens, over who should decide what, if anything, to teach primary school children about homosexuality and homosexual relationships.

How the curriculum actually came to be written and implemented is only belatedly being told in the city's newspapers (a story in itself): how the gay and lesbian materials were included; how the curriculum passed muster with reviewers, consultants, the chancellor's staff (some of whom say they never saw the contested material); and how it was sent for implementation to New York's thirty-two local school boards where it met fierce, and perhaps fatal, opposition from District 24.

Pressed by the Gay and Lesbian Teachers' Association, the Central Board's curriculum office engaged a lesbian first-grade teacher to contribute a gay perspective. Her text seems to have been included without vetting or consultation. It sailed through. That is, until the curriculum was rejected by District 24, which cited. in part, its own right under decentralization regulations to shape the curriculum. Other local districts deleted, rewrote, or postponed to a later grade the material on gay families. For its rejection of the curriculum and refusal to negotiate an alternative, Chancellor Fernandez suspended the board of District 24. Mr. Fernandez has called opposition to the curriculum a malicious, highly organized campaign to distort" its contents.

Because the strongest opposition has come from the District 24 board, which is made up solely of white Catholics, that resistance to the curriculum has been attributed to machinations by leaders of the Catholic church, accusations that recall the nineteenth-century nativists who saw immigrant catholics marching to the papal baton. An African-American district in Queens and a Hispanic one in the Bronx have also rejected the curriculum, and none of the remaining districts has accepted it without substantial revisions. Church officials have testified against the curriculum, but Mary Cummins, the president of District 24's board, for better or worse, marches to her own drummer. Her opposition galvanized other school boards and parents, many of whom are not Catholic, and many of whom are deeply troubled about what their children will be taught in schools on the subject of homosexuality.

The ins and outs of this continuing saga are marked by all of the Byzantine maneuvering the rest of the country expects from New Yorkers and their politics. Still, there may be some lessons in this for normal America.

Lesson 1. "Love me, love my lifestyle" cannot be the foundation for the tolerance, respect, and civil rights that gays and lesbians want and deserve. "Live and let live" has been the genuine strength of the pluralism by which New Yorkers have long survived, just as a spirit of agreeing to disagree has moderated the city's diversity of cultures, moral views, and life styles. Now we are seeing a new kind of pluralism, "enforced diversity." In a New York Times op-ed piece, Richard Vigilante argues, "Rather than asking us to live together in peace despite our deepest disagreements, enforced diversity asks us to surrender those disagreements, to pretend that our deepest beliefs do not matter and to shed them for a government-enforced least common denominator of values" (December 12, 1992).

Lesson 2. Don't introduce moral conflicts into the classroom when adults themselves are deeply and honestly conflicted. Homosexuals want gay bashing to stop, they want discrimination in jobs and housing to end, and most Americans agree with them. But some homosexuals want more than tolerance. "Gay-rights groups, emboldened by the election of openly gay and lesbian candidates in New York and around the country but vulnerable because of political setbacks elsewhere, view the gay curriculum as a measure of acceptance" (New York Times, December 15, 1992). The Gay and Lesbian Teachers' Association lobbied the curriculum office to include materials on gay relationships. Those who want such relationships to be regarded as the equivalent of heterosexual marriages should know that most Americans don't agree with them. In fact, the religious beliefs of most Americans still hold that homosexual acts are wrong. Thus, what the polling data tell us about citizen support for the rights of homosexuals needs to be tempered by the recognition that the moral views of most Americans are not likely to regard homosexual relationships with favor. No parents who honestly hold such a belief could responsibly allow their children to sit in a class where such approval is promoted.

Lesson 3. Political correctness is a fatal barrier to open and honest debate about such moral disagreements. In academia, PC has proved a powerful vehicle through which minorities enforce their claims upon the majority. The moral power of this ingenious tactic lies in the unwillingness of a majority to seem to be intolerant of views advanced by a small but aggrieved group (sometimes justifiably aggrieved), even when those particular views may be wrong or wrong-headed. What may seem to work in academia, however, is fatal in a representative government where opposing views must be openly and honestly considered. In the case of the "Rainbow Curriculum," the views of parents, school board members, and probably a majority of New Yorkers were denied legitimacy by being ruled out of the debate. Chancellor Fernandez treated opposition to the Rainbow Curriculum as a species of bigotry. Mayor David Dinkins gave whole-hearted support to the curriculum and Fernandez. Other politicians, civic leaders, and bureaucrats joined in. The media's own biases served until recently to obscure the issues and to deny a public voice to those who oppose treating heterosexual and homosexual relationships as moral equivalents. As a result of the showdown with District 24's board, what had been treated as a fracas over educational policy making is gradually revealing itself as a species of political strong-arming.

Coming on the heels of a brutal battle over AIDS education and condom distribution in the high schools last year, this year's struggle has subverted the justifiable goal of reducing discrimination against gays and of nurturing tolerance in a city where a tradition of "live and let live" has had a long and honorable working life.