THROWING THE BOOK AT THE `GAY MAFIA'.

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

THE world may well be on the verge of World War III, or at least partial nuclear annihilation. Gas prices are creeping toward $4 a gallon, it's the hottest freaking summer on record and flying just got scary again. And here in California, we are arguing about ... textbooks?

Sadly, yes. It all started when Sheila Kuehl, an openly gay member of the state Senate representing western Los Angeles County, proposed a controversial bill. It would require gay people, transsexuals, transgendered and other non-heterosexual types to be portrayed in California textbooks, when appropriate, as having made contributions to society.

The way some folks reacted, you'd have thought she was proposing a homosexuality how-to guide for 7-year-olds. The family-values organizations went apoplectic, putting the bill at the top of their ``to defeat'' agendas. They weren't so upset about legislators dictating the content of textbooks, which would be my automatic concern, so much as the attempt by the gay mafia to ``force sexual lifestyles upon kids'' (actual quote from Campaign for Children and Families Web site) and because ``it will turn every California public school into a sexual indoctrination center'' (from the Focus on the Family Web site).

Egads! Indoctrination center? Forcing sexual lifesytles on kids? Look who's engaging in overblown alarmist rhetoric.

The bill hardly would have done those things, even before Kuehl gutted it last week in an attempt avoid Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's veto. Now the bill merely requires that non-heterosexual folks not be portrayed as deranged, depraved or otherwise freaky and bad people in the textbooks.

It sounds reasonable to me.

But the gays must have already gotten to me with their insidious homosexual agenda because the bill's opponents don't think the new version is any better than the first. Even though it now seems little more than a symbolic gesture, it will still supposedly force schools to ``promote'' homosexuality and other sexually deviant behavior. A ``Yeay Gay Day'' for grade-schoolers would freak me out, too. If it were true.

If that logic held true, then teaching them about civil rights would turn them into American Civil Liberties Union lawyers or learning calculus would turn students into zitty math nerds who can't play sports. It's absurd.

I wonder if anyone on either side of this debate has bothered to look at the textbooks currently in use? I did, spending some time in Taft High School's textbook room on Thursday, thumbing through the books for various subjects. I was shocked at how sophisticated, as well as heavy, the texts have become since my days incarcerated in some of San Diego's crappiest public schools. Do people know that anal sex and Irene the ``tomboy'' are mentioned in books handed out to students in the same bland style as quadratic equations and monetary systems through history?

Why argue about whether the rumors of J. Edgar Hoover's cross-dressing are appropriate when discussing the life of the famous G-man when books are already filled with truly disturbing things like the social effects of pervasive poverty and Clinton's ``improper relations'' with a certain intern that led to his impeachment?

It's a mystery to me, particularly when there are many truly horrifying anti-family things going on in the world that could use denouncing by influential organizations.

I might be naive, but it seems the bombings of children in the Mideast is a more urgent threat to the lives of children than thinking warm, fuzzy thoughts about gays or drag queens. Besides, I would imagine ``Will and Grace'' or ``Queer Eye for the Straight Guy'' might have accomplished that already. We adults forget that kids are generally more in tune with popular culture than we imagine. They aren't dumb, and a few stray textbook references aren't likely to scar them for life.

Indeed, if you want to scare kids away from a life of homosexuality, what better way to do that than to force them to read about gayness reduced to the same dull and lifeless descriptions as are used for U.S. foreign policy in the post-Revolutionary War era?

Everyone should leave the public school textbooks alone; that goes for the Legislature and fundamentalist special interests. Instead of causing an uproar over nothing, they ought to put their energies toward a real social worry in California, such as curing our society of its penchant for dumping its sick and old people onto the streets and into lives of poverty and victimization.

I would suspect that children learn a lot more damaging lessons from seeing discarded grannies abandoned on the sidewalk than hearing about Tim the transsexual train operator.