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The future school kids of California will soon learn the valuable contributions to history by members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community by reading about them in their textbooks. Yesterday, the Assembly approved a bill okaying the addition of the info to our state's textbooks, and that bill lands on the desk of Governor Jerry Brown today. The bill, SB48, also provides for the inclusion of information about Americans with disabilities, according to the SF Chronicle. It took one Republican vote to join the party-line Democratic votes to pass the controversial and long-debated bill.
While banning the teaching of information about LGBT individuals or groups is not something on the books of any state, California could become the first state to explicitly require this particular inclusion.
Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) who introduced the bill believes that not including info about LGBT Americans, or any other particular group of people, California's educators are "selectively censoring history."
An Op-Ed from the LA Times in April, however, counters, by saying history is something better written by historians, not politicians. (Just to calm the dissenters' nerves, for the record, you can't teach someone to be gay.)
Brown's office has yet to comment on the bill.
