President of the Los Angeles Unified school board Jackie Goldberg, who is an out lesbian, took a powerful stand against anti-LGBTQ+ protesters.
Goldberg married her partner in one of the first same-sex wedding ceremonies in the country in 2004. At the time, she was serving as a California assemblywoman and was raising her son with her partner. They had already been together for 28 years before they could legally marry.
In her new position as LA school board president, she has had to field concerns from angry parents, but this Pride month has been especially difficult. Parents mobbed a recent school board meeting, upset that schools were celebrating Pride month and reading LGBTQ+ inclusive books during assemblies.
One book in particular, “The Great Big Book of Families” by Mary Hoffman was read by Goldberg during the meeting. The picture book featured families of all different types of configurations outside of the “typical” nuclear family. On only one page and in one sentence, it describes families that “have two mommies or two daddies.”
In a powerful 6-minute speech at a subsequent meeting, Goldberg addressed the anti-LGBTQ+ protesters directly.
“I’ve been confronting this issue my entire life,” Goldberg said in the speech that has since been viewed more than 1 million times. “I’ve been threatened. I’ve been harassed. I’ve been denied jobs because of who I am and who I love.”
She continued, “you don’t have to love me. You don’t have to like me. You can think I’m the devil incarnate. But you better treat me like a decent human being because that’s how I treat you even though you don’t believe I have the right to exist.”
She asked the audience what they thought the three-day-long debate about this one sentence did to every gay adult and child who is involved in the school district. She answered her own question by saying, “it made them afraid. How dare you make them afraid because you are?”
Goldberg described the sudden uproar of the threat of LGBTQ+ people in schools as a “manufactured crisis”.
“We pose no risk,” she added, “and the folks that are trying to say that we pose a risk are trying to create fear and anxiety for political gain and for no other reason than that.”
