When Will the Fighting Stop?

Alameda is a 20-minute ride from San Francisco on a ferry that serves coffee in the morning and chardonnay at sunset, but the two cities' distinct personalities make the island seem a long way from what is arguably the country's gayest city. The place has a peculiar island conservatism -- not quite Republican because city's vote went 75% for John Kerry in 2004. It's a conservativism that brings the speed limit down to 25 mph on all roads. Slow is fast enough for Alameda; they think of all the children playing.

The 70,580 residents are an average of 38 years old and ripe for the Parent Teacher Association. Many live in Victorian houses standing in constant competition for the island's preservation award, which the upper-middle-class suburb gives each year to the home best representing those sensibilities. Alameda's now-defunct amusement park attracted city people from Oakland and San Francisco. Now they move there to amuse themselves and raise their children. The birthplace of the Popsicle and the snow cone is either strangely or fittingly the hotbed of a national argument on how public school students learn to live with others.

It started in the fall of 2007. Teachers that year asked for help dealing with bullies who made gay jokes. They thought talking about homosexuality in classrooms, while taboo, would teach children early on that homophobic behavior is not tolerated in class and endangers their peers. Margie Sherratt, acting assistant superintendent for the Alameda Unified School District, responded with an innocuous item now known as Lesson #9 -- which sounds sinister, like something from a science fiction novel.

Sherratt's lesson asks kindergarten and first-grade students to define a family and introduces the idea of same-sex couples. Once able to read, students would take home the true story of Roy and Silo, two male penguins who raise a donated, fertilized egg. Older students would examine the work of Harvey Milk and poet Walt Whitman.

The curriculum recommendation has, in two years, come to represent a huge progressive step past what the state of California and all others require in their public schools with its antibullying bylaws.

It has also been the subject of controversy following the passing of California's ban on same-sex marriage; opponents of the curriculum say voters have spoken on the issue.

However, the suicides of 11-year-olds Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover in Massachusetts and Jaheem Herrera in Georgia this past spring led to a closer look at bullying -- this time as a public health hazard, suppressible with laws on the playground, state, and federal levels. Their mothers called passionately for reform as guests on Oprah Winfrey's and Ellen DeGeneres's talk shows. When they described their sons' deaths as escapes from daily torture disguised as schoolyard teasing, they became sympathetic superstars for a mini-movement.