Marriage as Defined in Texas’ Textbooks

Re “A Texas-Sized Fib,” editorial, Nov. 20: It is really no surprise that the Texas Board of Education would go to great lengths to try to define marriage as a “lifelong union between a husband and wife.”

Although they are working as hard as they can to deny me the right to marry the person I love, however, it’s very disturbing that their marriages are falling apart. Maybe if less time was spent on trying to place discrimination in our textbooks, the Constitution and state laws, they would have more time to devote to preserving the sanctity of their own marriages.

With a national divorce rate of 50%-plus, it is hard to imagine why anyone would be worried about gay people destroying the sanctity of marriage.

Eric J. Norman

West Hollywood

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Textbook publishers should simply have refused to make the changes that the Texas Board of Education demanded for its textbooks. If all the publishers refused to make the changes, Texas either would have had to take the textbooks as they were originally printed or go without new books for its students.

Josh Rivetz

Northridge

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Re “Revision Marches to Social Agenda,” Nov. 22: You recently reported on the Texas Board of Education’s success in censoring health textbooks to emphasize faith-based sexual abstinence-only tenets, eliminating reference to such scientific realities as sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy and teen sex experimentation.

The textbook publishers, trying to maximize profits by printing a single Texas-approved text, limit book choices for other states. The sad result is that “books purchased [in Texas] wind up in classrooms across the nation, because publishers are loath to create new editions for smaller states.”

Your readers need to know that those texts are in California classrooms as well. On the Ojai Board of Education, I recently learned that unless we purchased a health text supplement, our high schoolers would not learn the sexual science loathed in Texas. Health texts approved in California are already “abstinence-only” and contain no information about condoms or contraception.

I think the publishers could sell all the science-based texts they print (particularly in blue states) if they would simply affix a label to the book covers reading “Banned in Texas.”

Kathi Smith

Board member, Ojai Unified School District