SCHOOLS EXAMINE LESSONS OF MASS. SSM: From the Associated Press

...Massachusetts schools have long broken ground in the area of gay rights.

Cambridge Rindge and Latin School became the first public high school in the Northeast to create a gay-straight student alliance more than 15 years ago. Today, there's one in nearly every district. And the state Department of Education has long provided grants to teach acceptance of gay, lesbian, and bisexual students.

"Schools have been way ahead of everyone else," said Paul Schlictman, president of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. "We've always had gay parents. The only thing that's changed is their legal status."

Whether textbooks or lesson plans will change to reflect the events of the past week remains to be seen. Until the state's highest court ruled in November that same-sex marriage should be legal, effective Monday, the issue was abstract.

Now, it's a reality. In a history class at Newton South this week, teacher Michael Kozuch raised gay marriage as part of a discussion of the cultural differences between nations. ...

"Marriage isn't about kids," a boy added. "It's about two people who love each other."

Another girl recalled that in "Romeo and Julius"--a Shakespeare parody she and other classmates performed recently--the unmarried couple had no hospital visitation rights, one of the benefits married gay couples now enjoy in Massachusetts.

Outside liberal bastions like Newton and Cambridge, however, the discussion is decidedly different.

Michael Barth, a 30-year-old psychology and history teacher at Melrose High School, 10 miles north of Boston, said it's more common for his students to favor traditional marriage. Gay marriage comes up "all the time" in lessons on the history of discrimination, he said. ...

For now, gay marriage discussion in the classroom depends on who's teaching.

Barth said he's heard no directives from his superiors in Melrose on how to handle the issue. Schlictman, of the school committee association, said there's been "no chatter" among school boards around the state, and the Department of Education is staying out of it.

"We don't tell schools what they can and can't teach," DOE spokeswoman Heidi Perlman said. "The only guidance we give is if it's going to be discussed, it needs to be done in an education setting, not in a way that teachers are lobbying one way or another."

Supporters of traditional marriage say they're concerned that pro-gay marriage teachers will push their views on students. Ray Flynn, the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican and Boston mayor turned Catholic activist, is among them. ...

The issue should be discussed in classrooms as part of current events, he said, but not alongside the civil rights struggle for blacks.

"To be politically correct, people will be incorporating this in history books, as if it was civil rights," Flynn said.

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