Los Angeles School Board President blasts Homophobic Protestors

Los Angeles School Board President blasts Homophobic Protestors | In 2004, Jackie Goldberg, then a California assemblywoman, married her partner at San Francisco City Hall in one of the first same-sex weddings in the country, their nuptials celebrated with cheers from family, friends and political allies. Legally unable to marry up to that point, the couple had already been together for 28 years and had raised Goldberg’s son. Jackie Goldberg, the president of the Los Angeles Unified school board, waded through a crowd of protesters upset that the district’s educators were celebrating Pride Month in part by reading “The Great Big Book of Families” at an assembly. Goldberg listened to the reading of the 2010 picture book, which describes all sorts of families: those with a mom and a dad, some with single parents, and others headed by foster parents, adoptive parents or grandparents. On one page, it describes families that “have two mommies or two daddies.” That’s when Goldberg realized what the protesters were so upset about: families like hers. Goldberg expressed her disappointment four days later at the board’s regularly scheduled meeting on June 6. She felt compelled to denounce the protest outside Saticoy Elementary School, which Goldberg says is part of a growing effort across the country to drive LGBTQ+ people back into the closet. Her fiery, six-minute speech married Goldberg’s decades-long career as a politician with the lifelong activism that started with her work as a leader of the free speech movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s. “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." #losangeles #la #usa #california #us #homophobia #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtfamily #gay #lesbian #gaydadshavemorefun #jackiegoldberg #democrat #schoolboard #StateRepresentative less