California Gov. Gavin Newsom vows to impose millions of dollars in fees and fines on a school district that refuses to teach kids a mythologized version of a politician who sometimes pursued sexual relationships with kids.
“After we deliver the textbooks into the hands of students and their parents, the state will deliver the bill — along with a $1.5 million fine — to the school board for its decision to willfully violate the law, subvert the will of parents, and force children to use an out-of-print textbook from 17 years ago,” Newsom announced.
Temecula Valley Unified School District voted to retain control of education closer to parents and reject Sacramento’s mandate that all California communities teach about a political figure little known during his life outside of the Bay Area, where he spent less than a year in elected office. The state dictates that children in grades one through five learn about Harvey Milk.
Of course, Newsom does not want Temecula Valley children to learn everything about Harvey Milk. He wants a Disneyfied version that leaves out his sexual relationships with teens and his running interference for a cult leader who murdered hundreds of children.
In The Mayor of Castro Street, Randy Shilts details how Milk poached an underage runaway from a friend, moved him into his home, decorated his apartment with photographs of the youngster’s backside, claimed guardianship over him to others, and continued the relationship for six years despite the troubled boy’s drug use and suicide attempts.
Shilts was not just gay but an activist journalist who used his writing to advance homosexual causes. NBC News depicts the anti-Milk forces as “three school board members backed by a conservative political action committee with ties to an evangelical church,” noting, with neither context nor curiosity, that the school board president referred to Milk as a “pedophile.” It ignores that the information upon which the board president based his assessment comes exclusively from gay men who knew Milk.
The sources relied upon for my book Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco, which portrayed Milk as a predator seeking very vulnerable and very young paramours, were gay.
One well-known member of San Francisco’s gay community, who wished to remain unknown for obvious reasons in Cult City, recounted a 1970s night on the town with a group that split up when Milk’s teenaged date could not gain entry to bars. Early the next morning, this prominent gay man discovered the youngster beat up, balled up, and bawling in Milk’s doorway. (READ MORE: Pols Want to Spend $1.6M to Enlarge Harvey Milk’s Name at SFO)
“He said, ‘I got beat up,’” the anonymous source explained in Cult City. “He said, ‘He beat me, raped me.’ I didn’t examine him or even say he should go to a doctor. I heard it. It was enough for me.”
Harvey Milk’s private life would seem to disqualify him, particularly after #MeToo, as a classroom icon for 6- to 11-year-olds; more so does his brief public life.
After Jim Jones absconded with a first-grader to the jungles of Guyana, the incoming San Francisco supervisor warned President Jimmy Carter against using the State Department to intervene on behalf of the boy’s parents. To the president, Milk described John Victor Stoen’s mother as engaging in “blackmail,” the boy’s father as a teller of “bold-faced lies,” and Jones as “widely known in the minority communities here and elsewhere as a man of the highest character, who has undertaken constructive remedies for social problems which have been amazing in their scope and effectiveness.”
Stoen, like runaway Jack Galen McKinley and so many youngsters who crossed Harvey Milk’s path, suffered a bad outcome. He died alongside 900 or so others after the minions of that “man of the highest character” forced him to ingest cyanide in Jonestown.
Milk told lies about Jones because Jones supported gay rights. Newsom, NBC News, and others tell lies about Milk for politically motivated reasons as well. Parental love, arguably a more powerful drive and certainly a more noble one, motivates the recalcitrant citizens in Riverside County.
Given Harvey Milk’s track record, might Newsom consider that it could be legitimate rather than ideological worries that are causing parents in Temecula Valley to not want to gamble on the outcome of their kids crossing his path, too?
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