Jen Tullock, an openly gay author and actress currently starring in Apple TV’s Severance, is also an alumnus of CAL — and she’s not surprised by the assignment. “My ten years at CAL taught me that my value, that my very worth as a human being, was conditional,” she told WHAS. “This cruel lie, and the lie that any child can or should reverse their very nature, has and will continue to harm the children to whom it’s taught.”
CAL did not respond to Them’s request for comment before publication. In a statement released last week, CAL superintendent Darin A. Long said the school’s position is that marriage must be between one cis man and woman, and “all other sexual expressions go against God’s design.” Long also said that administrators would “review this assignment to ensure there is clarity in its purpose and language.”
Of course, the issue isn’t that the assignment was unclear — to the contrary, it’s a completely transparent attempt to indoctrinate young people into a homophobic worldview by using platitudes about “love” and “compassion” to create a veneer of benevolence. “This assignment, given by a school purporting to prepare students ‘to reason logically’ sets students up not to understand rational thinking and equally conflates love and cruelty,” wrote Willie Carver, an openly gay teacher and 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year, in an editorial this week in The Courier-Journal. “In short, the students are set up to fail, since the task is impossible.”
It’s no surprise, then, that the assignment seems to violate CAL’s own Community and Diversity statement, in which the school claims to stand against “prejudice that may cause anyone to feel undervalued and unworthy of human dignity.” These contradictions and hypocrisies aren’t a problem Long and his employees need to solve — they’re just the kind of cognitive dissonance evangelical Christians have to cultivate, so that a child can be made to believe that homophobic discrimination is an act of kindness.
For now, we can only hope that of the 3,000-odd students currently stuck in CAL schools, the LGBTQ+ kids among them make it out relatively unscathed. “I’ve been gone 20 years,” CAL graduate Kylee Marcy grimly told the Courier-Journal, “and I would’ve hoped that … they would have learned that love is the way to go, as opposed to the fire-and-brimstone hate. But it doesn’t seem like it to me.”
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