State-church cleavages and morality: teaching sexual diversity in Brazilian public schools.

In the now-classic piece, Party Systems & Voter Alignment, Lipset and Rokkan (1967) contend modern party systems emerged from four types of cleavages that have historically structured society: center-periphery, state-church, land-industry, and owner-worker. While the state-church conflict may no longer be as immediately apparent – and indeed, scholars (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 1999) suggest that state-church may often be more in cooperation than conflict - the cleavage continues to surface in democratic societies. What is perhaps most surprising is that, just as Lipset and Rokkan theorized some four decades ago, the control of education remains a principle point of social contention.

The salience of this divide is evident when we consider the issues of sexuality and education policy. We first consider the question of sexuality and the expressive function of public policy. Since sexuality draws heavily from religious didacticism, education policy in regards to LGBTs decenters this relationship by publicly endorsing sexuality alternative to the traditional model. Thus, the state-church cleavage originally identified by Lipset and Rokkan (1967) returns to the forefront of political conflict for many of the same reasons.

Sexuality, and childhood sexuality in particular, is the source of considerable anxiety in the Western world (Butler 2001; Rubin 1984; Weeks 1985). It therefore becomes the object of regulation and control which delineate the parameters of acceptable sexual behavior. To fall within these parameters is to be part of the charmed circle, which reflects a specific conception of sexuality that is “‘good, normal’, and ‘natural’ [and] should ideally be heterosexual, marital monogamous, reproductive, and non-commercial” among other standards (Rubin 1984, 153). These definitions often find basis in moral and religious doctrine. Following this logic, non-normative sexualities (among them, LGBT sexualities) fall outside of the bounds of the charmed circle and raise the specter of sexual peril, moral panic, anxiety, and judgment. One way to avoid these threats to sexuality is by institutionalizing the values espoused by the charmed circle into public policy.

Public policy serves an expressive function, by which society codifies dominant values into a legal framework (Gusfield 1963; Vergari 2001). Specifically, education policy indoctrinates children and adolescents with culturally specific norms, beliefs, and values through explicitly and implicitly morally didactic material. Thus, these policies must take particularly firm stances in regards to issuing prescriptive dictates that will form the next generation of society. In Western democracies, struggle for control over expressive values regresses into what scholars of public policy term morality politics (Haider-Markel 1999; Mooney 2000; Mooney and Schuldt 2008; Vergari 2001). Morality politics entails conflict over first principles whereby issues of moral quality and technical simplicity are prone to high levels of conflict, low information costs, issue salience and, consequently, higher levels of citizen participation. Debates feature the presence of religious fundamentalists and cultural conservatives who claim to protect traditional values from outside threats (Doan and Wiliams 2008; Egan and Hawkes 2008; Gibson 2004; Moran 2001; Patton 2007; Robinson 2012).

The inclusion of sexual diversity in education policy problematizes this relationship, principally through the intersection of (non-normative) sexuality and children. As a recent example of this conflict, we take the case of the so called “kit gay” introduced in 2011 by the Brazilian Ministry of Education, with financial support from the National Foundation for Educational Development and the NGO Communication and Sexuality. The “kit gay” refers to a policy proposal intended to combat the prevalence of homophobia in public schools. The kit included a series of pamphlets, handouts, and videos designed to sensitize students to questions of sexual diversity, dealing with the themes of coming out, same-sex attraction, gender-identity, prejudice, and peer pressure.

The project was cancelled by then recently elected President Rousseff before implementation, with the Secretary General of Republic reporting that Rousseff found the project to be “inadequate” and “improper for its objective” (Flor 2011). Media sources linked the abrupt cancellation to pressure from the Evangelical Bloc in the Congressional House of Deputies, and a concomitant scandal involving Rousseff’s then Chief of Staff, Antonio Palocci. The government publicly denied that pressure from the evangelical bloc influenced the decision. Instead, the official proclamation claimed that future projects dealing directly with customs and mores would include more scrutiny from the executive cabinet as well as input from civil society (Passarinho 2011). Even so, a cursory look at the rhetoric vis à vis the project confirms the media interpretation of events.

Leading evangelical representative Anthony Garotinho (PR-RJ) demanded that the Minister of Education resign and claimed that the 74 member strong bloc would oppose any project introduced until the government removed the videos. Threats were also made to open an investigation regarding the terms of the contract between the Ministry of Education and the NGO Communication and Sexuality, which was responsible for the production of at least one of the videos (Passarinho 2011). Finally, Garotinho’s claim that the videos function as “a stimulus to homosexualism” illustrate three points: first, the suggestion that exposure to material on sexual diversity will directly affect one’s gender or sexual orientation is patently false; second, and closely linked, public discussions of marginalized sexualities continue to induce moral panic as described by Gayle Rubin; and third, the deliberative use of the term homosexualism, rather than homosexuality, retrogresses to the medical era prior to 1985, when homosexuality was still defined as a mental illness in Brazil.

Following the earlier discussion, the “Kit gay” exemplifies the difficulty of incorporating sexuality into education policy. The inclusion of content on sexual diversity in public schools threatens to decenter the dominant conception of sexuality. Public policy would confer expressive legitimacy to LGBT sexualities, directly challenging the hegemony of the charmed circle that encompasses so called sexually acceptable behavior. This debate degenerated into morality politics, meeting with predictable defiance by religious interests and ultimately exposing the durability of the state-church cleavage predicated upon the control of education.

References

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