Everyone’s talking about Portland these days. Now going on three weeks, the Portland school committee’s well-intentioned but poorly communicated effort to make birth control available to King Middle School students is getting the attention of the national press alongside fires in California, war with Iran and meltdowns in the housing market.
I haven’t been following the issue in any great detail and probably wouldn’t do very well in any debate about laws barring consenting minors from having sex; whether or not providing the pill promotes promiscuity or exactly how much information about their social entanglements children can be expected to share with their parents. As someone without a dog in this fight (or a girl in the school) my interest is largely confined to the controversy, not the policy. Whatever way it is resolved my life will remain unchanged with the exception of maybe having to share the sidewalk with one less young girl pushing a stroller.
All this adds up to why you won’t see me on television talking about this controversy – not that anyone has asked. Or at least no one has asked me yet. Watching the national news shows and perpetual punditry it can seem everyone in Portland is getting their 15 minutes of fame all at once. There’s the local district attorney on "Good Morning America"…Look – it’s that nice woman I always see at the supermarket talking to Katie Couric’s replacement…Hey, that’s that wacky Ben guy from the school board getting yelled at on Fox!
Kansas, smansas. The new front in the culture war is Maine. But a funny thing happened on the way to the battlefield – the troops conscripted to do the fighting are pretty lousy at following orders of the generals in Washington and New York.
As I sat sipping my coffee Monday morning watching NBC’s "Today" show, co-host Meredith Vieira spoke to Jennifer Southard, a mother with children at King Middle School and John Coyne, the school board chairman who cast his vote against adopting the new policy. With two such guests, odds in favor of someone being really upset with the policy were pretty good, or so the producers may have thought. But it would not be so. While Coyne did not vote for the policy, he told Viera his interest now was in making sure the program worked well. Southard, while explaining the controversy has helped parents wake up to the fact some of their children’s peers engage in risky behavior, also made clear that parents – not school administrators – are the primary source of values and morality for children. Viera seemed a little perplexed that these two people in the middle of a storm were so agreeable and not just respectful of other points of view, but sympathetic toward them. It was as if there was recognition that everyone has the best interest of children in mind.
Not very good TV.
When I got home that day, I turned on the evening news to see local newscaster Jeff Peterson getting pointed at by Bill O’Reilly. Apparently "The Factor" has been “investigating” the Portland School Committee policy and has uncovered the fact that the nurse behind the initiative, Amanda Rowe, is married to the state’s attorney general, Steven Rowe. As you can see from their last names, the two have gone to great lengths to hide their marriage in order to realize their lifelong dream of manipulating the menstrual cycles of schoolgirls. Or at least that seems to be the conclusion O’Reilly came to because the nurse and her husband didn’t hold a “joint press conference” to announce that they are indeed married. I was quite impressed by Peterson who succeeded where so many others have failed in sticking to his own script of asking what any of this has to do with anything rather than being distracted by O’Reilly’s baiting, condescension and bullying. O’Reilly expressed his love of Maine but lamented that it has changed in the last decade due to “influx of secular progressives.” I guess his investigation also revealed that people from Maine resent Massachusetts transplants, although I was under the impression Maine’s problem is it suffers from a lack of an influx of people – secular, progressive or otherwise.
The segment also featured a clip of Cumberland County District Attorney Stephanie Anderson, a Cape Elizabeth Republican who also seemed to annoy O’Reilly for her lack of ideological loyalty in the culture wars. It seems Anderson is more interested in prosecuting child abusers.
All in all, from what I’ve seen, the national spotlight has revealed something we all take for granted in this state – that Maine is a place of moderation and pragmatism; where people are close to their governments and practice a tradition of intelligent and (for the most part) respectful dialog about practical concerns.
If it were only so that that is what the rest of the country learned from this controversy.