Jelly Bean Does Not Like "Trans” Donated to Stop Help Effort

Herman Rowland Sr., Chair of the Jelly Belly Candy Company, is a major contributor to the Privacy for All Students initiative campaign led by Prop. 8 strategist Frank Schubert, political director for the National Organization for Marriage. Just as he did with Prop. 8, Schubert is using misrepresentations and scare tactics to collect signatures to qualify an initiative on the 2014 ballot that would repeal the historic “School Success and Opportunity Act, ” AB 1266, authored by out Assemblymember Tom Ammiano. The transgender student law goes into effect on Jan. 1, unless the measure qualifies, which would put the law on hold.

Schubert, initiative sponsor Capitol Resource Institute and the Pacific Justice Institute have blatantly and shamelessly sexualized AB 1266. “Yesterday afternoon I spoke with a father who wants to help,” Schubert wrote in a fundraising email. “His daughter just started kindergarten at a K-8 public school. He reminded me that an 8th grader looks pretty big to a little kindergartner. The last thing she needs is to be confronted in the bathroom by an 8th grade male who claims a ‘gender identity’ with the female sex.”

                                                                                                          (by Karen Ocamb  Posted at Frontiers LA.com)

 But Schubert’s fearful image of a hormonal 8th grade boy pretending to be a girl distorts the truth—trans kids fear the bathroom, fear being exposed, fear being bullied and beaten up by people who share Schubert’s point of view. In truth, trans girls are more like 12-year-old Jazz, who wanted to play on the girls’ soccer team at school, and 6-year-old Coy Mathis, whose family fought back after her school said she was not allowed to use the girls’ bathroom. For their courage, the two trans girls were honored at GLAAD’s 24th Media Awards in New York City last March.

Nonetheless, Schubert, CRI and PJI continue to use ugly misrepresentations for their Machiavellian political purposes, no matter who they hurt or how precisely, widely and firmly their claims have been debunked. For instance, PJI warned about school districts that promote LGBT History Month with icons who “will alarm many.” People such as “California transgender Gwen Araujo. Living as a woman, he was killed in 2002 after tricking several men at a party into having sexual relations with him,” reported conservative One News Now.

The coalition is also warning “what the future holds if the law is not overturned by referendum,” citing in their fundraising email a discredited story about a trans student at Florence High School in Colorado Springs, Colo., who PJI claimed had harassed other girls. PJI also claimed that the girls were “warned” by the school “that if they continued to speak out against the boy's presence in their restrooms, they could face punishment including being removed from the school’s athletic teams or even charged with hate crimes.  [PJI] also claims the girls were told that if they didn’t like sharing a bathroom with the boy, they could simply refrain from using those facilities at all.”

“This is exactly the kind of horror story we have been warning would accompany the push for radical transgender rights in schools, and it is the type of situation that LGBT activists have been insisting would not happen,” PJI attorney Matthew McReynolds said in a statement, reported by LifeSite News.

But school superintendent Rhonda Vendetti told Transadvocate blogger Cristan Williams that “[t]his is one parent basically bringing their viewpoint about this situation to the media because they weren’t getting the responses that they hoped they would get from the district, from parents of students at the high school or from the board and myself.”

Meanwhile, PJI has turned the life of that trans student, whom Transadvocate identified only as Jane Doe, into a living hell. “I know my daughter,” Doe's mother told The Advocate. “She’s a shy and timid person. It was upsetting. As a matter of fact, before we moved to this town, she was afraid that she would be bullied at school. She had a fear that if she went to this new school, something would happen and she wouldn’t be safe.”

The Advocate pointed out that “[a]fter the truth came to light that no ‘harassment’ occurred and the report was from a lone parent who feared this kind of ‘harassment’ might take place, the anti-gay PJI clarified its complaint by alleging that the mere presence of a transgender girl in the girl's bathroom constituted harassment against the cisgender students.”

But Schubert does care who’s hurt. “Our challenge is to get on the ballot,” Schubert told the Los Angeles Times’ George Skelton. “If we do, I don't think we'll have a great deal of difficulty winning the campaign. Most people I talk to can't believe they [Gov. Brown, the California Legislature, Democrats] did this. What were they thinking? To say that we need to open up our school showers and bathrooms just doesn't make sense.”

But Wendy Hill, an Assembly staffer who helped pass AB 1266, told Skelton “the common fear” about open showers is outdated—water, towels, janitorial services cost too much. “[A]nd most important,” said Hill, “they don't want to be responsible for watching all the naked minors,” which could lead to accusations of teacher molestation. “In some schools that still have showers, they're single-stalled, with curtains.”

“They have bathrooms and changing areas,” Schubert countered. “Kids are going to be exposed.”

“[T]he very last thing” transgender children want to expose is their genitalia, Hill told Skelton. “It gives them away. They're not old enough to have had transgender surgery.” Indeed, while school districts in L.A. and San Francisco have long had trans policies similar to AB 1266 without incident, in schools that don’t, “some transgender students just don't go to the bathroom. They hold it all day long. There are higher incidences of urinary tract infections. They don't eat breakfast—the most important meal of the day—or even drink water in order to avoid going to the bathroom. Dehydrated, hungry kids aren't learning as well. They cut school and even leave school.”

‘So what?’ Schubert suggests. “[L]et’s not act as if gender identity is some innate, inborn characteristic of humanity, because it’s not,” he told The Daily Beast. “It’s a political creation designed to advance an agenda.”

Sara Train, head of Project SPIN (Suicide Prevention Intervention Now) at the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, works very closely with the Los Angeles Unified School District and disagrees. “Most students don't know that one of their classmates is transgender. When students are allowed to use the facilities that they identify with, other students get it,” she told Frontiers. “By contrast, forcing students to use facilities that don't correspond with their gender identity is uncomfortable for all.” 

The Center, Equality California, the Transgender Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights are closely monitoring the situation and asking people to decline to sign Schubert’s petitions.

“We have no evidence to suggest they were able to achieve 500,000 signatures,” as Schubert claimed in his interview with the L.A. Times, Masen Davis, Executive Director of the Transgender Law Center, told Frontiers. “Regardless, we are confident that fair-minded Californians will prevail. I know this issue might be new to some folks, even in the LGB community, so let’s be clear: transgender boys are boys and transgender girls are girls, and all students should be supported and able to attend school as their authentic selves. Every student should have a fair chance at success, that’s what this law is all about.”

But Schubert’s ties with NOM and with anti-LGBT Catholics have certainly helped raise money. In 2010, Jelly Belly disavowed any anti-gay attitudes when the sad NOM-backed Latino tour bus (tracked by the Courage Campaign) tried to pay a visit. “Jelly Belly does not allow any group to promote their special interests, pass out flyers or approach our visitors for their own interests at our public tours,” Jelly Belly Consumer Affairs Manager Kit McCoy said.

Apparently the chair of the Jelly Belly Candy Company makes exceptions. According to the New York Times, Herman G. Rowland Sr. hosted a Jelly Belly rally for Rick Santorum in March 2012. The Times reported that Rowland Sr. calls himself “an ultra-conservative” who contributed to Santorum, Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry.

But Rowland’s $5,000 contribution is dwarfed by those of Sean Fieler, managing member of New York-based Equinox Partners and the Kuroto Fund. He’s another conservative Catholic according to a bio on the Catholic Finance Association website. In a New York Times story about former anti-gay marriage proponent David Blankenhorn, whose Institute for American Values Sean Fieler once financially supported, the hedge fund manager’s average annual donation “ranged from $200,000 to $250,000.” According to the California Secretary of State website, so far Fieler has contributed $150,000.

The money-pitch is stepping up. On Oct. 23, Privacy for All Students sent out a somewhat confusing email, saying the organization doesn’t know how many signatures it has gathered so far but “we know exactly how many signatures the paid gatherers have collected. ... We have donor commitments for $50,000 but a need to match it with another $50,000 to complete the target number of paid signatures collected.”

The next day, on Oct. 24, NOM asked for “an immediate donation” to NOM California to help the coalition effort. “Because nakedness trumps sincerity. I do not want a naked boy in front of a young girl in the shower or bathroom even if he sincerely identifies as a girl,” NOM President Brian Brown wrote.

To qualify the Referendum to Overturn Non-Discrimination Requirements for School Programs and Activities, Schubert and Privacy for All Students must submit 504,760 valid signatures to the counties by Nov. 8 and to the state by Nov. 10.

by Karen Ocamb  

Posted at Frontiers LA.com