My testimony last week on LB1202

Mostly because out-of-state school choice hucksters had pissed me off, I testified last week on LB1202, Lou-Ann Linehan's School Choice Scholarship bill. This is what I said.

My name is Gerard Harbison, and I teach at the government university about eight blocks north of here (laughs) but I'm speaking only for myself. I haven't been flown here by a lobbying group. I haven't served as a political appointee of the Trump administration, like some of our previous speakers. But I did put three children through Lincoln Public Schools, and I have a grandson in public school in Omaha.

I want to talk about one thing private schools can do that LPS cannot: discriminate.

In 2017, Joshua Payne-Elliot, a social studies teacher at Cathedral High School in Indianapolis, married a male teacher at another Catholic school, Brebeuf Jesuit preparatory school. Under instructions from the archdiocese of Indianapolis, cathedral fired Payne-Elliott in 2019. Brebeuf refused to fire the other teacher. As a result they were told they would no longer be considered a Catholic school.

Cathedral High School in Indianapolis receives over $1 million per year in public funding through a scholarship program similar to that proposed here. 14% of Indiana schools participating in the program explicitly discriminate against LGBTQ individuals.

In 2018, Saints Peter and Paul Catholic school in Miami, on instructions from the archdiocese, fired first grade teacher Jocelyn Morffi for marrying a woman.

In 2013, Michael Griffin, a gay French and Latin teacher at Holy Ghost Preparatory School in Bensalmen, Pennsylvania, was fired for applying for a marriage license.

In 2019 Monica Toro Lisciandro, the theater teacher at Covenant Christian School in Palm Beach, Florida, was lectured about sin and then fired for being gay.

69-year-old Lonnie Billard, a recent teacher of the year, was fired by Charlotte Catholic high school in North Carolina in 2014 for posting about his upcoming wedding on Facebook. Lonnie's mother was dying and he wanted to get married soon so she could be there.

In 2017 Matt Tedeschi lost his job teaching religious studies and French at Saint Ignatius College prep school in Chicago after he was outed by a student who found his dating profile online.

And right here in Nebraska in 2015, Matt Eledge's contract to teach English and coach speech at Omaha Skutt was not renewed because he planned to marry another man.

Lincoln Public Schools very properly forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation. I am happy to pay property and state tax to support LPS. I do not want my tax dollars going to schools that have openly homophobic policies such as the religious schools listed above. if my Christian fellow Nebraskans can object to funding abortion is a matter of conscience, then surely I can as a matter of conscience object to funding discrimination against our LGBTQ fellow citizens.

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