Failed DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s group stands by anti-gay honoree
StudentsFirst declines to rescind award to John Ragan, fudges timeline of events and deletes laudatory blog post
In response to a recent report that Michelle Rhee’s controversial nonprofit StudentsFirst named anti-gay Tennessee state Rep. John Ragan “reformer of the year,” the group is standing by him — responding with dubious claims about his record and scrubbing its website of a blog post hailing him for always voting “to do right by kids when it comes to education.”
Salon wrote on Monday that, per a report by Scott Wooledge at Daily Kos, despite receiving the award from StudentsFirst, Ragan has a notorious (and searchable) track record of legislation that specifically targets queer students for harassment by teachers, school counselors and their peers. He was the co-sponsor of the notorious “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a measure that would have banned teachers from discussing sexuality that is not “related to natural human reproduction” in the classroom — and would have forced educators and school therapists to “out” students they suspected of being gay to parents or guardians.
Asked by Salon why it would choose to honor such a lawmaker, StudentsFirst said Monday that it was not aware of Ragan’s anti-gay voting record at the time that it named him reformer of the year. According to StudentsFirst regional press secretary Calvin Harris, the organization honored Ragan in August 2012, but a report in the Knoxville News Sentinel from July 2012 indicates that Ragan had already been stirring local controversy by trying to exempt “religiously