Here is the key to this issue.
The fascists among the gay "activist" groups have morphed a generalized request for tolerance into a demand for acceptance.
School administrations, not wanting to appear "intolerant" have gone along with it. The activists and the schools are wrong on the principled base of how our constitutional rights intersect with this issue.
The basic difference between "tolerance" and "acceptance" is the key.
Tolerance is not a demand that you change your mind, that you change your opinion, that you change your beliefs or your values - or that you be taught that you must.
Tolerance simply sets a public standard on the limits of your behavior (not your thought), with regard to respect for other people who have different opinions, different beliefs or different values.
Tolerance does not demand that you "accept" others and it provides no moral mandate for government to try to command that acceptance, whether through education of any other means.
Tolerance, to the extent it has a place in education, is best covered not but a curriculum that attempts to indoctrinate, to command acceptance of those with whom we may hold what we believe are legitimate differences.
Tolerance, to the extent it has a place in education, is best dealth with by the behavior of teachers and school administrators demonstrating respect and tolerance through their actions and through the actions they demonstrate that they expect their students to show each other.
That demonstration does not demand "acceptance", only respectful tolerance even to those to whom we disagree. It does not illicit any demand focused on any particular attribute derived from anyone's values. It is values-nuetral, demonstrating by behavioral example, not preaching-as-teaching, neither acceptance nor rejection; demonstrating that acceptance or rejection is based on our own personal value-set and demonstrating only the public limits to which we have a right to impose or propose rejection.
How is this done in the example at the core of the article?
It is done not by preaching that it is "O.K." for Heather to have two mommies. It is done by teachers and administrators not discriminating against Heather and not allowing students to behave in rude, disrepectful and mean ways towards Heather - period, end of teaching tolerance. Tolerance, not acceptance.
Unfortunately, the effort to command acceptance of almost all forms of "non-Christian" personal attributes has led to many forms of outright intolerance in the classroom, at all ages, to any form of "Christian" attributes of students.
Much of the materials that school administrators use in this area comes directly from, or has been prepared with input from the gay activist organizations. And, as I said here above, that input is not seeking tolerance among diversity, it seeks to use government, via the schools, to command acceptance. It does not border on thought control and indoctrination, it is thought control and indoctrination.
The truth of this is evident in what the gay activists would say if the school curriculum was "teaching" students that fundamentalist Christians should not be "discriminated against" because everyone needs to be saved by Jesus. It posits an attribute (spiriual salvation from Jesus) that can only be "accepted" at the personal level as a belief the government would be demanding everyone accept.
That would be a command for acceptance of a basic belief/value/attribute of a "Christian", not a request for tolerance of diversity.
However, we cannot expect anything but hypocrisy from the left.
Wise words.