As the pastor of First Congregational Church Alameda, United Church of Christ, I am grateful to the Alameda Unified School District for actively responding to our teachers' requests for a curriculum that would give them the tools and resources they need to foster respect for all the people in our neighborhood by putting a face on same-gender parented families who have been invisible in K-5 curriculum until now.

As a local church pastor and a former social worker, I have spent hundreds of hours listening and bearing witness to the heartache and deep sense of shame experienced by people who knew from an early age that they were gay, but kept this core part of their being hidden because they anticipated rejection, ridicule, judgment or abuse from their friends, family, co-workers and, most grievous to me, their churches.

To be a Christian, as I see it, is to pattern one's life after Jesus who said that the whole Bible could be summed up by one command: Love God and love your neighbor as you love yourself. When someone tried to pin Jesus down by asking him, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus responded with the parable about a Good Samaritan, which could well be subtitled: "Why Opting Out is Not the Road To Take."

In Jesus' story, a man is beat up and left bleeding by the side of the road. Two very pious religious people see the man lying on the ground. They cross the street to avoid interacting with the man for fear of being contaminated. Ironically, Jesus names a Samaritan — someone despised by Jesus' listeners — as the neighbor who goes out of his way to tend to the man's wounds. Jesus' bottom line: Every human being is your neighbor, part of the human family, and of inestimable value to God.

One of the goals of the Caring Schools Curriculum LGBT lessons is to acknowledge the existence of same-gender parented families in our community and to help children to get to know them so they won't cross the street to avoid them, but welcome them into their neighborhood.

The Rev. Joe Caldwell stated that a literal interpretation of the Bible does not allow for the open definition of family taught by this curriculum. In response I would ask: What would it mean for us to take everything the Bible says about family values literally? Just a few examples: Parents could stone their children just for talking back; domestic violence and incest would be acceptable; a man could own his wife like he owns the animals in his barn; men could have as many wives and mistresses as they desired; fathers could sell off their daughters; being single would be better than being married.

Do you know how many times Jesus talks about same-gender couples? Zero. Do you know how many times the Bible actually refers to same-gender couples in a committed covenanted relationship? Zero.

Biblical injunctions have to be read in light of their cultural and social setting. Cultures change. How we interpret the political and religious texts handed down to us changes. What we find acceptable changes. At one time, people read the Declaration of Independence and the Bible and still were able to justify stealing land from Native American people, buying and selling African Americans as slaves, denying women the right to vote and banning interracial marriage. We cannot read the Bible and pick and choose what we are going to take literally or not.

One of the goals of a public school system and thereby its curriculum is to teach democratic norms of equality and mutual respect for all people in our communities, whether we agree with others beliefs and lifestyles or not. I may not agree with a certain view of life, but the job of the public school system is to teach children about the facts and realities found in the world around us. Although I am a Christian and a pacifist, I am not going to ask that my children be able to opt out of the facts about the Civil War. It is our job as parents to participate in the school system, talk with our children about what they learn, and help them become good citizens. We cannot underestimate the internalized self-hatred that develops when a young person is judged, teased, bullied or hurt by others because they are perceived to be different. From a young age, our longing is to belong, to fit in.

I often wonder about the rationale of those who vehemently declare that people are not born gay, but make a choice to be gay. Who would choose a lifelong sentence of being ridiculed, shamed, judged, made to feel invisible, physically at risk, and treated unequally under the law, despite living in a country that prides itself on the declaration that all people are created equal?

At the same time this curriculum has been hotly debated in our community, two 11-year-old boys took their own lives because they could not bear another day of being incessantly teased and called gay by their classmates. Consider the incredible inner angst that drove them to believe that it would be better to hang themselves than to get up and go to school the next day. We will never know whether these boys would have grown up to be gay, but what we do know is that this one word, said in a mean-spirited way, has an enormous power to harm.

To the extent that we as a community are silent, complicit or active in promoting anti-gay sentiment, we bear some of the responsibility for the death of these two boys. We can debate the ins and outs of this curriculum for years to come, but the bottom line is that any of our children can be the targeted with gay slurs. All of our children are at risk.

If one life is saved, if one child grows to accept others in our community because we have put this curriculum in place, it will be well worth it.

The Rev. Laura Rose is pastor of First Congregational Church Alameda, United Church of Christ and a parent, in Alameda.