Harvey Milk Proposition 6

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The 2008 American film Milk depicts the first openly gay elected official for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk. The film takes place over eight years, as the audience watches the numerous achievements and struggles that Harvey Milk endures in his pursuit to solve his dissatisfaction with his own life and his hope to spark change for the LGBTQ+ community. Proposition 6, a nationally conservative movement that sought to ban openly gay and lesbian individuals (with the addition of those who were allies of the community) from working in public schools, is a significant part of LGBTQ+ history. Harvey Milk made a great effort to advocate strongly against Proposition 6. Ultimately, with the contribution of immense support from queer …show more content…
Amongst his many homophobic beliefs, Briggs, like many others, believed and blatantly argued that queer people are not beneficial to society, as they cannot reproduce (Milk). While recognizing the movie's timeframe, these beliefs are not factual. Instead, they attribute a person's personal beliefs to the LGBTQ+ community while stigmatizing queer family formation and their suitableness for parenthood (Smietana, Marcin et al.). Adoption within the LGBTQ+ community, along with legal rights, has played a crucial role in establishing and legitimizing the existence of queer reproduction and the formation of queer families, which has ultimately been around for decades. In 1968, Bill Jones, an openly gay man, applied as a single father to adopt a child in the state of California and was able to do so. This was recognized as the first nationally approved adoption for an individual who identifies as queer. With this, change begins to spark in other areas over the next few decades. To emphasize a few, in the 1970s, New York refused to reject adoption candidates solely due to an individual's sexual orientation (explicitly