The Good Book and the Bad Book
At Austin’s elite St. Andrew's Episcopal School, everything from the architecture to the emphasis on tolerance is designed to reinforce a sense of community. But when an English teacher had her senior class read Brokeback Mountain, a fight between parents over the true meaning of Christian values threatened to tear the close-knit campus apart.
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No problems arose until the spring of 2005, when two St. Andrew’s moms started talking Brokeback at a girls’ softball game. One was Kate McNair. The coming Hollywood film was making its way into the news, but Kate had never heard of the movie or the story; since her three kids were in lower and middle school at the time, she had no reason to know what the seniors were reading. Kate’s friend had a copy of the story and directed Kate to the paragraph in which the two men’s love first gets physical. Kate read the phrase “Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock,” and then saw mentions of “all fours” and “a little spit.” She needed no more. Like Horne’s, her reaction was visceral. She could taste her anger. “We assumed that this was a Christian school,” says McNair now, “and that these kinds of materials would not be handed to our children. We’re not a bunch of homophobes. We just don’t want our kids reading smut.”
Kate called Nazro several days later and arranged a meeting. With Kate and her husband, Cary, was another set of lower- and middle-school parents, pro golfer Ben Crenshaw and his wife, Julie. “They were all really angry,” recalls Nazro. “They said, ‘You need to get rid of that book. It has no place in this school.’” Nazro was surprised. She admitted she hadn’t read the book, pointing out that with twelve grades under her charge, she couldn’t read every single assignment. She read Brokeback before a second meeting, which also went nowhere. Nazro said she would consider their concerns over the summer.
Through June and July, Nazro searched for an answer. She talked to the head of the accrediting network of private schools to which St. Andrew’s belongs. She talked to the dean of the Episcopal seminary in Austin. She talked to teachers and parents. She even talked to several national Episcopal leaders. Most of them counseled, and she agreed, that the school’s policy for selecting books should determine the school’s answer. Schotz says the key is prudence, and it’s up to the educators to ask the right questions: Is it the right book for that age of student? Does it fit within the year’s curriculum? Will it move students to the next skills level? St. Andrew’s trusts its educators to make that decision. Nazro decided that the answers to the long summer’s questions were the same as when Horne and Carlson first considered the book: yes, yes, and yes. At the end of July she informed the McNairs and the Crenshaws that the book would continue to be taught.
Nazro knew the decision carried ramifications beyond parents with bent noses and kids transferring schools. The McNairs—Cary is a film producer and the son of billionaire Houston Texans owner Robert McNair—had pledged $3 million to the school’s building fund, a generous enough gift that their name would be attached to a new wing of classrooms for the upper school. A few days after Nazro made her decision, Kate told Kathryn Runnells, the chairman of the school’s board of trustees, that the family didn’t want its name on a building at an institution that supported pornography and homosexuality—and that the school should start looking for another source of funds. Cary echoed Kate’s comments in a letter he sent the board in mid-August.
News of the burgeoning rift spread quickly through the close-knit community, with most of the parents rallying behind Nazro. At parents’ night the next week, she received a standing ovation when she delivered her welcoming address, and her office overflowed with flowers sent by supporters. Just as conspicuous was Kate McNair, passing out xeroxed copies of Brokeback in the hallways.
In mid-September, the school released the McNairs from their $3 million commitment, and, as it turned out, replacement funds were found by the end of October. The St. Andrew’s faculty and other Austin teachers scrounged up small contributions. A couple of St. Andrew’s families added $30,000 and $100,000 to existing pledges. After a front-page story in the Austin American-Statesman had made the rounds on the Internet, smaller donations in amounts from $15 to $1,000 came in from around the country. Then Houston’s Brown Foundation gave the school $1 million, and a St. Andrew’s family anonymously kicked in the $1.5 million needed to make up the rest. When the money was counted, the school had actually netted an additional million dollars.
But the battle was over values, not money. Critics started to see the school as one more microbus in the caravan of godless Austin liberalism. In their meetings with Nazro, the McNairs objected to the school’s participating in the National Day of Silence, an annual event in which students and teachers opt not to speak for a day in recognition of people who are without a voice in society. The idea was to make kids think about gays and lesbians, but Nazro expanded it to include race and religion. That didn’t fly with the critics. The McNairs protested the school’s failure to observe the National Day of Prayer. Nazro explained that the kids pray in chapel every day. Critics also bristled at the school’s decision not to sponsor a Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter. Nazro said the school had decided that the FCA wasn’t sufficiently inclusive, adding that a Bible study group had been formed instead.
Parents went in and out of Nazro’s office to voice their concerns. The conversations grew heated. These were parents who were paying $10,000 to $15,000 in annual tuition, and they wanted their voices heard. Most parents tried to keep their cool, but old friends grew hostile as the factions hardened. I talked to two lower school dads on different sides of the issue who were unique not only in their willingness to be quoted but also in the fact that they had managed to remain friendly. They’re both from ranching families—Steve Baker is a commercial cattleman and Mike Reynolds is a King Ranch heir—and over the phone they even sounded alike. But they had widely different takes on the controversy.
“I told people about country boys working on my ranch who spent what would have been their senior years in Iraq,” said Baker. “If you want to talk about a senior year exposed to the horror of adult situations, those boys can. If all we have to worry about is whether our seniors can understand these books, that makes me think, ‘What a wonderfully sheltered situation we have.’”
Baker’s friend Reynolds makes a similar point, but to the opposite end. “I had a cousin who wanted to see what Mace felt like so he had one of our security guards spray him in the face. I guess some people think every kid needs to be exposed to some of the things in a book like Brokeback before they go off to an Ivy League school. I don’t happen to agree.”
Parents like Baker tried to make peace. “The McNairs are wonderful people,” he said. “And so are the Crenshaws. My daughter played softball with their daughter, and I saw their angst. It was genuine.
“But you know,” he added, “I am a forty-seven-year-old product of Goose Creek Independent School District, in Baytown, Texas, and I was raised to call the Civil War the War Between the States. If I decided that was the way to teach these kids, and I was a big donor, could I have dictated that?”
For the McNairs, it wasn’t so simple. Or maybe it was. “When we caught wind of Brokeback Mountain, there was no way to convince us that this was okay,” says Kate. “It’s like trying to convince me that there’s no God. We expected our friends to have as strong a commitment and faith as we did. I believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That’s my faith.
“But we came to find out this was not a Christian school. It’s Episcopal. And shame on me for not knowing what the Episcopal Church has gone through the past few years. If they took the word ‘Christian’ out of their mission statement, that would be different. But they won’t.
“And they messed with us.”
Episcopalians, like all Christians, believe that our life is founded on the life of Jesus and that as a church we are called to offer the redeeming love of God in Christ to all people. Episcopal schools are a concrete expression of the church’s care for young people and their families, and of the belief that God calls us to love all God’s children. —from Lucy Nazro’s parents’ night address, August 2005
THE FIRST IMPRESSION LUCY NAZRO typically gives is, “Here is somebody’s favorite teacher.” Her clothes are comfortably rumpled and complemented with arts-and-crafts jewelry and reading glasses colored with Pollock-like splatters. Her short salt-and-pepper hair is always neatly in place, and her narrow eyes broadcast openness. Short and tan, she’s the kind of person you instinctively want to hug, not because she looks like she needs it but because she looks like someone whose hug might help you.
In her small office on the lower school campus, bookshelves and tabletops are covered with novels, Bibles, prayer books, stacks of papers, construction site hard hats, and photos of family and students—two groups who are, for her, one and the same. There’s no pride in her voice when she discusses the school’s stand, but there is an air of fatigue and frustration. “I had people say to me last fall, ‘Lucy, you’ve got to lead us through this,’ and that’s the way I felt. And I led by explaining what it means to be an Episcopal school. We’re a school where emphasis is on reason and open inquiry, on inclusiveness, not exclusiveness. An Episcopal school is basically modeled on love.
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