School Board Cancels Gay 30 Rock Actor’s Anti-Bullying Talk Over His “Lifestyle”

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A Pennsylvania school board voted unanimously to cancel a speaking event with gay actor and author Maulik Pancholy this week, with conservative board members expressing fear about whether he would “impose” his “lifestyle” on middle-school students.

Pancholy, who is best known for his recurring role as Jonathan on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock and his Stonewall Book Award-winning novel The Best at It, was scheduled to give an anti-bullying talk at Mountain View Middle School in Mechanicsburg, PA on May 22. But during the Cumberland Valley School Board’s April 15 meeting, board member Bud Shaffner introduced a motion to cancel the event immediately, telling the rest of the board that Pancholy “labels himself as an activist, he is proud of his lifestyle and I don’t think that should be imposed upon our students at any age,” as Today.com reported.

Video footage of the meeting shows several board members agreeing with Shaffner’s objections. “It’s not discriminating against his lifestyle — that’s his choice,” board member Kelly Potteiger said in defense of the motion to cancel the event, while recently-elected member Matt Barrick simply demanded that the board “[g]et politics out of our schools.” Shaffner’s motion passed unanimously, 8-0.

As noted on his official website, Pancholy joined former President Barack Obama’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in 2014, a year after publicly coming out. He is a co-founder of the anti-bullying nonprofit Act To Change, and his speaking events focus on standing up to bullying, especially with regard to AAPI and LGBTQ+ youth. Pancholy has not yet commented publicly on the cancellation.

“It was going to be an assembly about empathy and anti-bullying,” said Brooke Ryerson, an LGBTQ+ high school sophomore who formerly attended Mountain View, in comments to Today.com. “But that doesn’t matter to the board. They want to silence us in any way they can [...] They’re sending that message that they don’t want our identities in the school.” Shaffner defended his motion, telling Today that he was concerned Pancholy would “go off script” to discuss politics, adding, “[p]olitically motivated discussions belong at home and not in the classroom.”

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Trisha Comstock, a local parent whose child formerly attended Mountain View, started a Change.org petition in response to the cancellation, protesting the board’s decision and demanding the talk continue as scheduled. “Being LGBTQ+ isn't a dirty little secret to protect our students from,” Comstock wrote in her petition. “The cancellation of this assembly sends a harmful message to our students — that being different is something to be ashamed of or hidden away,” she added. “We must challenge this narrative by reinstating the assembly with Maulik Pancholy.”

Comstock’s petition had received over 1,900 signatures at the time of writing. “I’ve never seen the community united the way it is now,” she told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “We are sending a clear message that bigotry doesn’t belong in education.”

For several years, conservatives across the U.S. have increased their focus on school board elections to advance far-right causes, especially the weakening of teachers’ unions and rolling back LGBTQ+ inclusion. Meetings have devolved into chaos and even sparked violence over issues affecting LGBTQ+ students. While there are still extremely few openly LGBTQ+ school board members to push back against proposals like Shaffner’s, however, the push to control schools may be yielding diminishing returns: In St. Louis, 13 “anti-woke” school board candidates all lost their bids for office in local primaries earlier this month.

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