Leadership Quote by Ed Case

Ed Case is trying to make “teaching” feel like the least controversial verb in American politics: not endorsing, not celebrating, not even “including,” just acknowledging that gay and straight people exist and build families. The sentence is built like a legal brief, and that’s the tell. By stacking “fact and the reality” alongside the symmetrical pairing of “homosexuality and heterosexuality” and “opposite and same-gender unions,” he frames LGBTQ life as ordinary civic data, not a special-interest topic. It’s an argument for neutrality that borrows the authority of institutions: public schools as the place where society agrees on baseline reality.

The subtext, though, is that “value judgement” is already in the room. Case isn’t speaking into a vacuum; he’s speaking into classrooms where heterosexuality has long been treated as default, and where the “judgement system” often arrives disguised as tradition, religion, or parental prerogative. His phrasing tries to disarm culture-war alarms by promising no moral instruction, only recognition. That’s strategic: it offers moderates a way to support inclusion without appearing to take a side.

But the line also reveals the trap of “neutrality.” Declaring something value-free can function as a political shield, not a philosophical position. In practice, deciding what counts as “fact,” what gets named, and whose family is legible is itself a values choice. Case’s intent is to lower the temperature; the context is a fight over who gets to define childhood knowledge, and whether visibility is treated as education or as persuasion.