Educational Gag Orders Target Speech about LGBTQ+ Identities With New Prohibitions - PEN

[Nevilledog]

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Jeffrey Sachs
@JeffreyASachs
New from @PENamerica: So far this year, 102 Educational Gag Orders (aka anti-CRT bills) have been introduced by state lawmakers, and a total of 112 are currently under consideration.

And more and more, they are targeting LGBTQ-related speech.

pen.org
Educational Gag Orders Target Speech about LGBTQ+ Identities With New Prohibitions and Punishments
The effort to censor anti-LGBTQ identities in the classroom is expanding rapidly.
11:12 AM · Feb 15, 2022

https://pen.org/educational-gag-orders-target-speech-about-lgbtq-identities-with-new-prohibitions-and-punishments/

*snip*


The effort to censor anti-LGBTQ identities is expanding rapidly

Of the bills currently live, many are progressing quickly through their state legislatures. Florida’s HB 1557, better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, is a typical example. Having won support from Governor Ron DeSantis last week, it was swiftly voted out of the state senate. This bill would prohibit public K-12 teachers from “encourag[ing] classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” in primary grade levels, as well as teachers in any other grade level from doing so in a manner that is not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.” As commentators have noted, HB 1557 would be a magnet for censorious lawsuits, allowing a school’s most conservative parent to dictate what every other student learns.

But Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill is just the tip of the iceberg. While race, sex, and American history remain the most common targets of censorship, bills silencing speech about LGBTQ+ identities have also surged to the fore. Currently, 15 such bills are under consideration in 8 states. This is in addition to the wave of book bans sweeping through schools and public libraries, bans that overwhelmingly target materials dealing with gender and sexuality or that center LGBTQ+ characters. Many other bills currently under consideration target LGBTQ+ students for special scrutiny and exclusion in other ways.

What’s behind this sudden interest in censoring these topics and themes? In reality, it is not very sudden. Rather, what we are seeing in 2022 is a convergence between two distinct but related sets of actors: First, anti-LGBTQ+ activists, well-established but with limited success in penetrating public schools; and second, the “anti-Critical Race Theory” movement. The latter has primed the public to support sweeping censorship of classroom speech. For anti-LGBTQ+ activists, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, a chance to ram through bills that are far more restrictive than anything the public would normally accept. The goal is quite simply to lock LGBTQ+ topics on the wrong side of the schoolhouse gate.

No bill better exemplifies this trend than Kansas’s HB 2662. Introduced last week, it appears at first glance to be a typical “curriculum transparency” and “parents’ rights” bill, similar to many others we have seen this year. The first six pages are a long list of rules about curricular materials, where they must be posted, how parents are to be notified, etc., all of it punctuated by occasional broadsides against “racially essentialist doctrines.” In other words, standard “anti-CRT” fare. But tucked back toward the end, HB 2662 also proposes to make a change to the state’s obscenity law, making it a class B misdemeanor for a teacher to use any material in the classroom depicting “homosexuality.” Note well: not sexually explicit depictions of homosexuality. Just homosexuality in general.

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[Ohio Joe]

1. Sheesh...

It's ignorance and fear that leads to this outright hatred... Something that would be solved by education.

[multigraincracker]

2. One of the main reasons we have schools is because

parents, either dropped out or were not paying attention. Now this.

[LakeArenal]

3. Boy are the kids in for some humiliation when they go to work some day.

When you boss turns out to be a lesbian who is younger than you. The CEO is married and his kids have two fathers.

When the unemployment specialist is a transgender person that uses your bathroom.