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While Harding and other proponents of the legislation claim it will not outright ban students from discussing their LGBTQ+ families, or classes from discussing LGBTQ+ history, critics believe the (no doubt intentionally) broad language will open up schools to suits from parents who think any talk of LGBTQ+ people or issues is inappropriate, per NBC News.
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This bill goes way beyond the text on its page. It sends a terrible message to our youth that there is something so wrong, so inappropriate, so dangerous about this topic that we have to censor it from classroom instruction.” Last month, Chasten Buttigieg, an LGBTQ+ advocate and Pete Buttigieg’s husband, tweeted: “This will kill kids, You are purposefully making your state a harder place for LGBTQ kids to survive in.” Citing data from the Trevor Project, Buttigieg noted that “42% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide last year.” Meanwhile, as The Guardian recently noted, citing an August 2021 report from the Trevor Project, “LGBTQ+ youth who learned about LGBTQ+ issues or people in classrooms had 23% lower odds of reporting a suicide attempt in the last 12 months.” “This is politics at its worse, cynically using our students as pawns in political warfare.” In a speech on the Florida House floor Thursday, Representative Carlos Guillermo Smith, a gay Democrat, told his colleagues, “We are in distress because this bill is yet another attack on our community. Across the country, we’re seeing Republican leaders take actions to regulate what students can or cannot read, what they can or cannot learn, and most troubling, who they can or cannot be,” a White House spokesperson told NBC News last week. “Make no mistake-this is not an isolated action. Opponents of the bill-which includes the Biden administration-have warned it would be tremendously damaging to the mental health of LGBTQ+ students, teachers, and families. (He also claimed to have heard examples of children being told, “Don’t worry, don’t pick your gender yet,” and cases in which teachers are “hiding” lessons from parents.) The bill is now headed to the state’s Republican-controlled Senate, where it is expected to pass, and then will land on the desk of Governor Ron DeSantis, who signaled his support for the legislation earlier this month, saying it’s “entirely inappropriate” for teachers to talk with students about gender identity. In addition to banning “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” in the state’s public elementary schools, the bill allows parents to take legal action against school districts if they think their “fundamental right” as parents has been violated. Despite claims by Representative Joe Harding, who introduced the measure, that it is simply about “empowering parents” and “creating boundaries at an early age of what is appropriate in our schools,” in reality, the legislation is dangerously anti-LGBTQ+ and hugely harmful to the young people it’s supposedly trying to protect.
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On Thursday, Florida’s House of Representatives passed the Parental Rights in Education bill, better known (and more aptly dubbed) the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
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Yes, despite regularly invoking (and entirely misrepresenting) the First Amendment in order to justify inciting a violent insurrection, or to complain their rights have been violated when they very much have not, conservative lawmakers are currently trying to censor the conversations teachers are allowed to have in classrooms, and if you took a wild guess that the crackdown is coming from an unambiguously bigoted place, congratulations: You know your modern Republican Party. Something you’ve probably gleaned about the GOP by now is that while it talks a big game about being the party of “freedom,” when it comes down to it, it wants to police the books people can read, the subjects they can teach, the decisions they’re allowed to make about their own bodies, and the words that come out of their mouths.