‘Don’t say gay:’ Sex education fuels US culture wars

Schools have increasingly become flashpoints for political confrontation in the United States, with heated standoffs throughout the pandemic over masking policies, and regular flare-ups over sensitive questions of race, history and sexuality.

Derided by its opponents as the “Don’t say gay” bill, it has the backing of Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, who is widely expected to run for president in the next election.

“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,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.

But Brandon Wolf, press secretary of the non-profit Equality Florida, believes that by framing these questions in such a way, the new law would harm children beginning to identify as LGBTQ, by suggesting that “just by their existence, they are inappropriate.”

Buttigieg cited a survey from the Trevor Project indicating that 42 percent of LGBTQ youth seriously considered suicide last year, asking: “Now they can’t talk to their teachers?”

“It’s not to encourage kids to be talking about sexual activity,” she says, but rather have them “reflect on what they feel internally and who they may be attracted to,” and that “it’s okay to talk about these things.”

On the other side of the debate, Tina Descovich, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a group that supports the Florida bill, denies it amounts to “discrimination.”

Descovich cited the example of a woman whose 13-year-old had met with school counselors about their gender identity without notifying her, including to decide “which restroom she was going to use”

“I think that that is a discussion for the home, and I think there’s age appropriate discussions,” she added.

The California Teachers Association, which refused to discuss specifics of the lawsuit, noted that it is “concerned about a political climate right now in which outside political forces fuel chaos and misinformation and seek to divide parents, educators and school communities.”

Bills similar to the Florida measure have been introduced across the country.

In midwestern Indiana, a bill would make schools ask parents’ permission before discussing sexual orientation or transgender issues.

Activists have seen this playbook before: In the late 1980s, after sex-ed courses were updated to address the HIV epidemic, similar legislation spread across the country, out of fear children would be “recruited into homosexuality,” recalls Clifford Rosky, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Utah.

In Florida itself, meanwhile, the law today is clear: schools are instructed to teach “the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage.”