Their path to win legal fights looks more promising, with Republican majorities in these statehouses passing these bills on to Republican governors, expecting fights in lower courts, and biding time until a conservative majority on the Supreme Court reviews the challenges, Carl Charles, a senior attorney with the civil rights organization Lambda Legal, said.ĭrawing on pandemic-era anger over school closures, mask-wearing, and the specter of critical race theory, state Republicans see an opportunity to rile up their most conservative constituents ahead of primaries, general elections, and a new Supreme Court term.īut what these bills communicate coyly, its supporters in media and politics have been saying out loud for quite some time: The way to win back lost ground in the culture war over LGBTQ people is to cast them as morally corrupt villains - and use schools as a starting point for a bigger cultural shift. Some of these proposals are more explicit than Florida’s - Tennessee’s proposal seeks to ban books or material that support or promote LGBTQ “issues or lifestyle” altogether - but all offer a window into how social conservatives see opportunities to roll back protections for queer and trans people: score victories in the courts and make the cultural fight more extreme.
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![gay flag crossed out gay flag crossed out](https://fsymbols.com/images/banned-lgbt-emoji.png)
Legislatures in Alabama, Ohio, and Louisiana have since advanced similar proposals Texas’s lieutenant governor is looking at introducing a bill when its next legislative session starts, and lawmakers in six other states, mostly in the South, have supported iterations of restrictions on LGBTQ identity in schools. Echoing the model of Texas’s abortion ban, Florida’s law deputizes parents as watchdogs, providing a path through the courts to punish schools and staff that violate the statute. The legislation never uses the words “gay” or “trans,” but advocates argue that queer and trans Americans would be the primary targets of lawsuits by parents and officials behind the restrictions.
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Though supporters had said the law bans inappropriate conversations about sexual activity with young students, the text never explicitly references discussions of sex - only explicitly forbidding conversations about “sexual orientation or gender identity.” The ban applies from kindergarten through third grade but leaves an opening for “age-appropriate” restrictions beyond those grades, while also not defining what “age-appropriate” means. What “Don’t Say Gay” and its conservative backers hope to winįlorida’s education law is couched in the language of parental rights and uses vague language to implicitly threaten LGBTQ teachers and allies with lawsuits. The feedback loop of anti-LGBTQ legislation and “grooming” discourse reveals new dimensions to the conservative movement’s efforts to stymie the progress of recent years: Some members of the political right see opportunities to wield their advantages in the nation’s increasingly conservative courts against LGBTQ people - and opportunities to claw back the ground they’ve lost in the culture war as Americans’ opposition to discrimination grows. Instead, they now want to corrupt your children.” Why? Because they are not happy just having marriage. On his talk radio show last week, conservative activist Charlie Kirk tied same-sex marriage and the acceptance of LGBTQ Americans to corrupting children: “We’re talking about gay stuff more than any other time. “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children,” Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s press secretary, tweeted at the beginning of March. But suddenly, it seemed, 20th-century homophobia acquired a modern, QAnon-esque edge. Their attacks come in a country that is more accepting of queer Americans than at any other time in history about eight in 10 Americans back nondiscrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people. Sitting members of Congress, cable news hosts, and conservative intellectuals coalesced around “ ok, groomer” discourse as a new way to attack LGBTQ Americans - not just the teachers these bills are targeting. In the span of what seemed like a week, old-school bigotry felt mainstreamed. Conservative proponents of these bills then launched new broadsides against LGBTQ people, accusing teachers of “grooming” school-age kids and queer allies of enabling pedophilia in their criticism of the bills and the chilling effects on school discussions. Ron DeSantis signed a bill restricting the kind of discussions and instruction public school teachers can have that involve “sexual orientation or gender identity,” copycat proposals popped up in at least three Republican-run states.
![gay flag crossed out gay flag crossed out](https://i.pinimg.com/600x315/0f/78/12/0f78121e966e679ec00b537eb7e14607.jpg)
The past month hasn’t been great for queer and trans Americans.