“Don’t Say Gay” vs. Parental Rights in Education: The forever culture war
Unless you’ve been holed up in the desert eating locusts and honey for the last couple of months, you’ve probably heard of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that was recently signed into law by Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Its official name is “Parental Rights in Education.” “Don’t Say Gay” is how our liberal media frames the discussion. And of course the bill has become a cause célèbre for right and left to draw their swords in an en garde stance.
I can’t track down when the nickname was first used, but the wordsmithing artistry of “Don’t Say Gay” is worthy of messaging guru Frank Luntz, and is simply brilliant in its execution. It gets the hearer to focus the mind on something opponents want you to think the bill contains, namely that public school teachers are not allowed to, and can be punished for, using the word “gay” (it doesn’t); and it gets the supporter to deny that the bill has anything to do with gender definition and identification (it does).
The Bill
It helps if we put down the rhetoric of political emotions for a moment and deconstruct what the bill actually contains. I’ll link to the full verbiage here, but will summarize and annotate a bit now (for all you political wonks).
HB1557 – or the Parental Rights in Education bill – is an amendment to Title 48, chapter 1001 of section 42 of the Florida statutes – a section that articulates the powers and duties of district school boards. The amendment is a paragraph © inserted into subsection 8, addressing matters of student welfare. It’s four pages long. Prior to this amendment, the subsection consisted of two paragraphs – (a) and (b) – together totaling 8 lines. Paragraph (a) reads that the school districts should provide: “proper accounting for all students of school age, for the attendance and control of students at school, and for proper attention to health, safety, and other matters relating to the welfare of students.” The next paragraph states that the school district supports bus drivers and teachers to deal with unruly students, even if that means kicking them off the bus or out of the classroom.
The wording of HB1557 is clumsy and ambiguous. And not uncommon for partisan counsel, but particularly sloppy for the genre. The lawyers knew this too, as they mentioned “providing construction” three times in the preamble. “Providing construction” is legal mumbo-jumbo, meaning...interpretation will be needed when applying the law because the language is ambiguous (Oh, for fucks sake!)
Much of the bill addresses procedures for notifying parents to changes “in the student’s services or monitoring related to the student’s mental, emotional, or physical health...” (as any good Family Protection bill should). It also states that a school district may not adopt procedures without disclosing said changes to parents, but it does not specify what procedures (of course).
And here are the two parts of the bill that cause the most consternation: subparagraph 3 states “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students”.
Sidebar: What does “age appropriate” mean? Is it considered instruction if a teacher answers a child’s question about his two daddies?
And subclause (II) of subparagraph (7) lets parents sue if they aren’t happy with the remedies of their objections. Subparagraph 3 is what inspired the “Don’t Say Gay” label. It makes up a small portion of the bill’s content, but you’d have to be tragically naive not to see that this is the primary tone and tenor of the bill. The “vigilante” subclause was no doubt inspired by the Texas’ abortion law, though it isn’t as broad in granting standing (thank God).
There are plenty of unintended consequences for both sides of this bill. It states that parents are allowed to review questionnaires pertaining to the student’s health and well-being prior to its administration. This is to make sure that all health screening doesn’t contain requests about anything to do with sexual orientation. But what if the parents wants questions about sex, gender health, and orientation to be included? What about vaccination status? What are the implications for student free speech? The list of questions is long...
Why the bill in the first place?
On October 18, 2021, the Child & Parental Rights Campaign, Inc., a public interest law firm founded in 2019, filed a civil suit in the Northern District of Florida on behalf of January and Jeffrey Littlejohn against the Leon County school board for violating their “fundamental rights” as parents to direct the upbringing of their children.
The suit alleges that the school was guiding their child’s gender identity without their consent. In September of 2020, while driving her 13-year-old teenager home from school, the Tallahassee mother learned that school staff members asked her daughter which bathroom she wanted to use and what sex she wanted to room with on overnight trips.
The lawsuit coincided with a growing awareness among Florida House Republicans about a series of LGBTQ+ student “support guides” used in some school districts, to advise on how to deal with transgender students. Example: If a student exhibits behavior that leads school officials to believe that student is LGBTQ+, they are asked not to notify parents or guardians. So, as you might imagine, by the second week of January 2022, the Florida House of Representatives filed version HB1557 in response.
Now is probably a good time to note that Leon County, located just west of where the panhandle meets the pan, has more Democrats than Republicans. Of the two-hundred thousand voters, the Dems make up 52.5%, Republicans 21%. And the messaging battle should not be overlooked here either. This whole mess served as an opportunity for Republicans to position themselves as a bulwark against radical Democratic policies. And it’s working.
Schools and keeping kids safe
School closures during Covid literally put parents in the front row of their children’s classrooms. Daily school activity moved from the background of everydayness to a place of stark awareness.
Curricula that was once vague to most parents was quickly brought into tighter focus. The regular goings-on of a typical school day were now part of our collective family life. The modern pedagogic experience was slowly unfolding on the screens before everyone. Something else became clear as well, the fact that our schools are de facto daycare centers. Most parents have accepted that administrators and teachers are in some way responsible for raising their kids, but many parents have drawn lines in the sand with the new ideologies being introduced.
Here comes the judge
“The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill,” Governor DeSantis’ press secretary Christina Pushaw wrote on Twitter.
“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,” she wrote in another tweet. “Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules.”
There is no doubt that the GOP is practicing “Lovejoy’s Law,” preying on concern about children to advance a political agenda. The state has been doing such things since Socrates ran afoul of Athens’ law. His thoughts were expressed in a public setting, making the charge of “impiety and corrupting the youth” easy to lodge. If you want to demonize an opponent, accuse them of harming children; from bombing maternity wards to satanic rituals, to calling out teachers for “indoctrination.” The Scopes Monkey Trial being a powerful example of warding off godlessness 100 years ago. None of this is new.
One hundred years ago, the controversial subject matter was evolution. Today, it’s race and gender. Anti-racism and anti-anti-racism measures are implemented in schools across America with equivalent retaliation. While a third of the U.S. States have advanced efforts to promote teaching an expanded history curriculum with a variety of perspectives, twice that many have drafted regulation to prohibit curriculum that would seek to fault a specific race or gender with responsibility for wrongs committed (being called “race or sex scapegoating” in West Virginia, for example).
All this calls out the much larger role of our public schools and the development and rearing of our children. How does, or how should, public education contribute to weaving and sustaining our necessary social fabric?1 Considering that compulsory education began in 1852, there’s been a battle over not only what should be the purview of public school, but whether there should be public schools at all.
Politics, polarity, and the media
It’s dishonest for the GOP to say that this bill doesn’t restrict access and exposure to content representing LGBTQ thoughts and ideas or anything having to do with gender and sexuality (because it does). But it’s disingenuous for the Dem’s to be befuddled as to why support for such a bill might exist. This is not to say the former must agree with the latter, or the latter agree with the former. But neither group is being straightforward with the other when each is being intentionally obtuse.
To wit: The left doesn’t do itself any good by saying that kids in K-3rd grade already experience rudimentary exposure to mild forms of sexuality in the form of cisgender couples holding hands or parents kissing, so exposure to transgender and sexual expressions in the classroom shouldn’t be prohibited. And the right doesn’t sweeten the deal any by leaning on old homophobic tropes of sexual deviance to justify keeping that exposure at bay.
There are several ways supporters could characterize the bill that is nuanced, legitimate, and respectful of our fellow human beings. “Grooming” is being used by the GOP as a trigger word: scaring the less informed but no less concerned (and in some cases genuinely bigoted) population into believing there is a pedophilic queer cabal out there trying to shred our current way of life.
It harkens back to the Anita Bryant postulate: since gays can’t reproduce, they must recruit. A duck call from the right – one can hardly call it a dog whistle when the quaking is loud enough for everyone to hear – while at the same time knowing they’ll “own the libs” with their incessant quaking. It simply fires up the base and generates engagement through enragement, which in turn leads to fundraising and a higher voter turnout (ain’t politics great!).
Our media, of course, is unable to serve this debate, and is (of course) complicit in fostering the postering of all parties involved – which only increases conflict and renders the option of resolution even more remote. There’s no clearing for open and honest debate about the issues that brought the “Don’t Say Gay” bill to life, or the issues its passage will cause. Instead, we have a messaging war of words framing ideas that are dishonest at best, and maleficent at worst.
Right now, the political and media industrial complex are almost impossible to distinguish from one another, as both deliver the drama of election cycles ad infinitum. Elections are now in a constant state of being planned, produced, played out, and fundraised. When politics merges with media (as it has), you end up with governing that focuses on the wants of a live studio audience rather than the needs of an electorate. Engagement through enragement. Policy? Governing? Keeping the trains running on time? Naw...that’s just boring.
Both camps have used this bill to advance their agenda for the forthcoming midterm elections in November of 2022. This competition of ideologies has grown exponentially over the past five years specifically, and is now exacerbated by the media’s polarized and binary framing that caters to the individual over all other considerations.
There’s no refuge for someone who genuinely wants to understand what’s going on in our culture today. When every topic is framed with a polarized either/or narrative as opposed to an and/also solution, it loses the necessary analysis of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. And the subjects that are tearing us apart currently are not matters that can be objectively verified epistemically. It is between the left’s appeal to science that is yet proven, and the right’s appeal to faith that is not provable. There is no “test” for gay or trans that doesn’t rely on subjective criteria, there’s no “proof” of God’s will apart from something based solely on belief.
Democrats are continually baited into a culture war that matters little on how best to govern. And the GOPs uncanny ability to goad the left into assuming its more radical pose gives them a straw man to display for the suburban swing voter – which they then whack like a piñata.
Politics has always relied on the means of media to achieve its aims. Historically, it was used to advance political and legislative goals that bring policy to life. Now it’s to achieve fame, committing performative acts for their own sake. Both parties spend considerable time attracting attention to themselves, leveraging fame for power, and then using that power to gain even more fame. It’s reality TV without the reality.
Political rivals once had the same goal: bringing the most benefit to the most people. The politics was about working out competing methods to achieve an end goal. Those methods were often based on differing world views, but those differences were not considered existential (Read: Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan). Now every deviation is treated like a snap of Thanos’ thick fingers, bringing about the end of the world as we know it.
And so, it leads to a forever war.
The red thread though all cultural wars is this: rights. What are rights, who has them, what kinds of rights do we have and how are they enforced? In the west, rights are inextricable from identity. In western law, personhood is not defined by being a human, it’s defined by which rights are granted, from a fetus to a corporation. Without rights, it’s assumed there’s no identity. There are parents’ rights, student’s rights, state’s rights, gender rights, voter rights, protester’s rights. All of these identities push together in a shoulder-to-shoulder scrum where everyone’s head is down trying to gain possession of the ball, without anyone realizing where they are on the field, and believing that if one group has the ball the other group has lost it.
But rights aren’t pie! There are not limited slices to go around. The movement toward equity does not have to be a series of punishments levied through law, executed by a unilateral power, but neither is it because we pick rights off the Tree of Knowledge and hand them out. Rights are synthesis of tradition, dialogue, demand, debate, or consensus. Sometimes they must be fought for (often, unfortunately). They are aligned with truth, justice, and legal, moral, and natural entitlement. They have always been granted by the state, at first by decree of the king, eventually, in a democracy, by deliberation of those who represent the state and their constituents.
Conclusion
What’s missing from these cultural discussions is anything resembling compassion. Compassion is a form of compromise, an agreement that you and I aren’t the only person that matters. It’s recognizing a public square and agreeing to the rules. We now have a media meme sphere that acts as a normless public square, one that celebrates transgression as an antidote to any gesture that might require compromise. To validate our existence, we chose conflict over comity because friction affirms. Standing on a soapbox in that public square, screaming at an opponent over the stockades holding those who have dared not agree has become the only way to feel like we matter.
But today, the public square sees a minoritarian culture class battling a minoritarian political one. The left wins in the movies and the right wins in the statehouse. Both play tug-of-war with the news. The right has been losing ground in the culture war since General Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Politics and government are the last means available to advance ideas that don’t gain ready purchase in popular culture – as offered by the “culture industry” (re: media). The danger is that neither of these competing interests represent pluralities. They think they do because their means of transmission echo their own messages back at them. But the left and right spend little time listening to anyone that doesn’t say what they want to hear – or what’s trending on Twitter.
If we are going to preserve this Republic, we’ve got to find some accommodation for granting autonomy over the local establishment and enforcement of community standards while at the same time guarding against the subjugation of fundamental human rights as established by a national legal consensus.
The community standards of San Francisco are not the community standards of Opilika, Alabama. But legally established human rights should be the same.
It’s the debate about what constitutes a fundamental human right and what are community standards (and what ranks as reasonable methods of enforcement of both) that is part of the process of civic engagement that makes the republic a republic. Or we’re not looking at a consensual “e pluribus unum” any more, but a fractious “e pluribus plures.”
Compulsory education emerged in the United States as the Industrial Revolution firmed up. It’s likely no coincidence that the first compulsory schooling laws were in Massachusetts in 1852, the same state where half-a-century of running textile mills had turned the Northeast from agrarian to an industrial region. As the country turned to industry, children were needed less on the farm and more as citizens of a growing nation. In the wake of the Civil War, that nation needed state-centered cohesion more than ever. Fifty years after the Civil War, a new high school was opening every day.
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