In recent years there has been growing acceptance of gay rights among even the most socially conservative Americans. Florida’s new law offers a worrying sign that this may be changing
chanted students across university campuses in Florida. “Gay! Gay!” joked the hosts of the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, repeatedly. “Say GAY!” urged billboards on Florida’s roads. Their target was a law in Florida, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by its detractors, which prohibits schools from “classroom instruction…on sexual orientation or gender ideology” from kindergarten to the end of third grade or “in a manner that is not age appropriate”.
By focusing, therefore, on “sexual orientation” and failing to define what constitutes “instruction”—is it everything that is said in the classroom?—the law creates the possibility that a teacher will fall foul of the law for simply alluding to the fact that a child has, say, two mothers.
But political opportunism is not the whole story. Banning the discussion of sexual orientation in schools promotes the erroneous idea that talking about it encourages children to become gay. When it comes to gender identity, however, there is, mostly anecdotal, that talking about the subject encourages children to identify themselves as trans—including those who might otherwise grow out of distressing feelings of gender dysphoria.
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