From purity rings to ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ the right’s war on sex ed never ended
Recently, the Administration for Children and Families sent letters to health departments in states and territories across the United States, requiring them to remove “all references to gender ideology” from the Personal Responsibility Education Program that provides federal funding for sex education. It’s a disturbing move that mirrors how, from the 1980s through the early 2000s, the Bush administrations threatened to and did cut federal funding to states and schools that refused to teach abstinence-only sex education as part of the Purity Culture Movement.
Similar to contemporary “Don’t Say Gay” movements that empower parents seeking to remove references to LGBTQ+ individuals from classrooms and libraries, abstinence-only sex education has been proven to be deeply ineffective and harmful to children. These parallels are more impactful than ever, as the administration regulates what sex education can be taught in schools by withholding funding. It’s a sex education version of “Don’t Say Gay” that shows how modern anti-LGBTQ+ legislation is a new form of purity culture, and one bent on eliminating not only representation but also education about LGBTQ+ bodies.
Understanding this history is vital to unpack and argue against how sexual education restricts any discussion of trans, nonbinary, and queer people.
In the 1980s, Congress passed the Adolescent Family Life Act, or the “chastity law.” Title XX of the Public Health Service Act funded a program, which has received over $125 million to date, encouraging young people to practice “chastity.” It wasn’t until 1993, following the lawsuit Bowen v. Kendrick by the ACLU, that programs functioning out of the AFLA were prohibited from using religious references or churches as host spaces. For the first time, AFLA programs also had to be medically accurate, despite a 2004 report by the office of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, which found that two-thirds of abstinence-only education materials included false information.
By 1996, Title V of the Welfare Reform Act set up a new system of grants providing funding to states that offered abstinence-only sex education. Title V required that federal funding received would be matched by state funds–for every five dollars of federal monies, four dollars of state monies would be contributed to a program that “teaches that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.” Title V was followed by Title XI, §1110 of the Social Security Act, which provided grants to community-centered (including faith) organizations.
This funding often required educators not to teach young people, 12- to 18-year-old children, who were targeted by the program, about contraception or other safe-sex practices. This program later moved to the Administration for Children and Families, known as the Community-Based Abstinence Education program. In 2006 alone, $176 million was spent on state grants. The new program released an initiative that urged educators to emphasize traditional family values, including explicit instructions that “material must not encourage the use of any type of contraception outside of marriage or refer to abstinence as a form of contraception.”
While these programs largely went defunct by 2009, when President Barack Obama removed almost all funding for abstinence-only sex education, the Community-Based Abstinence Education and Title V programs continue to allocate funding. A new Alabama Senate Bill 3 sponsored by State Senator Shay Shelnutt for the 2026 session. It seeks to require any sex education program or curriculum taught in a public K-12 school to “encourage abstinence from all sexual activity.” The bill would also require a parent or guardian’s permission before a child could be part of sex education, establishing an opt-in option rather than an opt-out. This is similar to discussions this past March in North Carolina’s New Hanover County.
As students returned to school in New Hanover, they faced a new sex education program, one that removes lessons on gender and sexuality. This includes eliminating discussions of gender roles and the LGBTQ+ community. This past March, the county’s Board of Education voted to change its sex education programs to comply with federal mandates related to gender identity, namely executive orders like the one signed on Trump’s first day in office that denied the existence of trans, intersex, and nonbinary individuals.
This was also profoundly influenced by Trump’s January 29, 2025 executive order titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” stating that within 90 days of the order, the Secretary of Education, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of Health and Human Services would provide an Ending Indoctrination Strategy “eliminating Federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.”
Although the Board of Education squashed the option of establishing an opt-in program instead of an opt-out one, which was contrary to staff recommendations, these options were brought up during the conversation. This sets a dangerous precedent. And as the Administration for Children and Families’ letters this past week reveal, historical (and present) funding restrictions surrounding sex education directly mirror current efforts to remove mentions of LGBTQ+ identity and same-sex relationships.
And it has a historical precedent: purity culture has roots in the Social Purity Movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that sought to eliminate social impurities, like sex work and contraception use, along with LGBTQ+ identity and representation. Perhaps the best example is the 19th-century Comstock laws. Anthony Comstock, an infantryman during the Civil War, tipped police about sex trade merchants and got his anti-contraceptive bill passed on March 3, 1873. Comstock was instrumental in the passing of a federal law with his namesake in 1873, criminalizing the distribution of pornography, contraceptives, and information about them, and any materials that could be used to produce an abortion.
The Comstock Act of 1873 also classified LGBTQ+ publications as “obscene”and prohibited their transport through the US Mail. It wasn’t until 1958 that classifying LGBTQ+ materials as “obscene” was overturned by the Supreme Court. In 1954, the Los Angeles Postmaster argued based on the Comstock Act that One: The Homosexual Magazine was obscene and thus could not be transported via the mail, but four years later, the Supreme Court ruled in One, Inc. v. Olesen that the Comstock Act had limited application over written materials.
Today, anti-abortion activists are debating the resurrection of the Comstock Act of 1873, which is still in effect but has essentially become dormant in the last 150 years. The law is still technically enforceable and could be used to stop the distribution of contraceptives, abortion medications, and supplies through the mail and local carriers.
Modern anti-trans legislation uses some of the same language that Comstock did over 150 years ago. Abstinence-only educators did over 20 years ago that access to information about sexual intercourse, contraceptives, and abortion will cause people to seek them out. It’s the same argument used within late 20th and early 21st-century purity culture to mandate the erasure of queer and trans people from libraries, classrooms, and public spaces, which conservative Christian leaders argue that they can stop children from “becoming” gay by “protecting” them from all discussions of LGBTQ+ identity and expression.
So the news of these letters from the Administration for Children and Families is not surprising but instead shows how far-right Christian politicians are mobilizing the abstinence-only sex education playbook to target discussions of LGBTQ+ identity in schools. After the Mahmoud v. Taylor Supreme Court case that ruled in June 2025 that parents could opt their children out of lessons that included books with LGBTQ+ representation based on religious rights, this aim to restrict federal funding based on including LGBTQ+ representation and discussions of LGBTQ+ identity in sex education is the next logical step to “Don’t Say Gay” in classrooms.
Emma Cieslik (she/her) is a queer, disabled, and neurodivergent museum professional, public historian, and writer based in Washington, DC.