Equality California, the nation’s largest statewide LGBTQ+ civil rights organization, announced endorsements of 18 pro-equality candidates Thursday, including candidates for the California Board of Equalization and Legislature and 13 openly LGBTQ+ candidates for local offices throughout the state.
The full list of new endorsements can be found below:
California Board of Equalization:
BOE District 1: Braden Murphy
California Senate:
Senate District 34: Tom Umberg
Senate District 38: Catherine Blakespear
California Assembly:
Assembly District 17: Matt Haney
Assembly District 64: Elizabeth Alcantar
Local Offices:
San Leandro Unified School District Board of Trustees, TA 2: James Aguilar
Covina City Clerk: Drew Aleman
Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors, District 4: Ken Carlson
Sonoma County Superintendent of Schools: Dr. Amie Carter
Palm Springs City Council, District 3: Ron deHarte
Orange County Assessor: Rick Foster
Vallejo City Unified School District Board of Education: John Fox
Sunnyvale City Council, District 5: Richard Mehlinger
San Dimas City Council, District 2: Eric Nakano
San Leandro City Council, District 1: Celina Reynes
Hart Union High School District Board of Trustees, TA 2: Andrew Taban
Anaheim Union High School District Board of Trustees, TA 1: Billie Joe Wright
El Cerrito City Council: Carolyn Wysinger
Note: Bold names indicate an openly LGBTQ+ candidate.
For a complete list of Equality California’s 2022 endorsements, please visit eqca.org/elections.
Chris DeSett said the first time he started to feel comfortable with his sexuality was the first night he moved into a dorm at American University in Washington, D.C.
DeSett, 28, moved there ahead of his freshman year in August 2012, from his childhood home near Kansas City, Missouri. He chose the school for its international studies program but also because he wanted to get out of the Midwest to figure out who he was away from his family.
Chris DeSett.Chris Desett
After he moved into his dorm, and everyone’s parents had left, he said other students started banging on doors to gather people to hang out together.
“So we’re all rushing down to this meeting area, and we’re talking and we’re playing ‘Never Have I Ever’ and stuff like that,” he said. “It felt very welcoming and felt very affirming, and I kind of dipped my toe in the water and just said, ‘Oh, I think I might be bisexual.’ I didn’t feel that way, but I was just testing the waters for a reaction. And everyone’s like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s so great.’”
After the first semester of his freshman year, he came out as gay. He said that moment on the first night in the dorms had a lasting impact on him.
“The reason why that’s so important to me was I wasn’t met with rejection,” said DeSett, who now works for the federal government. “That affirming environment did give me the confidence to really explore my identity and then land on the conclusion that, ‘No, I am a gay man, and I’m confident that I know that for a fact. I know that I’ll be loved for who I am.’”
New research from the Williams Institute, a think tank at the UCLA School of Law, revealed that LGBTQ people who attended college or graduate school were four times more likely, at 21.5 percent, to report having chosen a university in a different city or state to seek a more welcoming climate than non-LGBTQ people, at 4.8 percent. Nearly one-third, or 32.6 percent, of LGBTQ people reported picking a college elsewhere to get away from their family, compared to 14.1 percent of non-LGBTQ people.
DeSett said he chose a school in Washington, D.C., because he “wanted an experience where I had room to grow and be myself without having to worry about someone calling my parents” and outing him before he was ready.
The Williams Institute found the majority of LGBTQ people surveyed, at 71.9 percent, said they experienced a sense of belonging at their college. That number is slightly lower than non-LGBTQ people, at 83.5 percent.
But, researchers noted, despite some LGBTQ people’s efforts to find more welcoming environments, more of them reported facing bullying, harassment, assault and mental health issues than their non-LGBTQ counterparts. Nearly one-third (32.6 percent) of LGBTQ people who attended a four-year college or graduate school said they experienced bullying, harassment or assault, compared to 18.9 percent of non-LGBTQ people. More than one-third (35.3 percent) reported that their mental health was not good for all or most of the time they were in college, compared to 10.8 percent of non-LGBTQ people.
Majorities of LGBTQ people in four-year colleges (60.4 percent) and graduate school (56.3 percent) also said they were not out as LGBTQ to any faculty or staff.
Adon Cooper said he thought he would feel comfortable being out when he started undergrad in 2004 at the State University of New York at Purchase, a public liberal arts college about a half-hour north of his home in the Bronx borough of New York City.
“Literally, the first time walking on campus, I was greeted by a bunch of drag queens, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be really cool,’ but I realized that I wasn’t really ready to have those kinds of conversations,” Cooper, 35, said.
Adon Cooper.Adon Cooper
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Even though he wasn’t ready to be out, he said he faced peer pressure and verbal abuse from people who tried to force him to come out.
But he said college was still where he found his “footing,” and he started to feel more comfortable with the idea of coming out. One day, his first roommate in college, who was a dancer, went into the bathroom “as his normal self and came out fully in drag,” Cooper recalled.
The two talked about drag and watched “Paris Is Burning,” a 1990 documentary about New York City’s ball scene, a subculture created by LGBTQ people of color where members of different “houses” dress up and compete in elaborate balls. He said they are still friends.
“He started to really educate me on what a queer lifestyle can look like, and it made me feel like maybe if and when I’m ready, I’ll at least have someone I feel comfortable enough to have this conversation with,” he said.
The report found that transgender and gender-nonconforming students face additional issues, including their colleges or universities lacking policies to support them. Resources for transgender students were less commonly reported by participants than general LGBTQ resources. One in four LGBTQ respondents reported that their school had a policy of allowing transgender students to change their gender markers on their school records, and more than half (59.8 percent) were unaware of such policies.
Less than half (44 percent) of LGBTQ respondents reported the presence of at least one gender-neutral bathroom, and less than one-third (29.3 percent) reported that their college had gender-inclusive housing, defined as housing that isn’t segregated into men’s and women’s spaces and welcomes students who identify outside of the gender binary.
JJ Nichols, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, attended Samford University, a private Christian school outside of Birmingham, Alabama, starting in 2013. They said they didn’t come out until two years after they graduated, but, looking back, they said if they had asked to use gender-neutral pronouns at school, it “would be met with a lot of pushback.”
JJ Nichols.JJ Nichols
“It’s still inside Birmingham, which is the major city, so the homophobia was low-lying,” they said. “It was like more of that, ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin.’”
The Williams Institute researchers concluded that their findings show “the need to improve conditions for LGBTQ students, a sizable and heterogeneous minority population.” They recommended that colleges include sexual orientation and gender identity in nondiscrimination policies that protect LGBTQ students, faculty and staff; include LGBTQ content in diversity training for staff; and start a campus climate survey to identify emerging issues, among other suggestions to make campuses safer for LGBTQ students.
Nichols said that, despite the climate at their school, they remember meeting a professor in the school of music who helped them feel a little more comfortable with their identity. The teacher was pregnant, and she made a comment that if she had a son who was gay, it wouldn’t be a problem.
“It was just the note — the knowledge that somebody was OK,” they said.
Because of the disciplinary infractions he received for leading the protests at Flagler Palm Coast High School in March, school administrators are preventing him for running for the elected student body office, Jack Petocz said in a letter posted on Twitter on Tuesday. The school is located about 30 miles (48 kilometers) north of Daytona Beach.
“I am continuing to be punished for standing up for my identity and against widespread hatred,” Petocz wrote. “We shouldn’t be subject to abuse both in Tallahassee and at-home.”
In an email, school district spokesman Jason Wheeler said Flagler Schools was not permitted to speak about individual students’ disciplinary records. Requirements for individual on-campus clubs or organizations are set by the schools or clubs themselves, he said.
“The district has no say in setting those requirements or in how those requirements are enforced,” Wheeler said.
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Petocz is being honored next week with an award at the 2022 PEN America Literary Gala for organizing students to protest the Florida legislation and fighting book bans. PEN America is a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for free speech and is made up of novelists, journalists and other writers.
“Jack Petocz is leading his generation in fighting back against book bans and legislative efforts to police how individual identities can be discussed in schools,” PEN America said in a news release announcing that the Florida student would be receiving an award.
The Florida legislation, signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in March, bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.
More than 500 Flagler Palm Coast High School students walked out in protest of the legislation in early March, as well as thousands of other students around Florida. Petocz says he defied school officials’ orders not to distribute 300 rainbow pride flags he had purchased for the protest. He was suspended for four days afterward, he said.
Republican leadership in the Keystone State are expressing quiet alarm over the emergence of radical-right state senator who secured his place as the party’s nominee in the race against Democratic nominee for governor, Josh Shapiro, who is himself currently serving as the commonwealth’s attorney general.
State Sen. Doug Mastriano, who represents Cumberland, Adams, Franklin and York Counties in the South Central Pennsylvania area bordering Maryland, was not seen as a truly viable candidate in the primary race to be the party standard-bearer until he was endorsed by former President Trump.
Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial race has serious implications for the outcome of the 2024 presidential election cycle as well. The commonwealth is a strategic swing state and the occupant of the governor’s chair in Harrisburg will lend considerable influence to a final vote count.
Mastriano is a polarizing figure within the state’s Republican Party.
The retired U.S. Army colonel has campaigned at political events that included QAnon adherents, he espoused a political agenda that embraced Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, rejected measures taken to protect Pennsylvanians including masks in the coronavirus pandemic, holding an anti-vaccine “Medical Freedom Rally” rally on the state Capitol steps days after declaring his candidacy for the GOP governor’s primary race, and also mixing in messaging of Christian nationalism.
He also supports expanding gun rights in Pennsylvania and in the state Senate sponsored a bill to ban abortion once a heartbeat is detected.
NBC News noted that Mastriano pledged in his election night address that on the first day of his administration he would crack down on “critical race theory,” a catchall term Republicans have used to target school equity programs and new ways of teaching about race, transgender rights and any remaining COVID-19 vaccine requirements.
“CRT is over,” Mastriano declared. “Only biological females can play on biological females’ teams,” he added, and “you can only use the bathroom that your biology and anatomy says.”
His anti-LGBTQ views have long been part of his personal portfolio. The Washington Post reported that 21 years ago while attending the Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College in 2001, then-Maj. Mastriano wrote his master’s thesis on a hypothetical “left-wing ‘Hitlerian putsch’” that was caused by “the depredations of the country’s morally debauched civilian leaders.” Among those “depredations,” in his words, was the “insertion of homosexuality into the military.”
As the Post reported, his paper shows “disgust for anyone who doesn’t hold his view that homosexuality is a form of ‘aberrant sexual conduct.’”
The paper is posted on an official Defense Department website and lists Mastriano as the author at a time when he said he received a master’s degree from the school.
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West County High School GSA, Positive Images, LGBTQ Connection, and the Sonoma County Library are proud to present Sonoma County Queer Prom 2022! WHO: Sonoma County High School Students, 14-18 years old (Attendees must bring a form of ID for entry, no exceptions to age range)WHEN: June 11, 2022, 6:30-10:30PMWHERE: The Barlow, Sebastopol, CATHEME: Fairytale ATTIRE: Dress up, dress down, costumes, cosplay – all attire is welcomeWest County High School GSA, Positive Images, LGBTQ Connection y la biblioteca del condado de Sonoma se enorgullecen de presentar Sonoma County Queer Prom 2022.
QUIÉN: Estudiantes de secundaria del condado de Sonoma, de 14 a 18 años (los asistentes deben traer una forma de identificación para ingresar, sin excepciones al rango de edad)
CUÁNDO: 11 de junio de 2022, 6:30-10:30 p. m.
DÓNDE: The Barlow, Sebastopol, California
TEMA: Cuento de hadas
VESTIMENTA: disfrazarse, vestirse informalmente, disfraces, cosplay: toda vestimenta es bienvenida
Interested in purchasing tickets, donating or volunteering? Click on the pictures below to direct you to the appropriate link.¿Interesado en comprar boletos, donar o ser voluntario? Haga clic en las imágenes a continuación para dirigirlo al enlace apropiado.
When George M. Johnson wrote their memoir, All Boys Aren’t Blue about growing up Black and queer in America, they knew the calls to ban it would come.
“We live in a country where any story that is not centering some white, cis, heterosexual young boy or young girl…are not books they deem as acceptable and worthy,” Johnson told LGBTQ Nation. “I already knew from the beginning it would be banned in some places.”
But Johnson never expected it would go this far. All Boys Aren’t Blue, along with a myriad of other books that celebrate LGBTQ voices, has become the center of a national conservative movement to ban LGBTQ books – as well as books about race – from school libraries.
Across the country, parents and politicians alike are petitioning school boards and proposing laws to severely limit the type of content kids can access at school. In some states, laws have been proposed that would criminalize librarians and other school staff if they don’t remove certain books from the shelves.
Conservatives have claimed these books are inappropriate or even pornographic and that parents deserve more control over what their children can access. In many cases, their fights have been successful.
In at least eight states, for example, All Boys Aren’t Blue has been removed from schools, no doubt cutting off access to kids in dire need of stories like Johnson’s.
“I wanted [Black queer youth] to have the book that I wish I could have had growing up,” Johnson said. “A book that would help them be able to process things that they were going through.”
L.C. Rosen, author of Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts) – the story of a queer high school junior who is stalked and harassed for writing a sex advice column – wrote his book for the same reason.
“Even at the most progressive schools, sex-ed still tends to be focused almost entirely on heterosexual procreation,” Rosen told LGBTQ Nation. “I wanted to make sure there was a sex-ed option for queer teenagers because a lot of us don’t get that early on.”
Rosen’s book has also faced repeated challenges across the country. He feels it is especially ironic, considering the book is about others trying to push the main character back into the closet for failing to meet their standards of a “well-behaved gay boy” as Rosen puts it.
“It feels like life imitating art in that people feel this is a bad example of a queer person and therefore should not be for teenagers,” he said.
But Rosen emphasized that it isn’t him these bans are hurting.
“I care about the teenagers who are actively seeing adults say that books about queer teens who have sex are inappropriate,” he said, “who are actually hearing adults in their communities say that queer teenagers shouldn’t exist and if they do exist they shouldn’t have sex. That is what they’re living with now, and that must be horrifying.”
Maia Kobabe, whose graphic memoir Gender Queer explores Kobabe’s identity as nonbinary and asexual, agrees.
“What it hurts is the community where the bans and challenges take place…Readers in communities who are already the most marginalized or have the least resources and are unable to purchase the book if it is removed from the library or might not feel safe bringing the book into their home…It’s those readers who might need it most whose access is being most limited,” Kobabe told LGBTQ Nation.
Johnson, Rosen, and Kobabe all mentioned that most people challenging their books have not even read them, or else have read one or two lines taken out of context.
But even more, they all disputed the basic notion that it’s problematic to write about sex for a teenage audience, and especially the homophobic notion that queer sex specifically is inherently inappropriate or pornographic.
The reality, Johnson said, is that teenagers are out having these experiences, and they deserve to be educated about them.
“There’s this whole notion that the youth this book is geared towards, which is 14-18, is too young to read it, even though some of the experiences that I had clearly happened prior to the age of 14,” Johnson said. “Saying this topic is too heavy for my 14, 15, or even 13 year old, when they could already be experiencing these things, is really just a denial of what the actual young adult experience is in this country.”
In a statement on the banning of his book, Rosen also pointed out that while his book has plenty of discussions about sex, it also has no actual sex scenes.
The authors also encouraged anyone against the banning of their books – as well as the many other books being challenged – to stand up and speak out about why the books matter to them.
“That can send a lot of encouragement and make sure librarians know there are also people who want the books to stay,” Kobabe said.
Rosen said he’s willing to have conversations with parents who want to discuss the nuances of just how far and how graphic a book for teens should go. He acknowledged that not everyone with reservations is necessarily homophobic, and he is happy to speak with those parents about why he feels his book is a crucial source of sex education. But he also said there is no reasoning with those who merely think queer sex is evil or that any depiction of queer teenagers is a bad thing.
“Essentially, it’ll help kids come out of the closet, and that’s exactly what they don’t want,” he said. “It has been proven that reading fiction increases your empathy…[Parents] don’t like the idea of their kids being more empathetic and understanding to other points of view because then they’ll realize how their parents have been complicit.”
Johnson emphasized that what parents really need to do is listen to their kids.
“If your child is interested in my Black queer sex, that’s a deeper conversation you might need to be having with your child. Denying them my book is not the issue. What you’re really denying them is the open communication and dialogue.”
As Rosen put it, “If reading queer books made you queer, then we would all be straight.”
Americans are deeply divided over how much children in K-12 schools should be taught about racism and sexuality, according to a new poll released as Republicans across the country aim to make parental involvement in education a central campaign theme this election year.
About 4 in 10 Republicans say teachers in local public schools discuss issues related to sexuality too much, while only about 1 in 10 say too little. Among Democrats, those numbers are reversed.
The findings reflect a sharply politicized national debate that has consumed local school boards and, increasingly, state capitols. Republicans see the fight over school curriculum as a winning culture war issue that will motivate their voters in the midterm elections.
In the meantime, a flurry of new state laws has been introduced, meant to curtail teaching about racism and sexuality and to establish a “parents’ bill of rights” that would champion curriculum transparency and allow parents to file complaints against teachers.
The push for legislation grew out of an elevated focus on K-12 schools during the Covid-19 pandemic, when angry parents crowded school board meetings to voice opposition to school closures, mask mandates and other restrictive measures intended to prevent the spread of illness.
“All that that’s happening these days kind of goes against the longer history of school boards being relatively low salience government institutions and, in a lot of cases, they are nonpartisan offices,” said Adam Zelizer, a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School researching school board legislation.
What distinguishes this moment, Zelizer said, is the “grassroots anger” in response to school policies and the national, coordinated effort to recruit partisan candidates for school boards and local offices.
What started as parents’ concern about virtual learning and mask wearing has morphed into something larger, said Republican pollster Robert Blizzard, describing parents as thinking: “OK, now that we have the schools open, what are these kids learning in school?”
The poll shows 50 percent of Americans say parents have too little influence on curriculum, while 20 percent say they have too much and 27 percent say it’s about right. About half also say teachers have too little influence.
Kendra Schultz said she and her husband have decided their 1-year-old daughter will be homeschooled, at least initially, because of what friends have told them about their experiences with schools in Columbia, Missouri.
Most recently, she said, one 4-year-old’s pre-K class talked about gender pronouns. Schultz offered that and mask requirements as examples of how the public school system “doesn’t align with what we believe or how we would like to see our children educated.”
“I’m just like, you’re a little kid, you should be learning your ABCs and your numbers and things like that,” said Schultz, a 30-year-old conservative. “That’s just not something that me and my husband would be interested in having teachers share with our children.”
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In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in March signed into law a bill barring instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Opponents, including the White House, have dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
The poll shows Americans are slightly more likely to say the focus on sex and sexuality in local schools is too little rather than too much, 31 percent to 23 percent, but 40 percent say it’s about right. The poll didn’t ask about specific grade levels.
Blizzard, who has been working with a group called N2 America to help GOP candidates in suburbs, said the schools issue resonates with the Republican base and can motivate voters.
In the Virginia governor’s race last year, Republican Glenn Youngkin won after campaigning on boosting parental involvement in schools and banning critical race theory, an academic framework about systemic racism that has become a catch-all phrase for teaching about race in U.S. history. His Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, had said in a debate that parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach.
The poll also shows Americans have mixed views about schools’ focus on racism in the U.S.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said parents and teachers alike are frustrated after pandemic disruptions and should partner to help kids recover. The efforts to predetermine curriculum and restrict teaching are getting in the way, she said.
“The people who are proposing them, they’ve been pretty clear … they just want to sow doubt and distrust because they want to end public education as we know it,” Weingarten said.
Parents of school-age children aren’t more likely than other adults to say parents have too little influence in schools. But there is a wide partisan gap, with 65 percent of Republicans saying that, compared with 38 percent of Democrats.
Michael Henry, a father of three in Dacula, Georgia, says he’s wrestled over what the right level of involvement is. It didn’t sit right with him, for example, that his 6-year-old was taught about Christopher Columbus in an entirely positive light. He says he’s reflected on “some of the lies” and “glorifications of history” in his own public school education and thinks race needs to be talked about more.
But ultimately, school curriculum is “outside my area of expertise,” said Henry, 31, an actuary who is also the acting president of the Gwinnett County Young Democrats.
“I have to do a lot of studying and work to be able to make informed decisions, and I don’t feel like parents generally have that kind of skill set” for curriculum, he said. “I think professionals should mostly be determining what the curriculum should be.”
Henry worries that new restrictions are “adding extra hassle for teachers, who already have a lot on their plate, to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”
Florida’s newly enacted Parental Rights in Education bill — dubbed by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — has catapulted LGBTQ rights to the center of political discourse in recent months.
Leaders of global corporations, editorial boards of major newspapers and the White House have all weighed in on the new law, with some calling it “deeply disturbing” and others “noncontroversial.” The cast of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” has repeatedly ripped into the bill in several of its most recent episodes. At last month’s Oscars, co-host Wanda Sykes took a jab at the measure in the Academy Awards’ opening monologue. And last week, officials in New York City and Chicago launched ad campaigns in Florida to persuade LGBTQ Floridians to pack their bags and move north.
While Florida has been ground zero for this nationwide debate, 19 other states have introduced similar legislation that would prohibit how educators can talk about or teach LGBTQ issues in school this year, according to the Movement Advancement Project, or MAP, an LGBTQ think tank that has been tracking the bills.
“The truth is, this has never been about Florida,” said Brandon Wolf, the press secretary for the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Florida, which sued DeSantis over the law last month. “It’s never been about one state but rather a policy objective from the furthest right wing of the Republican Party to try to roll back civil liberties and progress through fear and manipulation of their base.”
He added, “You can, I think, imagine that we’re staring down a national ‘Don’t Say Gay’ debate if we’re not successful in pushing back against it here in Florida.”
Lawmakers in Indiana are weighing legislation that would require any student under the age of 18 to “obtain written consent” from a parent before participating “in any instruction on human sexuality.” In Arizona, House lawmakers introduced legislation in January that would prohibit schools from allowing students to participate in school clubs or student groups “involving sexuality, gender or gender identity unless the student’s parent provides written permission for the student to participate.”
And legislators in Tennessee proposed a measure in February that reads: “The promotion of LGBT issues and lifestyles in public schools offends a significant portion of students, parents, and Tennessee residents with Christian values.” The bill, HB 800, seeks to ban textbooks or classroom materials that “promote, normalize, support, or address” LGBTQ “lifestyles,” and subject LGBTQ issues to the same limitations religious teachings face in the state’s public schools.
“They vary quite a bit, but the thing that they have in common is that they restrict the ability of teachers and schools to provide students with an honest and accurate education that they deserve, that helps them to learn from our past and reflect the diversity of the world around them and prepare them for the future,” Logan Casey, a senior policy researcher and adviser at MAP, said.
Proponents of the measures disagree and contend that they would give parents more discretion over what their children learn in school and say LGBTQ issues are “not age appropriate” for young students.
At the Florida bill’s signing ceremony, DeSantis, who is widely believed to be considering a run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, said that the law would ensure “that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination.”
Tiffany Justice, a mother of four school-age children and the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a national network of about 80,000 parents that says its mission is to defend parental rights in schools, previously told NBC News that Florida’s Parental Rights in Education and similar measures amount to “parents pushing back.”
“They’ve had enough. We’ve seen enough nonsense,” she said. “The kids are not learning to read in schools, and what I have said before is ‘Before you activate our children into social justice warriors, could you just teach them how to read?’”
Since DeSantis signed the Florida legislation into law on March 28, other conservative lawmakers have signaled that they would step up efforts to advance similar versions of the law in their states.
In a campaign email last Monday, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick vowed to make a rendering of the law a “top priority” in his state’s next legislative session. That same day, Ohio state Reps. Jean Schmidt and Mike Loychik introduced their own version of the legislation.
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Loychik and Schmidt did not respond to NBC News’ requests for comment. On Tuesday, Schmidt refused to answer reporters’ questions about the bill while walking through the state capitol building in Columbus.https://iframe.nbcnews.com/YY8G0Ez?_showcaption=true&app=1
At the federal level — absent majorities in Congress or at the White House — Republican lawmakers have largely stayed out of the fray concerning a nationwide version of the legislation. But last month, while speaking with Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist and AM radio personality Alex Jones, Georgia Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene vowed to introduce a federal version of the law.
“I will meet with my team right after this interview, and we will work on it,” Greene told the radio host, “because I will do anything I can to protect kids.”
LGBTQ advocates note that the new crop of LGBTQ curriculum bills are not totally new. They say the measures resemble legislation from the 1980s and ‘90s that activists dubbed “no promo homo” laws, which explicitly prohibited the positive portrayal of homosexuality in schools. The majority of those laws have since been struck down, but they remain in place in four states in the South, according to national LGBTQ youth advocacy group GLSEN.
Casey said that unlike today’s bills, the “no promo homo” laws were more “narrowly” focused on restricting what educators could or could not say in health classes.
“They at least had this pretense of limiting the censorship to classes about sex-ed specifically,” Casey said. “The bills today have removed all pretense. They are just saying flat out: ‘You cannot talk about these issues in any classroom, in any instructional materials full stop.’”
Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, said another differentiator is that these present-day measures — despite being dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” bills — are aimed at preventing gender identity and transgender issues from being taught, and in some cases even discussed, at school.
“What we’re seeing now is that because it’s no longer politically feasible to discredit someone because of their sexuality, the most isolated, the most marginalized, the most impacted part of the LGBTQ+ community, which are trans and nonbinary people, are being hit with the same political playbook,” Willingham-Jaggers, who is nonbinary, said. “It’s absurd, this idea that trans folks are a threat.”
Supporters of these education bills have also suggested that they are meant to target trans Americans. Justice previously told NBC Newsthat the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws are needed to fight a “transgender contagion” sweeping the country.
The share of anti-LGBTQ state bills that specifically target transgender people have noticeably ticked upward over the past several years, an NBC News analysis of data from the American Civil Liberties Union and the LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans found.
For example, 22 of the 60 anti-LGBTQ proposed bills in 2019, or 37 percent, were anti-trans bills, compared with 153, or 80 percent, of 191 anti-LGBTQ bills in 2021. This year, about 65 percent of the anti-LGBTQ bills filed as of March 15 — 154 — targeted transgender people.https://iframe.nbcnews.com/j2EQSqk?_showcaption=true&app=1
While most, if not all, of these measures have been introduced by Republicans, not all GOP lawmakers are on board. At least five Republican governors have vetoed anti-trans bills in their states since last year (although some of those vetoes were overridden), and on Sunday, Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, dismissed the Florida LGBTQ curriculum law, calling it “absurd.”
“I didn’t really actually see the details of the legislation, but the whole thing seems like just a crazy fight,” Hogan told CNN.
