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.
First lady Jill Biden on Saturday announced the U.S. will provide an additional $80.9 million to the fight against HIV/AIDS in Latin America.
Biden during a visit to Casa Hogar el Buen Samaritano, a shelter for people with HIV/AIDS in Panama City, said the State Department will earmark an additional $80.9 million for President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief-funded work in Latin America. A Panamanian activist with whom the Washington Blade spoke said LGBTQ people were among those who met with the first lady during her visit.
Pope Francis visited the shelter in 2019.
“I’m glad we have the opportunity to talk about how the United States and Panama can work together to combat HIV,” said the first lady.
Michael LaRosa, the first lady’s spokesperson, noted Panama will receive $12.2 million of the $80.9 million in PEPFAR funding.
“This funding, pending Congressional notification, will support expanded HIV/AIDS services and treatment,” said LaRosa.
UNAIDS statistics indicate an estimated 31,000 Panamanians were living with HIV/AIDS in 2020. The first lady’s office notes the country in 2020 had the highest number of “newly notificated cases of HIV/AIDS” in Central America.
The first lady visited Panama as part of a trip that included stops in Ecuador and Costa Rica.
The Summit of the Americas will take place next month in Los Angeles. The U.S. Agency for International Development and PEPFAR in April announced they delivered more than 18 million doses of antiretroviral drugs for Ukrainians with HIV/AIDS.
This year, the Republican majority in the Arizona state legislature passed two bills, S.B. 1138 and S.B. 1165, which target trans children. The day before the 2022 Trans Day of Visibility, Gov. Doug Ducey (R) signed them into law, claiming they were about “fairness.”
In reality, S.B. 1138 and S.B. 1165 willfully restrict the opportunities and medical care available to trans children, with no regard to their quality of life or peace of mind.
The passage of these laws will humiliate and harm trans youth in Arizona, and increase the risk of bullying and social ostracization. And when we know that over 52% – over half – of all trans and non-binary minors seriously consider suicide, laws that target and restrict their lives further could quite literally be a death sentence.
S.B. 1165 bans trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams because “there are inherent biological distinctions that merit separate categories” for players.
In other words, trans girls are not real girls.
Schools will be forced to prove that girls weren’t assigned male at birth by performing invasive bodily searches of their genitals. The same Republicans who insist that LGBTQ education in schools is sexualizing children would force girls to undergo these searches.
Arizona Republicans pretend that this anti-trans sports law is about fairness. Gov. Ducey cites the need to protect cisgender girls from trans girls who would seek to “unfairly” steal their “titles, standing, and scholarships.”
At the core of this law is the belief that trans girls are not real girls – they are boys masquerading as girls, trying to cheat. This is a gross interpretation of a positive trend – that transgender athletes are finally starting to experience the freedom to compete on the teams of their real gender.
Having access to spaces, like sports teams, where their gender identity is embraced dramatically reduces the likelihood that trans youth will attempt suicide.
S.B. 1138 prohibits trans minors from accessing gender reassignment surgery, which is both affirming and often lifesaving for trans youth experiencing gender dysphoria. There is a reason why every major medical association supports gender-affirming healthcare.
Gov. Ducey and other members of the Arizona GOP claim that they are acting in the best interest of trans youth. But for trans children, who bear disproportionately high rates of mental illness, this is the very care that will transform their lives for the better.
It is undeniably wrong for politicians to have more say over a trans child’s body than themselves and their family members. And anti-trans sports bills are just another way of invalidating transgender people and seeking to cast us to the sidelines once more.
But we will not be silenced. Fighting against atrocities like these bills is about saving lives – the lives of children.
Republican leaders in Arizona, and across the country, are obsessed with trans children, and LGBTQ youth more broadly. In 2022, Arizona led the nation with the most anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in its state legislature. These laws are not about fairness or respect, as Ducey says. They are a sinister step toward controlling and coercing trans youth. They are absolutely reprehensible, and everyone in Arizona, and across the nation, should be raising their voices in outrage.
In 2023, the Super Bowl LVII is scheduled to take place in Arizona, outside of my hometown Phoenix, the same city where I am running as a candidate for the state legislature. Phoenix has one of the highest populations of LGBTQ residents of any city in the United States, and my district in particular, Legislative District 5, has a high concentration of LGBTQ constituents.
And we’re not alone. Religious leaders and voting rights activists all over the country have already called for the Super Bowl to be relocated over the countless heinous restrictive voting and election laws passed by the Republicans in Arizona this year.
If the NFL truly stands with us, they know what to do. They talk the talk; now it’s time to walk the walk.
Brianna Westbrook, a transgender working-class parent who grew up in poverty, is running for State Representative for District 5. For nearly a decade, she has worked tirelessly with local and national progressive organizations and organizers to meet the community’s needs.
My decision to transition took place while in the midst of reading the classic George Orwell opus on war: Homage to Catalonia.
Having been on and off feminizing hormones for the previous nine months, it was in Barcelona when I called my best friend and told her that my 35-year wait to embrace myself was finally ending.
Barcelona was also the city where Orwell’s personal narrative of fighting for a foreign nation in combat took place.
When coupled with other works on conflict by literary luminaries from the past including Faulkner and Hemingway, I’d come to appreciate the skill seemingly necessary when trying to write under such conditions and respected the apparent sacrifices that came with their tales.
Almost three years after that May 2019 phone call took place, I too am experiencing the conditions faced by the writers named above. However a different realization has taken place in the midst of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and my time spent here on the front lines.
That reality has imbued me with a new perspective on life as a writer, a transgender female and a minority in general, one that, no doubt, many others realized as part of their own existence well before I did in mine.
Put bluntly, the danger and microaggressions that non-cis, non-hetero, non-white, non-males face in the United States is the same as being in a European ground war.
The comparison is apt for several reasons.
After decamping to the northeast Ukrainian battlefront for the last month and counting, I understood with stark clarity that ever since announcing the decision to live as my most authentic self, I had been faced with the same obstacles I’m encountering here including the need to exhaustively be on guard against danger, to prove myself over and over as an outsider, and to wake up wondering every morning if this is the day I’ll die.
Having lived as a cishet white male for the vast majority of my life, the risks faced by those who blazed the pathways for my own success had always been a concept which eluded me.
No longer.
In recognizing the physical, mental, and emotional similarities which exist between the two spaces, I finally accepted that whatever privilege I’d previously enjoyed had long since dissipated. Furthermore, in spending the last few years compartmentalizing the slights, bigotry, and prejudice directed towards me, I was unable to fully grasp the constant struggle too many others are forced to endure.
Being a party to an actual, defined war has forever rendered my unintended ignorance moot.
In addition to making me aware of societal hostility, and the ramifications surrounding it, living among constant shelling, rocket attacks, and machine gun fire has also made me further consider why bloodshed, and the scent of ever looming death, may have creatively driven the authors I previously mentioned.
My current belief is that for those men, whose lives were otherwise bland, pedestrian, and without racial-, ethnic-, or gender-based burdens, seeking out the ultimate confrontation allowed for them to feel alive and stare at death.
For many who are minorities, every day brings a slight twist on that challenge: we avoid death, while hoping to grasp life.
Countless trans people are speaking out about their childhoods by writing letters in an effort to humanise the often cruel “debates” about them.
Under the hashtag “Letters 4 Trans Kids“, trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming Twitter users told their own stories.
As adults, they are thriving – and they want to help young people do the same. In a news cycle so often dominated by stories that dwell on bullying, murder and whether to remove their rights, trans people brought the conversation back to joy.
Among them was Arthur Webber, a 24-year-old writer based in London, England, who recalled nights “praying” that he would “wake up a boy” and now considers being trans a “gift”.
In many nations, from the US to Britain, trans folk are facing fire seemingly from all sides. From a belligerent press and politicians that see them as a “culture war”, to the spectre of rising violence and dwindling healthcare options.
But before then, Webber was a young person wishing he could throw on boy’s school uniform and use the men’s bathroom.
“My nights were spent praying that in the morning I would be a boy. I would wake up disappointed,” he tweeted. “However, I already was a boy – no divine intervention required.”
Webber recounted a Christmas Eve when he was seven spent cutting his hair off and rushing to tell his family about it. “I had been watching The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, so perhaps took the time of children coming out of a closet a bit too literally,” he joked.
“However, I already was a boy – no (terrible) haircut needed.”
Holidays provided a young Webber with a chance to be himself, a feeling so often stripped from trans kids. “I’d avoid giving them my name and say I was born without one,” he said, “which everybody is, really.
“The devastation I felt when my family would fetch me using my deadname and reveal that the outside world believes I was a girl still lingers with me.”
There were many stories from a childhood spent hiding who he was that he could have included in the letter, Webber told PinkNews. Many show how life-saving inclusive education can be.
“Until I had sex ed in year five, I was convinced that I was just a really late starter at being a boy and one day my d**k would just grow,” he said. “I’d be like all the other boys so sometimes I would look at men out in public and wonder at what age theirs showed up.”
Visiting a train exhibition at a Doncaster museum with his father and grandfather, the pair let him use the washroom with them “because they weren’t about to leave a five-year-old alone”.
“I was so happy to be there,” Webber recalled, “even though it smells.”
“As a child, I thought that eyelashes were a female thing so I would pull them out,” he added.
“So now they’re very thin because when you pull them out for years they sort of stop growing back.”
The Letters 4 Trans Kids hashtag was first started by Ina Fried, chief technology correspondent for Axios. She sought to “find a way to support” trans and non-binary youth amid an anti-trans legislative onslaught in America.
Fried called on social media users to pen a letter to share their experiences growing up trans or show their emphatic support for the community’s rights.
“I can only imagine what it is like to be a trans kid right now, trying to find your own way while having to have your humanity and basic human rights up for discussion every day,” Fried wrote on Facebook on 10 April.
“And then there is the message that debate sends to their community, to their friends and even to them – that they are not seen or valued for who they are.”
“What if everyone who supports trans kids wrote a letter, or made a short video or posted on social media,” Fried added. “Well, why not? Let’s do it.”
And hundreds of people did just that. Trans actors, filmmakers, drag artists and leading LGBT+ advocates grabbed their pens and wrote about figuring their identities out just like any other kid.
The letters are a testament to just how possible it could be for trans youth to flourish when supported, affirmed and loved.
A question so many of the letters raised was how the adults in trans children’s lives – from parents and caregivers to educators and politicians – can choose to care for them, not abandon them, so they grow up into the people they know they can be.
Despite the obstacles he faced, Webber has persevered as a proud trans man – and so will today’s trans youth, he stressed. Webber now considers being trans a “limited edition gift with no receipt”.
“Sometimes you’d give anything to return it because it’s too hard to look after,” he said, “but most of the time you’re thankful that it’s unique.”
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.”
Just a month ago, Katie, a Texas mom, had no plans to leave her home.
Even after Gov. Greg Abbott urged Texans in February to report cases of minors receiving gender-affirming care, Katie — who has a 15-year-old transgender son and knew she could be investigated — planned to stay and fight.
But things started to change for Katie when the Texas Children’s Hospital announced last month that it would pause gender-affirming services for minors in light of the directive. Her son lost access to his care program for three weeks until a judge paused the state’s investigations.
“That just really shook me,” said Katie, who asked that her full name not be published to protect her family’s privacy. “The things that you never would think would happen somehow are reality, and I can’t live with the uncertainty. It’s eating us up.”
A spokesperson for the Texas Children’s Hospital said in an email that the hospital “remains deeply committed to our transgender and gender-diverse patients” and will “continue to monitor the ongoing legal proceedings in determining how best to proceed.”
Her son’s initial loss of gender-affirming care was the turning point for Katie and her family. Katie decided that after her son finishes 10th grade this summer, the family would move to Denver.
Her son, N., told NBC News last month that things have been “awful” since the governor’s directive. “It was hard to stay in one piece and not break down on everything,” he said.
Katie said that since the family decided to move, N. has been doing the best he can to stay positive about it.
“But his heart is broken,” she said. “We’re leaving Texas temporarily on our terms with the hope and prayer that come November, we’re going to get to come back home and it will be a joyous homecoming.”
Last month, NBC News spoke to a dozen parents of transgender children, as well as to trans teens, following Abbott’s directive. At the time, only one of those families had planned to move. Now, three, including Katie’s family, have said they will leave the state.
The three families who are departing said they didn’t make their decisions overnight. But they had watched Texas officials become increasingly bold in targeting transgender people in recent years.
In 2015, the state began to consider a “bathroom bill” that would have banned transgender people from using public and school restrooms that aligned with their gender identity.
Since then, the Legislature has ramped up its efforts. Last year, it considered more than 50 bills targeting transgender people. Only one made it to Abbott for a signature: a bill that bars transgender students from playing on school sports teams that aligned with their gender identity.
But one of the other failed bills prompted an opinion from state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who declared on Feb. 21that gender-affirming medical care such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery cause “irreparable harm” to minors and were child abuse under Texas law. Abbott followed with his directive to the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services the following day.
“I’ll do everything I can to protect against those who take advantage of and harm young Texans,” Paxton said at the time, arguing in his opinion that minors cannot consent to gender-affirming medical care.
He has since taken several actions to defend and double down on his position. He appealed both injunctions issued by judges: a narrow injunction on March 2 that paused one of the state’s investigations into a Child Protective Services employee and a statewide one issued March 11 that paused all investigations. An appeals court reinstated the statewide injunction and it remains in place.
Get the Morning Rundown
Get a head start on the morning’s top stories.SIGN UPTHIS SITE IS PROTECTED BY RECAPTCHA PRIVACY POLICY | TERMS OF SERVICE
Paxton also filed investigative demands on March 24 against two pharmaceutical companies, Endo Pharmaceuticals and AbbVie Inc., alleging that they advertised their products as treatment for gender dysphoria rather than the medical conditions they were approved to treat.
The efforts from Paxton, Abbott and the state Legislature have had widespread effects. The Children’s Medical Center in Dallas removed all references to Genecis, its gender-affirming care program for minors, from its website in November and said the program would no longer take new patients. Last month, 850 doctors, medical students and employees at two Dallas hospitals signed a petition opposing the decision.
Paxton has also tweeted about transgender people, even repeatedly misgendering Dr. Rachel Levine, assistant U.S. health secretary and the first openly transgender Senate-confirmed federal official, prompting Twitter to flag the tweets.
All of it is adding up, and parents and LGBTQ advocates say they are exhausted. The Rev. Remington Johnson, a Presbyterian clergy member and a trans advocate, said she spends her days texting with the parents of trans kids in Texas and doesn’t know of any family who hasn’t considered leaving the state.
Even if advocates continue to defeat anti-trans bills, and even if the courts ultimately shoot down Abbott’s directive, they will leave behind a persistent “climate of terror,” she said.
“This is why there have been doctors that have just stopped treating trans kids,” she said. “It’s not because there’s a law, it’s because this is what terror-inducing bills do. It is the same playbook as the bounty-hunter style abortion bill, where it’s about causing anxiety and fear to stop the thing that you don’t want to be happening.”
She noted that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has already signaled support for a bill similar to one recently signed into law by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Parental Rights in Education Act, which bars discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in some classrooms. Critics of the bill have dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay and Trans” bill.
“Texas will work to pass what Florida passed but make it worse,” Johnson said. “It will be harsher, it will be more extreme.”
K., another Austin mom of a 10-year-old trans daughter testified against anti-trans bills at the Capitol last year, when the Legislature held three special sessions to pass the trans athlete restriction. She said that once it was over, she and the other advocates planned to take time off to recover and strategize for the next session.
But then Paxton and Abbott released their letters two months into the new year.
“Here we see that these two extremist politicians circumvented the legal process in order to implement these policies,” she said.
K., who also asked that her full name not be published out of privacy concerns, said that she realized that even though she and the other parents and advocates “followed the rules” and won, they’re still losing. “It makes me uncertain that we would be protected even though our kids have not received gender-affirming medical care at this point,” she said. “And I can’t fight offensively when I’m already down on the ground just trying to fend people off of my kids.”
She plans to move her family to Oregon this summer.
Parents also expect that the next legislative session, which starts in 2023, will be worse than the last. That’s why Heather Crawford, an Austin mom whose 15-year-old is trans, said she plans to move her family to Minnesota this summer.
“I have zero faith that it will stop,” she said. Her 15-year-old, Cass, was born and raised in Texas, but “I cannot ask them to spend the last years of their childhood in a state that wants to criminalize their existence.”
Cass, who uses “he” and “they” pronouns, said the idea of moving to a state with a number of pro-LGBTQ laws — and was the first to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in 1993 — is a huge relief. He said Paxton’s and Abbott’s efforts will put trans people in danger. “It’s saying that people can get away with transphobia towards everyone in the community, including kids,” he said.
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.”
Get the Morning Rundown
Get a head start on the morning’s top stories.SIGN UPTHIS SITE IS PROTECTED BY RECAPTCHA PRIVACY POLICY | TERMS OF SERVICE
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.
Get a head start on the morning’s top stories.SIGN UPTHIS SITE IS PROTECTED BY RECAPTCHA PRIVACY POLICY | TERMS OF SERVICE
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.
At a public hearing in Dade County, Florida, parents were enraged. The nation, they said, was in peril and children were at risk. A recent ordinance had granted gay people housing and employment protections, and that meant teachers couldn’t be fired because of their sexuality. Florida classrooms quickly became a battleground, and opponents of the ordinance said the state’s support of civil rights for homosexuals was infringing on their rights as parents.
Action had to be taken, and a campaign to limit the legal rights of LGBTQ people — all in the name of protecting children — was enacted. A woman who spoke at this hearing said it was her right to control “the moral atmosphere in which my children grow up.” That woman was Anita Bryant, formerly Miss Oklahoma and a white, telegenic, Top 40 singer who was well known for her Florida orange juice commercials (“A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine!” she’d say). Bryant spearheaded an anti-LGBTQ campaign of such impact that its echoes can be heard in today’s rhetoric. The year was 1977.
Last month, nearly half a century after Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education bill, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by its opponents. The measure, which takes effect July 1, prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in “kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” Similar bills are being considered in 19 other states, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank that has been tracking the bills.
Advocates of Florida’s bill say its purpose is to allow parents to decide how and when LGBTQ topics are introduced to their children. Opponents say it hurts the very children advocates are trying to protect. Sam Ames, director of advocacy and government affairs at The Trevor Project, a queer youth advocacy group, said in a statement that the bill will “erase young LGBTQ students across Florida, forcing many back into the closet by policing their identity and silencing important discussions about the issues they face.”
Historians say they’ve seen this before.
“It’s a contemporary version on these older attempts to annul homosexuality,” said Lillian Faderman, author of “The Gay Revolution,” among other queer history titles.
“In the present environment, you can’t go after homosexual teachers anymore,” Faderman said. “We have too many allies. And so Florida has found another way to do it by this ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, which doesn’t go after homosexual teachers precisely. But the idea is the same. That is, that homosexuality is a pariah status, and it shouldn’t be discussed in the public schools.”
When Bryant began her campaign in 1977, she had four children, and often said she was speaking as a mother and a Christian. And while the villainization of LGBTQ people was not new, Bryant took the idea of protecting children and made it mainstream. Her campaign and the subsequent “Save Our Children” political coalition used the argument that “homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America.”
Bryant’s focus on the idea that LGBTQ people were threatening to children created a talking point that social conservatives were able to rally around and promote to their friends and neighbors. Bryant paired this with her Christian faith, telling Playboy magazine in 1978 that her position “was not taken out of homophobia, but out of love” for gay people. When a gay activist threw a pie in her face during a news conference, she immediately prayed for the man to be “delivered from his deviant lifestyle.”https://iframe.nbcnews.com/ku4UXns?_showcaption=true
“Deviance” was part of Bryant’s core argument that homosexuality was evil and that LGBTQ people didn’t deserve rights. To award them nondiscrimination protection was to offer them a kind of special privilege. If we label homosexuality a civil rights issue, what is to stop “the murderer from shouting ‘murderer rights’”? Bryant wrote in her 1977 book, “The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality.”
Bryant’s work resulted in the repeal of the Dade County nondiscrimination ordinance, by a more than 2-to-1 margin, in a voter referendum. Its repeal caused a backlash in other states that had passed similar ordinances, and Bryant’s fame grew. She took her message across the country, and for the next three years was named “The Most Admired Woman in America” in Good Housekeeping’s annual poll.
While Bryant fueled the idea that gays were harmful to children, the blueprint for this type of rhetoric had been laid nearly 20 years before, also in the state of Florida.
The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (commonly referred to as the Johns Committee, after Charley Johns, its first chairman) was established in 1956, and was born out of opposition to the desegregation of schools and the pursuit of “communists.” The committee first targeted the NAACP but was stopped by the Supreme Court. The committee then turned to investigating alleged communists in Florida schools, but was stopped by the American Association of University Professors. They needed a new target, and in the fall of 1958, the committee began to investigate — and eliminate — LGBTQ people from Florida schools. There was no court and no association to protect them. The committee was well-funded by taxpayer dollars. School principals and university presidents cooperated.
“Charley Johns’s argument was that of, these homosexuals are perverting our youth because they’re teaching our youth in college, and high school, and elementary school, and we have to get rid of them so they won’t turn young people into homosexuals,” Faderman said. From 1958 to 1965, hundreds — if not thousands — of students and teachers were targeted, with many losing their livelihoods.
Get the Morning Rundown
Get a head start on the morning’s top stories.SIGN UPTHIS SITE IS PROTECTED BY RECAPTCHA PRIVACY POLICY | TERMS OF SERVICE
Though the committee was deterred from its investigation into the NAACP, its roots in opposition to desegregation and its evolution from racist opposition to homophobic oppression is clear, historians say.
“The Christian right really comes together on enforcing segregation in the 1960s. It’s about anti-Black racism; that’s largely where it starts. And they’ve hit on this idea that they’re protecting children and education,” said Hugh Ryan, a historian and author of “When Brooklyn Was Queer.” “They realize that this works, that this is the issue that will create a ‘political moral majority.’”
By the time we get to Anita Bryant in 1977, Ryan said, “they’ve already realized that they can harness this political conservatism and attach it to religion by talking about the family.”
Bryant ‘won the battle’ but lost ‘the war’
Though the Dade County ordinance was repealed, opposition to the bill led to a kind of LGBTQ activism that had not been previously seen in South Florida.
“The thing to remember is that Anita Bryant won that battle initially, but she did not win that war,” said the historian Julio Capó Jr., a native Floridian, who wrote “Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940.”
He said Bryant inadvertently spurred a mobilization and a movement.
“It was transformative,” Capó said. “It got people to see themselves as a voting bloc. It got them to see that their very existence and their rights were very much under attack in a different way than we had seen in the decade prior.”
The activism spread from Dade County and across the country, pushing against Bryant’s own “Christian crusade,” as she called it. In 1977, the co-executive directors of the National Gay Task Force wrote a thank you in The New York Times to Bryant and her Save Our Children organization, saying they were “doing the 20 million lesbians and gay men in America an enormous favor: They are focusing for the public the nature of the prejudice and discrimination we face.”
Though Bryant did enjoy some additional years of fame, her anti-gay rhetoric ultimately caused her career prospects to plummet. Her booking agent dropped her, the Florida Citrus Commission stopped running her orange juice ads and she filed for bankruptcy — twice. The anti-discrimination ordinance she helped repeal in 1977 was restored in 1998.
And today, even though state legislators continue to chip away at LGBTQ rights, same-sex marriage is legal across the country and federal law prohibits anti-LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace.
Though the times have changed significantly since Bryant’s heyday in the late ‘70s, it appears her views have not. In 2021, Bryant’s granddaughter Sarah Green told Slate that she came out to her grandmother on her 21st birthday. Bryant reportedly responded by saying homosexuality isn’t real.
“It’s very hard to argue with someone who thinks that an integral part of your identity is just an evil delusion,” Green said. Green, who clarified to them.us that she is bisexual, told Slate about her upcoming wedding to her fiancée, a woman, and said she wasn’t sure if her grandmother would be attending.
“I just kind of feel bad for her,” Green added. “And I think as much as she hopes that I will figure things out and come back to God, I kind of hope that she’ll figure things out.”
Bryant, now 82, no longer lives in Florida. She returned to her home state of Oklahoma and runs Anita Bryant Ministries International. Neither Bryant nor Green responded to requests for comment.