You might recall how in the spring of 2022, Florida Man Gov. Ron DeSantis and all his affiliated trolls on Twitter were insisting that DeSantis’s pet project, the “Parental Rights in Education Act” (Florida HB 1557), should absolutely not be called “Don’t say Gay” or any kind of censorship, because it was in fact a very limited bill that would ban “sexual instruction” in classrooms for kindergarteners to third grade, and if you think very young children need “sexual instruction” in public school then clearly you are a groomer sex pervert anyway, you sicko.
DeSantis was very clear about what an itty-bitty, tiny, limited bill this would be, explaining,
“When you actually look at the bill and it says ‘no sexual instruction to kids pre-K through three,’ how many parents want their kids to have transgenderism or something injected into classroom instruction?” DeSantis said. “It’s basically saying for our younger students, do you really want them being taught about sex? And this is any sexual stuff. But I think clearly right now, we see a focus on transgenderism, telling kids they may be able to pick genders and all of that.”
So stop your worrying, the bill was only aimed at grades K to 3, and also maybe all the other grades because its phrasing is so broad and ambiguous, and, oh, hey, what’s the bill’s actual text anyway?
Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
Funny, that’s not what DeSantis said. It really does prohibit any “instruction” on sexual orientation or gender identity, not just having first graders read aloud from Erica Jong’s Big Pop-up Book Of Fear of Flying. Did DeSantis fib? Egad!
Funny thing, though! In practice, the law is very definitely not being used in the limited ways that DeSantis suggested. In his Popular Information newsletter, indy journalist Judd Legum uses public records obtained via the Florida Freedom to Read Project to review some of the actions public schools in Florida have taken to remove books with any mention of LGBTQ+ characters from libraries, noting that none of the materials that were removed featured “sexual instruction” at all.
For instance, the school district in Lake County removed three books from school libraries, explaining they had to do so because the books contained “content regarding sexual orientation/gender identification prohibited in HB 1557.” What were these horrible dirty sex books? They were Jill Twiss’s A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo (a Last Week Tonight parody book about a gay bunny rabbit owned by Mike Pence), Patricia Polacco’s In our Mothers’ House(mutltiracial adopted kids with two mommies; note the horrifying plural possessive apostrophe placement!), and the oft-censored Gay Penguin book And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, an exploration of gay Penguin Lust at its ugliest — or not, as Legum ‘splains:
These books do not involve “sexual instruction.” One book that was removed, And Tango Makes Three, is the true story of two male Penguins, Roy and Silo, who lived in the Central Park Zoo. The pair build a nest together, and — after the zookeeper provides them with an egg — they raise an adopted child, Tango. There is no sexual content in the book.
Well maybe you don’t think so, but there’s definitely Gay Penguin Watersports, as seen in this excerpt:
Aww. Silo is Roy’s lobster!
Seminole County also cited HB 1557 in removing three other books from circulation, although the district will allow parents of fourth and fifth graders to check them out — if the parent directly requests the books in writing and personally picks them up from the school principal, because we assume librarians aren’t to be trusted with such hot stuff. (Just to be on the safe side, parents should probably also submit a security bond, take a loyalty oath, and pass a Voight-Kampff test.)
What horrific scenes of depravity are in these nasty books, rendering them unfit for K-3 kids, and requiring the strictest possible chain of custody for older grades? One, I Am Jazz, is about a trans girl who does not do anything sexual because duh, she’s a little kid in a picture book. The other two, 10,000 Dresses and Jacob’s New Dress, are about boys who like pretty dresses, which is clearly why they require far greater security measures than are used to secure Top Secret government documents at Mar-a-Lago, which we’ll concede is not a place usually associated with literacy anyway.
Legum points out that, hey, all of these books and many others on LGBTQ+ themes have been removed from school libraries, even though the DeSantis administration insisted in a discrimination lawsuit brought by LGBTQ students and their parents that no, the law only applies to classroom instructional materials, so heavens, that’s not discrimination based on federal case law.
Outside courtrooms, however, DeSantis’s Department of Education is developing training materials for school librarians that make no such distinction, and which encourage librarians to avoid selecting library materials that include “unsolicited theories that may lead to student indoctrination,” such as — you guessed it — any mention of “sexual orientation or gender identity” in books for grades K-3. Legum explains that the training
seeks to encourage librarians to remove books with LGBTQ themes from elementary school libraries by conflating the standards for instructional materials and library books.
To encourage the removal of more books, the training instructs librarians to “err on the side of caution” and consider “whether you as an adult would be comfortable reading the material in person in a public meeting.”
That latter “standard” goes well beyond even the text of the Don’t Say Gay law, but it sure makes Moms for Censorship happy because that would mean more books get removed, including those for older students that may well be age-appropriate but might make some pinch-faced church people turn red in the face at a school board meeting.
Legum notes that Florida is accepting public comment on the training and other school policies through January 18, if you’re a Florida Wonkette reader who wants to stand up to the bullies.
No, voice memos where you talk like a penguin would not be helpful.
UPDATE: In a new bit of fuckery, we learn today that Citrus County Schools won’t let kids use the library AT ALL unless their parents submit a signed permission slip. Tip of the Wonkette catgirl ears to alert reader Michail Vario!
As a result, some 4,000 students in the district are unable to use the school libraries at all, either because their parents said no, didn’t return the form, or returned the form without checking the “yes” or “no” box. Here’s the shittiest part: Only 84 parents checked the “no” box.
Fuck this timeline.
[Popular Information / Image generated using Stable Diffusion AI]
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