Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill is causing quite the stir in the national media. In an attempt to smear the bill and obscure its actual aims, leftists have taken to calling it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, even though such a phrase does not appear at all in the legislation’s text.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems determined to place the state on the frontline of the latest battle in the culture war — gender ideology in schools. Though squarely aimed at the state of Florida, the bill has caused such an uproar that it has exposed the leftists’ true intentions on a national scale, which may have been DeSantis’ plan all along.
The bill forbids teachers from discussing sexuality and gender identity with children in kindergarten through third grade. It also prevents schools and teachers from offering services to children that impact their physical or mental health without notifying parents first. There is an exception for suspected child abuse.
Critics claim that Florida’s bill is too vague and too broad on what constitutes having sexually inappropriate conversations with minors, and, honestly, they have a point.
Relying on children to snitch on their teachers is unreliable at best and has never worked out well in history (see: the Chinese Cultural Revolution). Are there going to be adult commissars in every classroom making sure the teachers don’t talk about gender identity or sexuality?
The fanatical activists who have infested our public school system will certainly find loopholes in this bill and take full advantage of them. They don’t see the classroom as a space to foster a love of learning or civic virtue in their students; they see it as a chance to indoctrinate children in the same woke ideology they were force-fed at college. It’s a chance to manufacture pint-sized revolutionaries ready to smash the old ways with reckless abandon.
But that may be the true point of the bill — to expose these ideologues for what they really are by forcing them to breathlessly defend an agenda that most Americans find deeply disturbing.
There are undoubtedly predators in schools and in the leftist political movement, but there aren’t nearly enough in positions of power to inaugurate the nationwide swing toward radical gender and racial curricula that we’ve seen in the last few years.
Just like critical race theory, radical gender ideology is designed to divide students into arbitrary groups and exacerbate tensions between those groups. You have the “oppressed” sexual and gender minorities on one side and the “oppressor” heterosexual majority on the other.
Again, as with CRT, we’ve seen the rhetoric steadily move from “it’s not being taught in schools,” to “even if it is, it’s harmless,” to “it is being taught, but kids need to know the realities of sexuality to be prepared for the modern world,” to finally “it’s being taught, it’s a good thing that it’s being taught to very young children and you’re a bigot if you disagree.”
But unlike CRT, students from the majority can convert to the other side either by proclaiming they are an “ally” or by becoming a member of a sexual or gender minority themselves. Once they’ve converted, they’re showered with praise for being so “brave” and embracing their new identity — one that is most likely at odds with their parents’ worldview.
Once this is done, the teachers and administrators have created students who are not only alienated from their parents and society at large but also blindly loyal to leftist ideology on gender and race.
This strategy began on college campuses, but the left is determined to indoctrinate children as early on as possible. As seen during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, younger acolytes tend to be more fanatical in their devotion to the cause.
Recent studies suggest that educating students in this ideology can cause severe, and long lasting, psychological harm. Children who embrace radical gender ideology are twice as likely to suffer from mental health problems and are far more likely to think about or commit suicide,
But leftists seem to think this is a small price to pay to overturn “oppressive” societal values and usher in a new utopian dream.
The Florida education bill is probably too vague and broad to actually stop the teaching of gender ideology in schools, but it does expose their plan and forces them to talk about it in the open where Americans can see it for what it is — an insidious attempt to politically brainwash children.
The education system is rife with activists who wish to foist their own political program onto other people’s children, but there are others who have been invaluable in perpetuating the left’s strategy. Politicians and teachers unions have protected radical and predatory teachers from being fired or disciplined, and the media has run interference by mischaracterizing Florida’s bill as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
The power structures that are being exposed by this bill are normally insulated from the actions of legislators, but by speaking out against it with such furor they reveal just how pervasive these radical ideas are in our institutions.
Over 20% of Gen Z adults (people who were born between 1997 and 2003) identify as LGBTQ, according to a Gallup poll from February, and the generation as a whole has drifted farther to the left on gender, racial and economic issues. Twenty percent of the population was not born LGBT. They are being influenced by what they were taught in the classroom and what they see online and in pop culture.
The left has also expanded the definition of what constitutes a distinct sexuality to outrageous proportions. For example, someone is supposedly “demisexual” when they only feel sexually attracted to someone when they have an emotional bond with the person. The left counts that as a distinct sexuality. Any sane person knows that’s ridiculous.
But it depends on secrecy and on subverting the will of millions of parents across the country. Florida’s bill has shined a light on what is being taught to young children.
In response, left-wing activists have lashed out at anyone who questions their perceived right to indoctrinate kids, revealing that their program is not really about protecting LGBT kids. It’s about power and about molding the future generations of America in pursuit of their political goals.
If the parents of the United States stand up now and take decisive action to clear out the education system of radical activists, we might be able to save future generations from being subjected to this damaging and divisive ideology.
Hayden Daniel is the opinion editor at the Daily Caller.