After her 5th graders in Winding Waters elementary school in Hernando County, Florida spent the morning taking standardized tests, Jenna Barbee, their teacher, gave them a study break. The class watched “Strange World,” a 2022 Disney animated science fiction movie. “Strange World” tells the story of scientists who overcome their differences as they search for a rare plant that could produce an unlimited supply of energy. In a subplot, two male explorers are attracted to each other.
Shannon Rodriguez, a mother of a student in the class who is a member of the county school board and of the rightwing advocacy group Moms for Liberty, complained to state education officials that the movie opens “a door to conversations that have no place in our classroom.” She would not “stand by and allow the minority to infiltrate our schools.” Rodriguez added, “God did put me here.”
Although the investigation had barely begun, school officials announced that “in the future, the movie will not be shown.”
“Strange World,” Barbee indicated, was relevant to a unit on ecosystems and earth science. Although Winding Waters has no process for approval of specific films, parents of all students in the class had signed permission slips authorizing her to show PG films. And Barbee claimed the door Rodriguez is “talking about” — the existence of gay people — “it’s already been open … these students are talking about things way beyond this [movie].”
This incident is another reminder that Florida’s Parental Rights in Education legislation, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by its opponents, is designed to end practices for which there is no evidence, impose values on students, muzzle teachers and effectively erase a group of already marginalized Americans.
Enacted in 2022, the Parental Rights Act addressed sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten and grades 1 to 3 in the state’s public schools. The legislation, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced, would ensure that children “get an education, not an indoctrination.” Opponents, he added, without evidence, want “Woke gender ideology in the first grade.” And the bill authorized parents to initiate lawsuits against teachers, administrators or schools.
The bill’s preamble prohibited “classroom discussions” of sexual orientation and gender identity, while the legislation itself barred “classroom instruction.” Neither instruction nor discussion was defined. Nor did the bill specify whether any reference to homosexuality violated the law, or school libraries had to remove every book mentioning LGBTQ people.
Joe Harding, a sponsor of the measure in Florida’s House of Representatives, filed an amendment requiring schools to inform parents if their child came out as LGBTQ, but withdrew it following vociferous criticism. Dennis Baxley, a Senate sponsor, maintained that the act eliminated “social engineering” that could result in more children identifying as gay or transgender. Baxley did not respond to requests for evidence that discussions of sexual orientation or gender identity altered students’ behavior.
Rick Stevens, founder of Florida Citizens Alliance, a rightwing advocacy organization, and pastor of Diplomat Wesleyan Church in Cape Coral, acknowledged that “we don’t have any evidence that it’s happening, either deliberately or accidentally.” Nonetheless, Stevens insisted that “anytime you start to desensitize kids and normalize certain behaviors, then it makes it easier for someone who wants to recruit them for sex trafficking, or anything else, because the kids don’t know the difference.”
A spokesman for Gov. DeSantis maintained that anyone who opposes the bill “is probably a groomer, or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 years old children.”
A few days after the bill became law, Laura Ingraham asked Fox News viewers a rhetorical question: “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals?” She, too, provided no evidence to demonstrate that they had.
This April, “Don’t Say Gay” was expanded to grades 4 to 8. The legislation also placed restrictions on instruction in “human sexuality” throughout high school, required that all school-age students be taught to abstain from sexual activity outside marriage, and encouraged teachers in reproductive health courses to promote “the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage.” It declared that a person’s sex “is an immutable biological trait” and “it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such a person’s sex.”
“Don’t Say Gay” has already had a chilling effect. In 2022, lawyers advised school administrators in Florida’s Orange County to disallow teachers from wearing rainbow articles of clothing to school, and discouraged them from putting photographs of same-sex partners on their desks.
Judges have thrown out lawsuits claiming that “Don’t Say Gay” is unconstitutional because plaintiffs have not (yet) been harmed and therefore have no standing to sue. And DeSantis recently signed a transgender bathroom bill and a ban on gender-affirming care.
In response to the legislation and a surge in hateful comments on social media, 88 percent of LGBTQ people in Florida are somewhat or very worried about potential harm to them, their children and families, according to a study by the UCLA School of Law Williams Institute. More than half say they are considering leaving the state; 17 percent claim they have already taken steps to do so. And Florida’s largest gay rights organization has warned LGBTQ people it may not be safe to move to or visit the state.
“Don’t Say Gay” is not about empowering parents. It’s an attempt to stigmatize people because they have chosen to affirm their sexual orientation or gender identity. And extremists have the votes to impose their agenda in Florida and many other red states.
There should be no doubt that they, and not their intended victims, are the advocates of big government, indoctrination and coercion, or that they are denying many Americans free speech and the rights of individuals to decide how to conduct their lives. In fighting for their rights, we preserve our own.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.