Commentary
The currently raging media battle over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill—which would prohibit public schools and the outside entities they hire from instructing children under age 8 about sexual orientation and gender identity—is a classic example of desperate propaganda at war with reality.
Here’s the reality: the exact language of the Florida bill as passed by the state senate on March 8: “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.”
Who could argue with that? Isn’t all education for youngsters, especially sex education, supposed to be “age-appropriate”? Does anyone really want 10-year-olds to get the graphic details from their teachers about sexually transmitted diseases? Maybe they should wait until they’re in high school. As for 5-year-olds—the age when most children start kindergarten—the Florida bill would simply ensure that finger-painting and nap time aren’t interrupted by Drag Queen Story Hour or the teacher coming out as “nonbinary” in class. If parents themselves want to take their own 5-year-olds (or 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds) down that road, the Florida bill would leave them free to do so—on their own time.
In fact, the Florida parental-rights bill, which is expected to be signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, reads so sensibly that the LGBTQ activists and their allies in the Biden administration and the mainstream media have been essentially obliged to make things up in trying to build a case against it. You can’t really run a TV ad asserting, for example, that Mrs. Jones in second grade should be telling little Doreen that she’s really a boy because she likes to play baseball, or a lesbian because she and her best friend hold hands. Viewers might get the idea that adults who are that fanatical about carving out sexual identities and desires for young children are ... a bit strange.
That’s where the propaganda comes in. The first thing the legislation’s opponents have done is give it a derogatory nickname: the “Don’t Say Gay bill.” Of course, the bill actually states nothing of the kind. But the new moniker, quickly picked up and spread by the media, gives opponents a chance to mock concerned parents as fundamentalist yahoos who shiver at the thought of a single word. Opponents also get a chance to carry protest signs saying “It’s OK to Say Gay”—again deflecting attention away from the fact that the bill is about classroom instruction, not vocabularies.
The next step for the media has been to invent far-fetched hypothetical situations that are supposed to demonstrate that the Florida legislation is so vaguely worded that it would be impossible to enforce constitutionally. Here’s an example from
Vox: “Suppose that a third grade student asks a teacher who the highest-ranking openly gay official is in the U.S. government. Is the teacher allowed to respond with the correct answer (Pete Buttigieg), or do they have to blow off the question?”
Yes, that’s the kind of question—“the highest-ranking openly gay official”—that third-graders ask all the time.
The next step after that is to accuse supporters of the bill of homophobia, transphobia, or both. “It’s hurtful, dehumanizing and a grooming of bigotry,” the
Palm Beach Post editorialized. “Demonizing mere discussion of gender identity sends a message that anyone who doesn’t identify as heterosexual should be viewed as ‘other,’ that anyone who celebrates or even tolerates diversity is suspect.”
In the
Orlando Sentinel Julie Wilensky of the National Center for Lesbian Rights wrote: “By suggesting there is something so shameful about LGBTQ people that they can’t be mentioned or must be discussed in negative terms, [bills like Florida’s] stigmatize and isolate LGBTQ youth, contributing to a climate of hostility and harassment in public schools around the country.”
Finally, there’s the rigged poll. That came from ABC News/Ipsos (
pdf), which reported on March 13 that 62 percent of Americans oppose laws like the one proposed in Florida. You might ask how that could possibly be true—until you read the wording of the question ABC asked the poll’s respondents: “Would you support or oppose legislation that would prohibit classroom lessons about sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary school?” Again, as its language makes crystal-clear, the Florida prohibition wouldn’t cover all levels of elementary school, but only up through third grade. Children age 9 and older could receive “age-appropriate” instruction, which seems reasonable.
Even more outrageously,
ABC/Ipsos admitted that it “oversampled people who identify as LGBTQ,” but then “weighted” their responses “to match their correct proportion in the general population.” Ed Morrissey of the
Hot Air website tore that one apart. He pointed out that among other things, ABC/Ipsos never supplied the actual unweighted responses, failed to disclose whether the pollsters might have oversampled urban areas where LGBTQ people tend to cluster, and collected responses from only 622 adults who might or might not have been registered voters. Finally, with the definition of LGBTQ recently expanded to include a large range of self-described “gender-fluid” individuals, we don’t even know what “their correct proportion in the general population” means.
Two days later, the Daily Wire, in conjunction with the technology research firm Lucid,
released its own poll of 1,000 U.S. adults that actually used the exact language of the Florida bill and asked respondents whether they supported it. Some 64 percent said yes, with only 21 percent saying they opposed it. The poll sample, like the general U.S. population, included a plurality of Democrats versus Republicans, and a majority who said they had voted for Biden in the 2020 election. Among parents, 68 percent supported the bill.
That’s reality. And when you see the reality, you understand why the “Don’t Say Gay” propaganda looks so absurd and desperate.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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