Attacks on the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law are about control

The alphabet people screamed in bloodcurdling unison Monday as Florida governor Ron DeSantis coolly signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill. Dubbed, in lockstep, by activists and the mainstream media the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the words “gay,” “homosexual” or anything similar don’t appear anywhere in the six-page law.

Quite clearly, the law states that “a school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.” A few things to note here: “primary grade levels” are defined in Florida as age three to grade three. “Classroom discussion” would mean a teacher-led discussion to an entire class, and does not pertain to one-on-one conversations between a student and teacher.

Most damning to the “don’t say gay” myth is something that, unsurprisingly, no one in the media bothered to consider: heterosexual, like homosexual, is also a “sexual orientation.” Therefore, classroom-wide discussions about heterosexuality that are not “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate” are also forbidden.

According to the hysterics, students of same-sex parents would be arrested for saying “my two dads” in class — and plenty of gay parents took to social media to falsely proclaim this to be the case. If that were so, saying “my mom and dad” in class would also be outlawed, according to the text of the law. It’s clearly not.

Celebrities and talking heads went to their old fallback — this bill is literal violence and anyone supporting it wants dead kids. To punctuate this, cherubic, sublimely naive manchild Chasten Buttigieg, the unemployed Hausfrau of transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, took to CNN to discuss suicidality among LGBT youth — suggesting more kids would kill themselves as a result. The problem, of course, was that every study he cited related to high school students, not kindergarteners. No one pushed back, naturally.

Kindergarten teachers with TikTok accounts showed us how grim and pathetic the life of a gay finger-painting instructor really is — they whined in rainbow socks about not being able to discuss their dating life with children.

“It scares me that I am not going to be able to have these conversations with my children… I don’t want to have to hide that my partner and I went paddle boarding this weekend,” a Florida kindergarten teacher said on MSNBC this week. Gross, dude. Get some friends. And unless “paddle boarding” is some new kink you explored down at the sex club, that’s not going to be a legal problem for you anyway.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called teaching three- to eight-year-olds about sodomy a “cherished value.” New York City mayor Eric Adams deemed the bill “state-sponsored discrimination.” Three unfunny female comics at the Academy Awards on Sunday chanted the word “gay,” which was supposed to be edgy? Funny? Controversial? Jury’s still out.

When you scratch a millimeter beneath the surface, or just actually read the damn bill for yourself, you see how innocuous the whole thing is. Why was the law even needed? And why, you might wonder, the extraordinary outrage and all the public tantrums? On its face, rather than some Christian theocratic decree, the law seems to act as a reminder, more than anything else, for educators to stick to age-appropriate topics. None of this is about gay rights — little is these days — but rather about control.

Here’s what happened: during lockdown and remote learning, some teachers and school districts were caught by parents being inappropriate. Students were not only getting pumped full of Critical Race Theory, parents realized, but bizarre gender ideology as well. Parents across the country were disgusted and outraged — they even flipped Virginia red in 2021 as a result. One state, Florida, has now put the left in time out, and Democrats are having an absolute conniption fit. This isn’t about the law, per se. Progressives arec raging against being reeled in. They’re not worried about “gay kids.” They’re telling America: you’re not allowed to tell us what to do, especially in education.

And speaking of these “gay kids” everyone is so broken up over: they don’t exist. There’s no such thing as a gay kid, and if you think there are gay kids, you’re probably due a visit from Chris Hansen. Sure, we’ve all been around a swishy, excitable little boy and thought, Billy’s got a little too much sugar in his tank. Or we might know a grimy little third-grade girl who likes snakes and spiders and roughhousing with the boys. A lot of the time, those kids will grow up to be gay, but not always. That’s very different from being a “gay child,” which is a grotesque way of sexualizing certain children who may be slightly out-of-the-ordinary.

There’s a reason proponents of the law call it the “anti-groomer” bill. While just as hyperbolic and reactionary as “don’t say gay,” “anti-groomer” at least seems to have some truth behind it. Most of us did realize from a very young age, elementary school even, that we were different from the other kids. For some of us, it led to excelling in unconventional areas, like the arts, and made us more popular for doing so. What would have been accomplished if some teacher had suggested we were gay, or if we were forced to sit through classroom discussions about homosexuality?

Not only would it have been extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing — knowing perhaps they were talking about us — but traumatizing. Look at America’s gay public faces. There might not be an epidemic of eight-year-olds committing suicide, but tell a child that because he likes playing Barbies with his sister he’ll grow up to be Ross Mathews and we may get one.

Worse still: telling that little boy that he might be a girl. Every gay man is thinking this but won’t say it out loud: if adults noticed I was a little different, suggested I might be a girl and that I could magically become one, where would I be today? Aside from everything else that’s reprehensible about it, pushing trans ideology on innocent kids is a kind of gay genocide.

There’s no appropriate age for the state to discuss sexual orientation or gender identity with a child. Sex ed, for older kids, is supposed to be about reproduction. Gays don’t reproduce. It’s also about STDs. While future homosexuals sitting through sex ed class can look forward to plenty of those, it doesn’t require a full lesson on sexual orientation. Kids will figure it out on their own; they don’t need the state and never did. Besides, when kids are ready for sex ed, after puberty, they already probably know more than their teachers about gay and trans stuff.

Here’s all the instruction high school kids need: “Some people are gay, it’s not controversial. A tiny number of people say they’re trans, it’s very controversial. Approach me after class if you want some approved books to read on the subject.”

“Next up: a three week seminar on the horrors of single motherhood.”