IGF CultureWatch

It’s hard to react to the new “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Tennessee with the bemusement it deserves.  SB 49 would prohibit Tennessee teachers in grades K-8 from mentioning homosexuality in the classroom.  It’s natural to find this bill stupid, harmful to students who may be homosexual, bigoted, mean-spirited, misdirected, ill-informed, dimwitted, irrational, shortsighted, irresponsible or just plain preposterous.

There are very few of us who would want elementary and middle-school children to have a sexual education imposed on them prematurely.  And if this were what the bill accomplished, it might be justified.

But that’s not what the bill does.  Instead, the legislation says, “No public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.”  It acknowledges the fundamental fact that sexual orientation is part of the human matrix, and allows instruction and school materials to include sexual orientation – how could it not?

But only if that sexual orientation is the state-approved one.  The bill provides that students in Tennessee can be explicitly exposed to the sexual orientation the state has adopted as its official policy – heterosexuality – and that they should be protected from any official hint that there is another sexual orientation the state does not endorse – homosexuality.

Unsurprisingly, California’s legislature has a somewhat different idea.  That state’s SB 48 would prohibit California school materials from “reflecting adversely” on lesbians and gay men, adding sexual orientation to an already established list of other factors such as race, gender and national origin.

The California bill may go too far in the opposite direction. Those of us who have worked long enough in the gay rights arena know that there are times when some of our own actions and leaders reflect pretty adversely on us.  It’s taken a long time for educators and policymakers to clean up the cleaned-up pseudo-history that used to be taught in our schools, and students are better for knowing that mistakes, flawed heroes, ideological zeal and terrible miscalculations are all part of the human story.  It would be a shame for us to back off from that candor.

But Tennessee’s SB 49 shows why California thinks it needs SB 48.  History, itself, has done its best to render lesbians and gay men invisible.  SB 49 only does explicitly what has always been implicit:  It makes the lie official.  SB 49 says that California won’t tolerate that lie any more.

I want to be bemused by Tennessee’s foolish notion, because I know that its children will inevitably gain awareness of the lively, active and open lesbians and gay men in their state and around the country and the world no matter what their state’s lawmakers wish.  Like the Chinese government, Tennessee’s deluded leaders want to control a truth that is ultimately indifferent to their autocratic mirage.

But these official lies do cause harm.  They reinforce the superiority of heterosexuality to homosexuality, and embolden the adolescent impulse to demean.  As an adult, I have the luxury and security to be bemused by the deranged grown-ups who have acquired the ability to misuse government.  But there will be children in Tennessee who won’t be so lucky, and will have to grow through the same lies that generations of us had to survive.  It’s easier to do that now, but it’s so unnecessary, and such a pigheaded use of the power of government.