Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) spoke at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to condemn the teaching of comprehensive sex education in public schools. While describing subjects like safe sex and sex for pleasure as unnecessary to any curriculum, she also singled out LGBTQ+ topics of how to have same-gender relations and how to explore your gender identity, but she provided no proof of this being taught at any schools in Colorado.
Boebert’s stance is hypocritical at best and laughable at worst. A high school dropout, she was a teen mom, and a grandmother at the age of 36, when her 17 year old son got his girlfriend pregnant. Not to mention, she’s firmly against LGBTQ+ public entertainment like drag shows for exposing innocent children to inappropriate behavior, when she herself participated in some inappropriate behavior at a showing of the Beetlejuice musical last year. Boebert’s nonsensical hypocrisy isn’t surprising, but it should still be noted.
It’s fun and easy to make jokes about Boebert, but it doesn’t change the real story going on. She’s perpetuating the demonization of queer people. With no evidence to back up her claims, she stated that public high schools and elementary schools are teaching children the specific mechanics of how gay people have sex in their comprehensive sex education curriculums. It’s this innocent children angle that the Right play so fervently. By reducing all queer individuals to groomers or child predators, it persuades the masses into believing the same lies, which is how more anti-LGBTQ+ politicians get elected and anti-queer legislation gets passed.
In addition, Boebert claimed that schools that teach comprehensive sex education should be defunded, which is another tactic of the GOP. Uneducated students become uneducated voters, unexposed to differing thoughts, ideas, and people from those they were raised around. Teaching about minority groups like the LGBTQ+ community in school normalizes those groups in children’s adult lives. Understanding it’s okay to be gay as a child means that child will grow into a more tolerant adult, which is not what the Far Right want. Keeping kids isolated from different cultures, ideologies, and perspectives will make it so that, as adults, they are frightened by the prospect of someone different than them. This alienation serves to further divide the country and is how the Right maintains a hold on their power.
