“Don’t Say Gay” Bill in Lousiana Pushes Extreme Agenda

Following in the footsteps of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, The Louisiana Legislature has passed H.B. 122, which bans discussions of gender and sexuality in public schools. Madison Markham, Freedom to Read program assistant, said; “It is disappointing to see Louisiana censor LGBTQ+ curriculum by adopting a Don’t Say Gay law during Pride Month. Taken with the Ten Commandments law and a new law policing pronoun usage in schools, HB 122 demonstrates how the legislature and the governor have pushed their extreme ideological agenda at the expense of student well-being and freedom of expression.” “It’s good to have a safe place where parents can have some confidence, for instance, if there is an LGBTQ employee, I think letting parents know, ‘OK, I’m fine with that person because I know they can’t talk to my child about their sexual orientation, no more than I would want a promiscuous male or female teacher to talk to my child about their sexual partners,” Republican State Sen. Beth Mizell said. To say that referencing a queer teacher as being “promiscuous” is an insult would be an understatement. It’s outright dehumanizing of the real and truthful feelings of those who are in a homosexual relationship. Since 2021, Florida has pushed out the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that censors the involvement of LGBT ideas and rhetoric within K-12 classrooms. These policies also prevent cherry-picked information, books, and instructions from being available within educational institutions to discriminate against and erase media that involves Black communities and LGBTQ+ Floridians.  Governor Ron DeSantis and the state’s Department of Education led the charge to get this bill passed. These sorts of interventions are meant to give more access to inaccurate information, disguised as having “in age-appropriate thoughts” and undermining Florida students’ thinking skills. Determining age appropriateness has been a discussion within educational environments, but these types of bills challenge local educators and scholars by withholding articles from modern-day society that engage with queer ideology and Black roots that have never been spoken about generations past.