The GOP is Targeting LGBTQ Education

Parallel to the anti-CRT push, new bills threaten to censor queer history

I’ve been writing and podcasting a fair bit about anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) agitation because I see it as central to the way the American right is rebuilding itself after the Trump presidency. The right is following a tried and true method to build national political power: stirring up moral panics about education to consolidate and expand its base. But anti-racism is not the only pedagogical concept being exploited in an attempt to appeal to panicked parents. 

Writing in The New Republic, Gabriel Arana calls attention to a spate of state level bills going after LGBTQ curricular content:

In public schools in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Montana, it may soon become illegal even to mention Bayard Rustin, the openly gay co-organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, or educate kids about the AIDS crisis. 

In May, Tennessee became the first state to pass what queer-rights advocates have branded as “Don’t Say Gay” laws, which either forbid the teaching of LGBTQ history in K-12 schools outright or allow parents to choose whether their children participate in lessons that include it. Within days, Montana followed suit. Yet another bill in Arkansas awaits the signature of the state’s Republican governor. Similar bills have been considered in West Virginia, Iowa, and Missouri, and even more proposals are percolating through red-state legislatures. 

Arana’s article deserves much more attention than it’s getting. Why isn’t this issue gaining much traction in the national media?

Partly, it’s a matter of Culture War exhaustion. Elected Democrats feel, reasonably enough, that these issues are deliberate distractions. The bills are also all in deep red states, where public opposition is likely to be weak and scattered. But even if politicians don’t want to get mired in arguments over a given bill’s messaging, taking a stance against the erasure and suppression of queer history is important. 

Ignoring these bills is a mistake. The simple reality is that queer kids are everywhere, as much in Montana as in New York. The queer kids in these communities shouldn’t be abandoned to local demagogues. 

Fundamentally, these bills are an anti-intellectual assault on education. Queer history is part of history, just as the history of people of color is part of history. Preventing educators from teaching history because it makes some people uncomfortable is a travesty.

(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)

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