Especially “Othello”! I mean, “the beast with two backs”? Really? We’re going to let this creepy old bald dude describe sex positions to minors? Okay, obviously “Twelfth Night” isn’t going to survive the “Don’t say gay” part of things here, what with the wacky gender-swapping twins subplot, but once you apply the strict interpretation of the bill, neither is any of the bard’s other stuff. One is even in the context of prostitution, and another in the context of an affair.Įven if it were safe for kids to be taught about heterosexuality, is that really how we want them to learn about it? That you can get so upset about someone reading your journal that you hire a sex worker and seduce a porn producer? It’s straight up straight deviance! Sure, it might have some important and - given the bill that prompted this piece - still-relevant ideas about the risks of state censorship, but our boy Winston does the dirty with not one but three different women over the course of the book. Sorry, but everyone’s favorite anti-Soviet novel to incorrectly cite in debates about whether Twitter constitutes a public forum has got to go. Here are a few suggestions of what to start the burn pile with. Right off, we’re going to have to strike any children’s books with mommies and daddies, but why stop there? Why should schools expose any impressionable minors to ideas that might make them gay, straight or anything in between? There’s going to be a lot of “Fahrenheit 451” reenactment to do, but we figured we’d do our part by sifting through a particularly fraught genre: the high school summer reading list.Īs it is, not passing the Bechdel test is pretty much an unwritten requirement, so these books are already a veritable thicket of hypermasculinity and graphic descriptions of heterosexual sex. If the goal is to keep kids from being exposed to ideas that might lead them to believe certain sexual relationships and gender expressions are okay, it’s really the only way. That’s right, ban straight sexual relationships and cisgender gender norms from school materials, too. Instead of entering into a sprawling, endless culture war over books, we’ve come up with a simple way for Floridians to resolve this bit of legislative hypocrisy: ban it all. That does seem to indicate that cultural material doesn’t influence sexuality or gender in the way our friends in Florida think it does, but that’s neither here nor there. Now, the fact is that many people exist who are not straight or not cisgender despite being constantly exposed to literature that reinforces these defaults. Maybe they didn’t take into account that simply being social defaults doesn’t exempt heterosexuality or a cisgender identity from their proper categorizations. Sorry, we literally don’t make the rules here: Florida Gov. By the “Don’t say gay” bill’s own logic - and language - that material is equally guilty of indoctrination. There’s a massive amount of curriculum featuring both. The thing is, heterosexuality is a sexual orientation and being cisgender is a gender identity. The law targets the youngest students in kindergarten through third grade classrooms, but also includes a pretty broad clause that prohibits the teaching of gender identity and sexual orientation “in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” It then empowers parents to sue schools that violate their ideas on what that constitutes. Given the politics of its backers - Republicans, one and all - and the un-ironic use of phrases like “woke gender ideology,” the critics are almost surely right. If you’re an American with a pulse, you’re surely aware that Florida just passed a controversial bill that would prohibit schoolteachers from “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity.” Critics of the bill say it is targeted at the LGBTQ+ community, painting innocuous descriptions of queer love or the simple experience of being trans as indoctrination.