The latest episode of The Argument takes you inside the debate.
I didn't come out as bisexual when I was a kid. I grew up in Ohio in the '90s and attended Catholic school. The message I received was that women who weren't feminine by traditional standards were vaguely suspicious. So I was clearly in big trouble, and bisexuality seemed like something I'd only get to achieve if I could somehow make it to a safer place. |
If I had learned at some point when I was young that being L.G.B.T.Q. was a normal way to be a human being — not a sign that I was evil and disgusting or, even worse to a chubby girl in junior high, ugly — I could have avoided so much anguish and time spent trying to "fix" myself on evangelical Christian message boards. |
So to me, bills like Florida's HB 1557, which bars "instruction" on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, are vague at absolute best and extraordinarily dangerous at worst, aimed at solving a "problem" that I do not think exists. |
As Ross recently wrote, some of these bills have been put forward by people who see the growing number of L.G.T.B.Q. Americans as a bad thing. The share of younger Americans who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender has risen over the last decade, including 21 percent of those born between 1997 and 2003. Ross wrote in his column that the reactions to these numbers can be sorted into three groups: "this is great news," "we shouldn't read too much into it," and "this trend is bad news." |
I can be found resting happily somewhere in between the first two groups. That more people are L.G.B.T.Q. seems like what would logically happen in a society that is more affirming of being L.G.B.T.Q. |
But having read a great deal by social conservatives about the new bills, it seems to me that these writers believe that there are simply too many L.G.B.T.Q. kids — "far in excess of what can be explained by more people coming out as stigma declines" — and that this must be the fault of teachers "grooming" them or a media environment that's too permissive. Because otherwise, those kids would be, as conservative writer Rod Dreher might put it, normal. |
These issues are important to confront head on. L.G.B.T.Q. Americans are, as we all know, Americans with jobs and kids and families and dogs. These bills aren't "culture war" fodder to me. They're kitchen-table issues, just as critical as inflation or immigration, especially in my house. |
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