You Don't Say

 You Don’t Say

There has been a great deal of jumping and shouting about protecting our second amendment rights.  That would be the right to keep and bear arms.  Strangely no one seems to be up in arms (pun intended) about our first amendment rights, chief among those is our right to free speech.   The first amendment also gives us the right to free assembly, petition the government for redress of grievances and states that the government should not establish any religion.

Increasingly, if you are in a school these rights are being taken away from you.

Let’s begin with Florida and its Don’t Say Gay bill.  If you are a teacher, you may not discuss being gay or anything approaching that unless it is developmentally appropriate and it’s never developmentally appropriate for kids under 3^rd grade.  So, when we return from spring break, if a young child has gay parents that child can’t discuss what he/she did with his/her dads or moms.  Families can report teachers who discuss these topics with children who are not developmentally ready after 3^rd grade.  The standard for what exactly IS developmentally ready is not included in the law so it is a shooting gallery for unhappy parents to take aim at teachers.

Hopefully those unhappy parents won’t move to Texas, at least not if they have trans kids.  In Texas you not only can’t talk about being trans but if your parents seek to support you with counseling or (OMG) not surgery!, your parents can be arrested for child abuse and you can be taken away from your parents and probably given to a family who will not respect or honor who you are.  But that will not be child abuse in Texas.

So far six states have banned the teaching of CRT, Critical Race Theory, and another 17 states are considering some ban.  Let’s be clear, CRT is NOT a curriculum or even a set of materials that folks could buy and teach from.  It is simply teaching the idea that racism exists and has existed and still exists and it harms us all.  Because CRT is rather amorphous these laws are VERY hard to enforce and the enforcement is left to families to complain and/or sue the school district for violating the state law.  In the old East Germany, before the wall came down, the Stasi, the East German secret service, kept tabs on everyone by making everyone an informer.  You never knew who you were safe with and who you were not. Something similar existed in this country during the McCarthy era when there were communists hiding everywhere and we all were part of the red hunt.  It’s a bit like that now.

There is a new Pixar/Disney movie called Turning Red.  The movie suggests that a girl’s menstruation is a normal biological process!!!  Well not according to some families who have petitioned Pixar/Disney to STOP producing porno movies for children.  Really, I am not making this up.

And yes, book burnings and book banning are back.  Libraries across the country are under siege to remove certain books from the library that are “unfit” to be read.  Will libraries cease to be places where we can read from a wide variety of opinions and find our own truth rather than the “truth” that has been pasteurized and deemed fit by a small group of people.

What is happening to our freedom to speak our own truth as long as we do not blasphemy others?   When did being a teacher make you a target for the shooting gallery of parents who have been given the right to oversee your teaching and report you to authorities if you do not speak their truth?

Those questions could be answered, but it might be safer to just not say.