Four days ago, I awoke to the following news:
In the days since, the College Board and Florida have been going back and forth on whether or not AP Psychology will actually be banned or not. Floridian legislators are attempting to implement Psychology with "age-appropriate discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation" and the College Board is deciding between reaping the profits an entire state has to offer and doing the morally right thing. Three guesses as to what they'll choose.
Despite being a literal blogger, I find myself without the words to express how outrageous this is. It is laughably ignorant that DeSantis seems to believe silencing queer voices from the classroom will eliminate the existence of queer people. It is devastating that Floridian high schoolers won't be able to participate in one of the most common, accessible, and useful AP courses -- especially given the current climate of college admissions, where "stand-out factors" like AP scores matter more every year. It's hilarious that DeSantis and his followers have finally admitted, point-blank, that they're just scared of science. They're really saying the quiet part out loud, now.
Regardless of your personal politics, the country's battle for proper sex education in the 90s has demonstrably proven that pretending sexuality doesn't exist in grade school increases the risk of STDs, unwanted/teenage pregnancy, and overall unprotected sex. And with Roe v. Wade recently being overturned, access to medical care for any/all of these issues is disappearing before our eyes.
But what did we expect? The deep, radical conservatives that run Florida and Texas are filled with contradictions like this -- they want young women to bear the brunt of birthing babies but refuse to teach them about sex. They claim to value human life and then regularly ostracize and marginalize everyone who is not a cis-het white male. Do you know the leading cause of death amongst children in the United States? Guns. More than cancer, more than car accidents, more than the little Drag Shows all these Republicans are so petrified of, if you can believe it. If they truly cared at all about protecting children, they would go after guns with the single-minded focus of the Salem witch hunt. But they don't, because this kind of politics isn't about protecting children -- it's about indoctrinating them.
Because, in truth: nobody is teaching about gender identity OR sexual orientation in anything BUT an "age-appropriate" way. No teacher anywhere in the country is showing their middle schoolers porn and calling it sexual education. Just like with the debates over Critical Race Theory¹ a few months ago, DeSantis seems to be solving problems that don't actually exist.
This got me thinking about how so many of the political ideological battles currently being fought are predicated on fear-mongering and straw men. Abortion is a medical procedure, the "fetus" nothing more than a clump of cells², but hearing the Republican Party use vitriolic language and pass harsh judgements on women/OBGYNs could convincce you otherwise. Guns are human-killing weapons, not symbols of American liberty, but every debate centers around the wording of the 2nd Amendment, not the number of children dead. Education is about diverse persectives and objective facts, not political indoctrination³, but the CollegeBoard is never criticized by Congress for how expensive and monopolistic it is, only for the "liberal" lessons taught. Things like the "Don't Say Gay" Bill don't effectively change much regarding what is being taught in Florida -- chances are, those conservative schools were already pretty heteronormative, and sex education is highly standardized anyway. But by writing and signing into law these vague, controversial bills, DeSantis has created the impression that this is some widespread, gravely serious issue that needs immediate addressing, all while further marginalizing the queer community, making their existence foreign (and thus, feared).
It's distraction politics. He can't fix the economy (or anything people actually care about), so he creates problems he can fix. It's embarrassing, to be frank. The radical Republicans will, with their whole heart, fight to protect the intangible, imaginary idea of freedom they've created for themselves and their privileged counterparts before they fight for the very real, very protectable, very quantifiable lives and safety of children, women, or minorities. I understand that I'm not particularly in any position to do much about this, given that I'm not sitting in a Congress chair. But I'm sick of the double-speak. Let's call a spade a spade: our need for power supersedes our desire to protect and uplift our fellow humans. I once believed that if aliens came (which, according to recent news, they might), or a disease struck (which it has), or a war began (that has, too), we would all band together to protect each other. I'm no longer so naive.
¹ Critical Race Theory, by the way, is a university-level framework designed to evaluate how racism is embedded in institutions. The general idea of CRT is that...racism exists, which should not scare or anger any logical, well-meaning person. But even if it were some "woke agenda pusher," it's still not being taught to elementary schoolers. This image conservative mothers have conjured up of teachers their non-white children throw bricks at the white ones is just that: imaginary.
² The common conservative rebuttal to this point is "okay, then when does it stop being a clump of cells?". The answer to this question is irrelevant, because by the time the fetus is decidedly a future human, women aren't aborting it. This image of women gleefully vacuuming babies out of their uterus at 39 weeks is, again, imaginary. Nobody goes through six months of pregnancy and then decides nah, I think I'm good, actually. Women don't even do that with clothes.
³ To be sure: education is political. The exclusion of Native Americans from the version of American history, for example, is inherently political, as is Florida's recent push to teach slavery as a "mutually beneficial" practice. What we choose to teach, to exclude, to emphasize, and to gloss over all have ramifications for our soon-to-be voters. I guess I meant to say that education cannot be viewed as a battle-ground for games of political volleyball, and rather should be a good-intentioned effort to expand minds. More on the problematic (political) history of academia in a blogpost later this week, so stay tuned :).
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