Students and teachers told U.S. House members during a Thursday hearing that their right to talk about race and LGBTQ+ issues in public schools is being silenced due to an onslaught of new state laws as well as pressure on school boards from right-wing advocates. “To be crystal clear, this is about disrupting and destroying public education,” James Whitfield, a former principal in Texas and one of the witnesses, told lawmakers.
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LGBTQ issues
LGBTQ issues
In a red brick house on the south side of El Paso, Texas, Susana Correa sits in front of a wall of five computer monitors, the biggest filled with lists of the names of hundreds of LGBTQ asylum-seekers waiting to cross from Juárez into El Paso. To her left, one monitor features a long string of WhatsApp conversations with asylum-seekers — more than 200 messages await for her response. Sharing the screen are recorded messages from her coworkers who are interviewing people waiting in Juárez, administering COVID tests and arranging for border crossings.
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WASHINGTON — A U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee panel on Thursday examined why thousands of books, predominantly written by marginalized authors, have been banned from public schools, and the impact of those actions on students and teachers. “Most books being targeted for censorship are books that introduce ideas about diversity or our common humanity, books that teach children to recognize and respect humanity in one another,” said the chair of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Rep. Jamie Raskin.
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At Tuesday night’s Wake County Republican Party convention, John Amanchukwu, a youth pastor with Raleigh’s Upper Room Church of God in Christ, gave the opening prayer. “There is a war in our public schools,” Amanchukwu said. “Our children are being turned out at an alarming rate. Our public education system is in shambles and our children have now become expendable....
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On Sunday, at the start of a week in which the Florida Senate was scheduled to consider a nationally-watched piece of legislation referred to as “Don’t Say Gay,” the organization Equality Florida posted a statement condemning “homophobic, transphobic” remarks from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press secretary. Christina Pushaw tweeted Friday in support of the bill that would restrict certain conversations on LGBTQ issues in Florida’s public school classrooms. That led to a scathing statement from Equality Florida...
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Conservatives target works dealing with race and LGBTQ themes Parents of sixth graders in a gifted language-arts class at Marvin Ridge Middle School received an email from their children’s teacher last month warning them that a book selected for the class’s unit on African American literature would at times be “uncomfortable.”
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Last December, a three-year state ban blocking new, local non-discrimination ordinances expired. The ban was a legacy of the brutal fight over House Bill 2, the controversial law that excluded lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from statewide nondiscrimination protections. Though a 2017 law (House Bill 142) partially repealed HB 2, it locked in place a moratorium on new LGBTQ protections — including nondiscrimination ordinances for employment and housing.
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This year the Human Rights Campaign, the national LGBTQ advocacy organization, is celebrating 10 years of its Municipal Equality Index. The group calls the annual report “the nation’s premier benchmarking tool for municipal officials, policy makers and business leaders to understand how well cities across the nation are embodying LGBTQ+ inclusion in their laws, policies, and services.”
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