 I'm old enough to remember when proponents of Florida's Don't Say Gay Law said that this was never about discriminating against LGBTQ plus people. We simply don't want woke sex and gender ideology being taught to young school children. Now if you watched the Humanist Report at the time, I made it very clear and people who know the way that these laws operate made it very clear that that's not happening. There's no sex education or gender ideology that kids are learning about. If there's conversations, then they're age-appropriate. For example, if a teacher happens to have a picture of her wife on her desk and a kid asks about that, then perhaps she'll explain in an age-appropriate way that that's her spouse. Some women, they marry women. Some men marry men. That's the way it is. You know, if you have a student who acknowledges that Timmy's parents are two dudes, you could explain that. Yeah, you know, some kids have two daddies. Even though most of them have a mommy and a daddy, some of them have two mommies. These are conversations that was so outrageous, apparently, right? But no, no, no. They insisted it was about woke ideology. Well, now we're learning about the way that this is affecting teachers and predictably it's having a discriminatory effect. Overtly, so. It's not even subtle because queer teachers are now effectively forced to go into the closet because of the Don't Say Gay Law. So as Florida ABC News affiliate WFTV9 reports, in private administrators only seminars last week, Orange County Public School attorneys advised principals what behaviors would and would not be legal under the law during a camp legal presentation. According to representatives of the County's Teacher Association, teachers and staff members will be disallowed from wearing rainbow articles of clothing, including lanyards distributed by the district last year. Elementary level teachers reported being discouraged from putting pictures of their same sex spouse on their desk or talking about them to students. Safe space stickers aimed at LGBTQ students may have to be removed from doors. Teachers will have to report to parents if a student quote comes out to them and they must use pronouns aside at birth, regardless of what the parents allow the CTA reported. So the effect of the Don't Say Gay Law quite literally is leading to queer teachers being forced into the closet. They're now being instructed to outstudents, even if they're in an unsafe environment. They're being instructed to literally misgender students, even if the parent is saying my child uses she-her pronouns. Nope, if that's not assigned at birth by law you're supposed to misgender them. That's the effect. Of the Don't Say Gay Law. Now, I ask proponents of this law, like Joe Rogan, who argued that this was never about discrimination. Are you going to come out and apologize after promoting this law? Is anyone who defended this going to admit that they were wrong and really this was never about woke sex ideology? And it was really just about forcing teachers back into the closet because that's what's happening. Now, they're being instructed by their lawyers to be overly cautious because they're afraid of a lawsuit because the law itself is incredibly vague and that's on purpose. But in a separate conversation, an OCPS official said the district needed to err on the side of caution until state officials provided more clarity. The strict interpretations they said were necessary to protect both students and teachers. The latter could have their teaching licenses revoked if they run afoul of the law, the official said. Now, this is not an unintended consequence of the law. The law is operating exactly as it should be, right? These lawmakers are wording this law purposefully vague so they can avoid a constitutional challenge if they're not explicitly telling queer teachers to go into the closet. Well, it's seemingly not illegal. But if you make it really vague, then you foster this environment of fear where queer teachers don't really know what is or isn't permissible and they just basically go into the closet, hide pictures of their same sex spouse, not revealed to their students that they're trans or non-binary, even if the teachers or if the students have questions. That's the effect of the don't say gay law and we fucking warned you that this was the case. And I think deep down all of the homophobes pushing the don't say gay law, they knew this, but they just wanted this to happen. Now, what's happening in Florida is a microcosm of what's happening across the country because as NPR reported back in April, more than a dozen states have proposed don't say gay laws and this coincides with the rise in popularity of the hateful libs of TikTok account on Twitter, which tries to get teachers fired for even acknowledging their identities around children and predictably the rise of the groomer rhetoric has led to a massive wave of backlash against LGBTQ plus teachers. Because now people who don't really know about LGBTQ plus people, maybe they don't have a friend who's trans or gay. They just assume that all gays are pedophiles and within the span of like four months, we've gone back to 1985 discourse in the United States of America, when it really felt like America was moving on and overall less susceptible to homophobia. But now the GOP brought it back in full force and we're in a situation where students are unfortunate enough to lose a lot of really good teachers who cared about them. Teachers like Willie Carver Jr., who was Kentucky's 2022 teacher of the year, but is now quitting citing homophobia as the main reason for his resignation. As NBC News reports, after being openly gay for several years, Willie Carver Jr. never thought about going back into the closet once he started teaching. But during his first week as a high school English teacher in Montgomery, Kentucky, a small town 40 miles east of Lexington, a school administrator had other plans for him. He said, you will be crucified Carver, 37 were called. No one will protect you, including me. 12 years later and shortly after he won his state's teacher of the year award, Carver announced last week he would be leaving the profession. Carver said that after changes in his school's administration, he was eventually able to teach openly as a gay man. However, he spent years watching school administrators try to stifle LGBTQ identities or what he described as death by a thousand cuts, he said. Among many instances of what he described as LGBTQ prejudice, Carver said his employer ordered teachers to remove books written by LGBTQ authors from the school's curriculum. Defended students who were accused of tearing down rainbow pride posters from school walls and shut down a student led poll that aimed to gather insight about the school's climate for LGBTQ inclusion. The straw that broke the camel's back, he said, was when the school administration failed to address repeated harassment against him and LGBTQ students. And this is going to continue to happen. Being a teacher is already difficult enough. You don't get paid very well. It's a thankless job. You have to sometimes use your own resources to purchase school supplies and some of these underfunded districts. And to add homophobia on top of that, it just makes it unbearable. So a lot more queer teachers are probably going to quit. Now, it's not like homophobia in schools didn't exist before, don't say gay, but it really repopularized homophobia. It made it socially acceptable to condemn queer teachers simply for being queer, for existing. Now, ask yourself this. Do you think that the proponents of don't say gay are going to look at what's happening and say, wow, I didn't intend for this to happen. I didn't intend for good queer teachers to quit. They're not going to say that. They're going to say, good, fuck them. Willie Carver, junior teacher of the year, fuck them. You shouldn't be around children because gay people are inherently promiscuous. And I just don't trust you around my children. Gays must be pedophiles. That's where we're at in the United States. Again, within the span of a couple of months, we've gone back to 1980s discourse when it comes to LGBTQ plus rights. And it's not just social regression that's happening because of the Supreme Court. We are going to lose legal rights as queer people as well. So it's not like this is a surprise to me, but I just wanted to come out and say, if you supported this law, you have yourself to thank. But I don't think that the people who supported this law doubted that this was the outcome. I think that a lot of them, they knew, even if it was subconscious, that this will lead to discrimination and harassment against LGBTQ plus teachers. But they wanted that because they're bigots. So here we are. Teachers are now explicitly and overtly being discriminated against, being asked to do what heterosexual teachers aren't. Take down pictures with them and their spouse out students who are gay, which might lead to them being homeless. But we've got to protect against woke indoctrination, right? It's a sick society that we live in. And the most nauseating part is knowing that so many people are going to celebrate this and not look at it in disgust, not look at it and think, wow, well, I'm not pro gay, but I guess I'll be tolerant and live and let live. No, they're going to celebrate this. They don't want gay people in society. They want them gone. So if they can't force them into the closet, then you prosecute them legally and socially persecute them and do everything in your power to turn back the clock. That's America in twenty twenty two, folks. Do you enjoy watching independent news shows like The Humanist Report, The Rational National and The Majority Report? But oftentimes YouTube doesn't deliver our videos to your subscription box. Well, I've got a solution for you. It's called the Optout app available right now in the iOS app store coming soon to Android. 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