[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by Pete F.

Floriduh’s latest political bill is just the resurrection of an old trope.

The bill’s proponents insist that the measure has nothing to do with harming the dignity of gay individuals but rather is aimed at ensuring age-appropriate sexual education. A series of tweets by Governor DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, however, suggests otherwise. “The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill,” Ms. Pushaw wrote. “Grooming” is a term for the tactics sexual predators use to manipulate and exploit their victims. “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill,” she said in a second tweet, “you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.”

The conflation of gay people, and gay men in particular, with pedophiles is an old and pernicious stereotype. In 1988 the British Parliament passed a measure preventing local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” or “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” Known as Section 28, it stayed on the books until 2003. Ten years later, the Russian Duma unanimously passed legislation “for the purpose of protecting children from information advocating for a denial of traditional family values” prohibiting the dissemination of “propaganda” of nontraditional sexual relationships.

While branding gay people as child molesters has been a staple of right-wing rhetoric around the world, there has long existed a strain of American libertarian conservatism that deems the legal enshrinement of such prejudices as an invasion of privacy and a dangerous enhancement of state power. During a similar episode of anti-gay moral panic, none other than Ronald Reagan — whose record on L.G.B.T. issues is most often defined by his shameful inaction around H.I.V. and AIDS during his presidency — turned to his libertarian roots to thwart such bigotry, rather than promote it.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

read the bill, then tell us what’s bigoted against gays.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device