America’s increased acceptance of gay people isn’t about schools

Republican officials once again find themselves at a point of tension. Over the past six-plus years, there have repeatedly emerged moments in which the furies roiling the party’s right-most flank clash with their own sentiments or political strategies. They’re left having to choose between hoping that the energy stays at the fringe or, if not, having to eventually capitulate to popular will. Sometimes, that anger has receded. Often, though, Republicans hoping to avoid the fray are eventually pulled into it — and sometimes they leap in, hoping that it will translate into more energetic support.

At the moment, a sizable, voluble portion of the political right is focused on arguing that the left — as manifested in their view by Democrats, the media and teachers — are trying to prepare young children to be sexually abused. In some cases, this argument is just trolling or an effort to tarnish their political enemies as pedophiles or pedophilia-sympathetic. In some cases, it stems from an apparently sincere belief that children face some threat of being trained by educators to be sexually active.

That belief is often a function of the debate over a law recently enacted in Florida that prevents teachers from offering “classroom instruction … on sexual orientation or gender identity” — a nebulously outlined prohibition that supporters have erroneously framed as being about sexuality. The law would seem to restrict a teacher assigning a book in which a child has gay parents, for example. And while a heterosexual marriage is an identical manifestation of sexual orientation, it is obviously not the focus of the legislation.