Florida governor Ron DeSantis recently signed the controversial “Parental Rights in Education” bill, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics. The law, whose language is intentionally vague in places, would restrict the ability of Florida schools to teach students in third grade or below about “sexual orientation or gender identity” in an “inappropriate” manner. Opponents argue that the law unfairly constrains and disadvantages LGBT students and educators. Certain interpretations suggest that gay teachers may be barred from making any mention of sexual orientation whatsoever, including their own, even with passing remarks such as a male teacher referencing his husband.

Similar bills are emerging in other states, as Republican activists and lawmakers continue their crusade against the illiberal excesses of “critical social justice” (CSJ) — the identity politics on steroids so ascendent in left-of-center circles today. CSJ’s entrenchment in the education system over the past decade has lit a fire whose flames Democrats continue to fan by denying its existence or insisting that parents stay out of their kids’ education. The problem is, as we have seen with the critical race theory bans, Republican solutions too often involve heavy-handed and illiberal measures of their own.

In this case, the legislation itself has taken a back seat to the discourse that has spun up around it — discourse that has revealed the ugly undercurrent of homophobia coursing just beneath the surface of this anti-woke coalition. Tensions escalated when Disney, seizing on an opportunity for corporate virtue signaling, voiced public opposition to “Don’t Say Gay”. In reaction, a groundswell of the bill’s online supporters, led by activists Christopher Rufo and James Lindsay, among others, began a campaign to smear all of their political opponents as “groomers” — a person who manipulates and lures a child in order to rape them.

The next thing anyone knew, everyone was a groomer. LGBT teachers, Democrats, dissenters, critics — the entire left half of society — all groomers. “OK Groomer” trended across social media. Old homophobic canards about gay men as pedophiles began to resurface. The sentiment that LGBT teachers are a virtually undifferentiated class of child sexual predators cropped up everywhere this bill was discussed. And there was next to no internal resistance. As this cancer spread and metastasized with lightning speed, it was greeted by its peddlers with pure glee and lockstep uniformity. But these attitudes didn’t come out of nowhere. They are the consequence of conspiracy theories that have been permeating the populist right for years.

QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory claiming that the world is run by a cabal of Satanic, pedophilic, child-eating elites trying to enslave the human race. These villains include all manner of Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and anyone else the typical Trump voter has a bone to pick with. 50 million Americans believe this. Everyone either on the populist right, or whose entire political identity is predicated on opposing “the left”, is now on the QAnon spectrum. Even if they’re not true believers, elements of it have rubbed off on them. Namely, people are now far more likely to stretch the definition of child sexual abuse like a piece of silly putty, and more likely to casually throw around accusations of such.

The QAnon-ification of the populist right has become the near-perfect analogue for the far-left’s critical social justice. Both purport to be concerned with real and serious issues — child abuse and bigotry — but both exaggerate the scope of the problem, see evidence of it everywhere they look, use accusations as cheap political cudgels, have no standards of evidence, and behave psychopathically because the ends justify the means. The woke-left calls everyone they disagree with white supremacists, Nazis, or fascists. The populist right now calls everyone they disagree with groomers, or pedophilia apologists. The result in both cases is the same. Being called a “white supremacist” in 2022 has nowhere near the impact it had in 2000, when the term actually denoted people in white hoods burning crosses or with shaved heads and swastika tattoos. Today, “white supremacist”, as regarded by the leftmost quarter of society, probably applies to over 100 million Americans! Voting Republican is now “proof” of white supremacy. The concept has been rendered all but meaningless.

Now map this dynamic onto child sexual abuse. Do we want to live in a society where accusations of child molestation carry vastly less weight, because “grooming” is now just a catch-all for anything involving kids perceived to be connected with left-of-center thought? It is difficult to exaggerate just how pernicious it is to wolf-cry about child abuse. Among all the parties hurt — the falsely accused, the misled public, and political discourse as a whole — the ultimate victims of this rhetoric will invariably be kids themselves. The “OK Groomer” brigade aren’t the defenders of children. They’re cynical, reckless bigots without a shred of principles.

With the legalization of same-sex marriage and populist takeover of the GOP, the homophobic theocrats of the Christian Right, so dominant during the 2000s, had been largely sidelined. But the rise of CSJ in K-12 education has, in the past several years, galvanized an anti-woke coalition that includes everyone from Evangelical “values voters”, to the alt-right, to liberals who should know better. Critical social justice is the best thing to happen to the Christian Right since the Cold War. It has made them relevant again. Witnessing this resurgence of anti-gay bile feels like stepping through a time machine back into the George W. Bush years. It underscores the tenuousness of progress.

We have made enormous strides on LGBT rights in a single generation. It could be undone in less time. The territory we have gained is not irreversibly captured. Critical social justice puts liberal progress on human rights at risk by associating it with its own activist movements or radical ideologies. The devotees of CSJ have worked tirelessly to link critical race theory to merely “teaching that racism is bad”, to rewrite American history with efforts such as the 1619 Project, and to link critical queer theory and the fanatical elements of identity politics to simply “teaching about the LGBT community”. This gives the impression to many, from far-right reactionaries to some confused liberals, that teaching children about the diversity that exists in society is necessarily part and parcel of a radical agenda to indoctrinate them into extreme ideologies. And by “indoctrinate”, of course we mean sexually abuse, since words don’t mean anything anymore.

But siding with one illiberal ideology to oppose another is never wise. If the Christian Right had their way, schools would teach abstinence-only sex education, creationism, and a version of history more akin to marketing material — so whitewashed that the textbooks come with a set of red, white, and blue pompoms. They have never had a problem with indoctrinating children, so long as it’s in their beliefs and values. Some of them apparently don't even really have a problem with the sexual abuse of children (as long as it is of the heterosexual variety). It's Republicans who are trying to do away with minimum marriageable age requirements in Tennessee via a law that would effectively offer legal protection to actual perpetrators of child sexual abuse. People still have agency, and it is the responsibility of every citizen to at least strive to be more than a pendulum bob unconsciously swinging in reaction to other forces. The politics of mindless reaction is how you get a coalition of alt-right trolls, Evangelical Christian conservatives, trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), and anti-woke moderates joining hands to perpetuate old homophobic tropes about gays as child molesters, or homosexuality as a sinful contagion that can infect with the slightest exposure.

"The Parental Rights in Education" law’s defenders claim that it defends children from ideological indoctrination and age-inappropriate sexualized content. It does no such thing. Poorly written by design — as so many anti-CSJ bills are, in an attempt to provide schools with the maximum discretion to enforce traditional conservative values — these efforts often fail to achieve their stated goals, and instead function as just another form of repressive overreach. What it will do is have a chilling effect on LGBT visibility, education, and identification. What it has already done is worsen an already unhealthy public discourse, and added “groomer” to the long list of terms stripped of all meaning by our imbecilic culture wars.

The answer to illiberalism is liberalism. We can teach kids about diversity, tolerance, racism, history, LGBT, and sex ed without injecting identitarianism, intersectionality, Marxian “systems of power”, binary worldviews of “oppressor versus oppressed”, or ideologies that reject science or denigrate Enlightenment values. That is the needle that we must thread. Critical social justice must be opposed, and if liberals won’t do the job, then the populist right and their fellow travelers will, leaving those who oppose it nowhere else to turn.

Published Apr 13, 2022
Updated Apr 28, 2023