Ross Douthat had an excellent column in the New York Times last week, entitled “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q Culture War.”
Douthat argues that to the extent that Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, “and other potential laws like it, is understood primarily as moving schools to a neutral position in these debates — by keeping gender identity curriculums out of the K3 classrooms and requiring schools to keep parents mostly informed about their teenagers’ self-identification — it’s likely to be politically popular. And, indeed, in some recent polling, there is majority support for the provisions in the law that seem to aim this direction.”
However, he warns that should such laws be used to “roll back gay rights or gay visibility — whether by pushing gay teachers into the closet or discouraging any discussion of sexual orientation in older grades,” they will likely be unpopular.
That’s why conservatives need to word these bills very carefully and be mindful of how they try to promote them. It is also why mentally divorcing LGB and T is an effective strategy, as we’ve seen in the U.K.
As Douthat notes:
The moderate position sketched above, the wait-and-see, kids-are-experimenting approach, is plausible to the extent that teenage exploration takes the form of dating both sexes, using a different pronoun or name, changing a wardrobe. But it collapses quickly if the choice is for or against a path of treatment that even advocates concede moves to stages that are only “partially reversible,” and then sometimes “not reversible,” within adolescence itself.