The culture war bills are fine—let's focus on something else
"Don't say gay" bills, "anti-trans" laws, and "book bans" are mostly innocuous, especially when compared to cutting people's healthcare, so let's focus on the latter
News dropped this week of an effort by 33 House Republicans to pass a national version of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, or as critics called it, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
The US House bill is called the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.” The bill bans federal funds from going to “sexually-oriented material” for children under the age of 10 and bans federal facilities from being used for this “sexually-oriented” content for children under the age of 10. It defines “sexually-oriented” as meaning “any depiction, description, or simulation of sexual activity, any lewd or lascivious depiction or description of human genitals, or any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects.”
The “news” coverage of this bill has been extremely skewed against it. But perhaps even more importantly, I think the coverage just gives the bill too much credit. This bill mostly does nothing! The same is true for other state bills in red states that ban trans girls from playing girls sports, or the ones that ban youth medical gender transition, or the ones that defund certain divisive concepts. These bills are all just basically innocuous, and to the extent they do anything, I think what they do is fine. I don’t think it’s worth elevating their importance to “book bans” and “anti-LGBTQ” legislation, and I certainly don’t think this hill is worth dying on for Democrats. There are high-stakes issues in American politics that we should be arguing about. This isn’t one of them.
The four types of right-wing culture war bills
It has become common in the last few years for Republicans to propose (and sometimes pass) very short and very legible legislation that focuses entirely on minor cultural trends that conservatives find worrying. I would trace this all back to journalist/activist Christopher Rufo’s impressive ability to obtain embarrassing leaks, which he first parlayed—via a Tucker appearance—into a Trump executive order to ban certain kinds of diversity trainings in the federal government.
But since that Tucker appearance, there have been four main kinds of these bills.
Bills that “ ban critical race theory” by listing a bunch of “divisive concepts” and saying public schools (and sometimes, publicly-funded diversity trainings) can’t teach them.
Bills that prevent transgender girls (kids who were born male but have since begun to transition) from playing on girls sports teams.
Bills that ban medical gender transition (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, elective surgery) for children.
Bills that prohibit public schools’ teaching of sexual orientation/gender identity to kids below a certain age (usually around 10).
Rather than speak in general terms, I think it’s best to dig into the laws themselves. There are many examples for each category of law, but luckily for the purposes of writing about them, all the laws in each category are nearly exactly the same.
“Book bans”
Our example in Type 1 will be Texas’ HB 3979. Below is the part of the law in question:
a teacher, administrator, or other employee of a state agency, school district, or open-enrollment charter school may not:
(A) be required to engage in training, orientation, or therapy that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex;
(B) require or make part of a course the concept that:
(i) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;
(ii) an individual, by virtue of the individual's race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;
(iii) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual's race;
(iv) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex;
(v) an individual's moral character, standing, or worth is necessarily determined by the individual's race or sex;
(vi) an individual, by virtue of the individual's race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;
(vii) an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual's race or sex;
(viii) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race;
(ix) the advent of slavery in the territory that is now the United States constituted the true founding of the United States; or
(x) with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality; and
(C) require an understanding of The 1619 Project.
Most of the above points seem unambiguously good—I would also like Texas teachers to not teach racial superiority. There are some other bullet points that seem bad, like banning specifically the 1619 Project from public schools. But, I am not really convinced that this law is a huge problem just because it bans the 1619 Project, when the law also mandates earlier in the text that students learn “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong;.”
If left-wing academics who oppose this law want to convince Americans like me of the dire nature of these laws, they should run a study on kids who have all the same curriculum except their parents showed them the 1619 Project vs kids whose parents didn’t show them the 1619 Project. If the control group—unenlightened by the 1619 Project—winds up being more racist in measurable ways, then you’ll see me very concerned about such bills. But until then, I think it’s fine if Texas children get to skip that one. Parents who are so inclined can just show it to their kids anyway.
Sports laws
For a ban on trans girls in girls sports, we can move north to Oklahoma for our example, the Save Women’s Sports Act. The important sentence is below:
Prior to the beginning of each school year, the parent or legal guardian of a student who competes on a school athletic team shall sign an affidavit acknowledging the biological sex of the student at birth[…]
Athletic teams designated for "females", "women" or "girls" shall not be open to students of the male sex.
First, I think it is important here to recognize the scope of this type of bill. In Utah, the governor vetoed a similar law, noting that there is only 1 transgender student playing girls sports in the whole state anyway. His veto was overridden. I assume the number is similar in Oklahoma, but more importantly, I don’t think a great deal of political debate should happen over whether one particular high school aged transgender girl plays sports on the girls team or the boys team.
Personally, I think she should play on the boys team—I think that’s only fair given how much of an advantage in sports it is to go through male puberty. But, also if she’s not really incredibly good, and the other girls are cool with the changing-clothes aspects of being on the same team, then I think it’s fine, and I am not upset about states that don’t have this law.
But, I also don’t think this should be a great political debate. A law legislating what team that girl plays on isn’t an anti-LGBTQ law, and it doesn’t represent some rollback of gay rights. It’s literally just deciding if a few transgender girls get to play on the girls team. It’s not a proxy for anything else, and it really really doesn’t matter that much.
Youth gender transition
This is the type of bill with the biggest spread in language, but each of them ban all or some aspects of youth medical gender transition (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgeries), and some require that school officials alert parents when their child is socially transitioning at school.
Our example here will come from Arkansas: HB1570. Key language below:
(a) A physician or other healthcare professional shall not provide gender transition procedures to any individual under eighteen (18) years of age.
(b) A physician, or other healthcare professional shall not refer any individual under eighteen (18) years of age to any healthcare professional for gender transition procedures.
Jon Stewart says this is akin to preventing kids from getting cancer treatments because the American Medical Association says to give cancer treatments to cancer patients and also says to give transgender kids puberty blockers, which I guess means France, Greece, Italy, Austria, and Portugal are also as backwards and obviously children-torturing as Arkansas.
I think Jon Stewart is wrong, and I think it’s fine to ban puberty blockers, probably wise in fact. Here’s a Politico article where they sympathetically interview a doctor who says he has numerous patients on puberty blockers who are 10 to 12 years old, and then it goes on to say in the very same article that the “puberty blockers come with side effects — potentially an impact on future fertility and a loss of boss [sic] density, but recent studies have shown those effects can be reversed, Rosenthal said.”
But if you still think blocking puberty blockers is wrong, you can rest easy because most of these laws are blocked by the courts anyway. So there’s a whole political fight—one where Democrats including Joe Biden have pigeonholed themselves into saying ‘yes we are big fans of 10 year-olds making fertility decisions’—over laws that aren’t even in effect.
Don’t Say Gay (in front of 7 year-olds if you’re a school teacher and they are your students)
For the “Don’t Say Gay” bills, our example will come from Florida, which passed the original one, HB1557. The key text is below:
Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards
I think by now you’re getting the point, but I just don’t see reason to get very upset about this law. Once again, if education researchers want to prove that learning about sexual orientation before 4th grade matters a lot for the prevention of homophobia, they should run a persuasive experiment that reveals that—heck, do it in another country and have some development economists administer it, but I don’t think it’ll reveal any effect. I genuinely don’t think it matters much for a child’s education whether they find out about gay people at age 7 in their school or whether they find out from watching TV or movies or going on the internet or learning at age 11 in school. Education is supposed to be local anyway, and parents in red states can teach their kids whatever they want as soon as they get home from school.
Here’s what I am really upset about in Florida politics: Florida is one of 11 states to still not have adopted Medicaid expansion; that’s probably caused over a few thousand deaths; and Medicaid expansion is so popular it passed in a ballot measure in Oklahoma.
If the laws are so innocuous, why do Republicans care?
I think there are some high-profile conservatives who are earnestly very concerned about transgender youth and school curriculums. Matt Walsh did in fact make an entire documentary about gender transition.
But I don’t think Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy is especially passionately concerned with Critical Race Theory in schools or with trans girls playing girls sports. But I do think they are both very passionate about cutting government healthcare provisions!
But that’s not popular, so you have to attach it to stuff that is, like banning elective mastectomies for minors.
And to some extent, this is the key to one of the central things going on in American politics: education polarization without income polarization. If you want to build a coalition that unites Americans without a college degree (who very much like Medicare, for example) with people who want a freer market and don’t like Medicare, it is genuinely a pretty good idea to demonize out-of-touch social liberals and taint them with the image of elective youth mastectomies or borderline pornographic graphic novels in Kentucky public schools. That gets the voters without a degree going, and then you can lower the tax rates on the rich to help with the other side of your coalition. It’s good politics, and in some ways I’m proud that you can’t run on privatizing Social Security anymore!
What can be done
I think there’s a coherent response to this article that goes something like this: “no elected Democrat has endorsed elective youth mastectomies, or Critical Race Theory in schools, so what more could possibly be done to avoid being smeared like this?”
But I do think this response falls short, and you can see it in action if you want in a recent debate between Ron DeSantis and his opponent for governor, Charlie Crist. Ron DeSantis gets to say he’s against double mastectomies for 15 year-olds who can’t even legally get tattoos, and Charlie Crist has to come back with “This reminds me of your position on a woman's right to choose. You think you know better than any physician, any doctor, or any woman in a position to make decisions about their own personal health.”
That looks quite silly, and it is quite silly. Abortion has absolutely nothing to do with elective mastectomies! Why couldn’t Crist just also say he’s also against elective mastectomies for 15 year-olds? Is there a substantial part of the base that would not show up to the polls once they found out Charlie Crist doesn’t support elective mastectomies for children?
It’s normal to try to seem moderate in a general election, and he’s facing a guy who despite all the hysterics about him being far-right, won’t commit to anything more restrictive than a 15-week abortion ban and says he doesn’t want anyone to go to prison for smoking marijuana. There are Republican candidates, like Blake Masters in Arizona, who will change their entire views on abortion after winning the primary, but Charlie Crist can’t say “I don’t like elective youth mastectomies either!” when facing one of the most shrewd politicians in the country.
Plus, the conception that Americans have of the left/liberal party in this country is not limited to the elected members of it, and it’s a fantasy to think it ever would be. There are plenty of Democrats who liken the American Right to a group of racists even though explicit racism is extremely rare for Republican elected officials. You have to be able to deal with the tails of your coalition, and the Democrats just don’t do a very good job of it.
Instead, the most socially liberal segment of the American Left gets the most airtime and the most attention and the most columns in the paper, and there’s very little condemnation of any of their takes except way after the damage is done and then you can have President Biden run cute stunts like saying “fund the police” in his State of the Union address only a year and a half after Democrats’ soft-on-crime appearance helped them lose race after race after race.
More generally than that, I would just really like the American left to have even just a little bit of a populist movement. Historically in this country, and even today in other countries, there is just no reason why the economically left party has to be substantially more socially liberal than the economically right party. In fact, that usually makes no sense, since economically left wing parties supposedly fight for low-income uneducated workers, and low-income uneducated workers are not particularly socially liberal. Places like Peru, or even just France, get to have strong left-populist movements, and I wish we got to have one too. Instead, we got Bernie, who—despite being the strongest leftist politician in decades—went from talking about how too much low-skill immigration is bad and calling Planned Parenthood the establishment to cosponsoring the bill to explore slavery reparations and proposing to decriminalize illegal entry of the United States.
I get it; he had to appeal to an increasingly educated, increasingly socially liberal Democratic Party. And the two-party system is part of what makes a left-populist movement so elusive in this country.
But I do think we the whole American left-of-center could try a little harder, and one good step would be to stop hyperventilating over innocuous culture war bills. You’re not going to win anything defending puberty blockers and pretending that curricular changes are book bans, and the stakes are people’s actual tangible life-saving healthcare that Republicans will not stop trying to cut anytime soon, so let’s try to get it right.
Thoughtful. Insightful. Illuminating. Thank you for this, Marc.