One of the things that Republican lawmakers have become very good at is looking across their state’s borders, seeing what new and exciting ways their neighbors have come up with to oppress a marginalized community, and then saying to themselves “well, if they can do it, so can we!” That’s how Texas’s abominable abortion ban catapulted from the Lone Star State to Republican-held legislatures around the country, and it’s how Florida’s equally abhorrent “Don’t Say Gay” bill now seems poised to go similarly viral.
In Louisiana, a conservative majority in the House on Tuesday voted to revive a moribund iteration of Florida’s homophobic legislation, after H.B.837 failed to advance through a congressional committee earlier in the day. The maneuver, backed 55-39, now sets the bill up for a full floor vote, where lawmakers will be able to decide if they want not only to bar public school teachers, staff, or presenters from addressing “topics of sexual orientation or gender identity in any classroom discussion or instruction in kindergarten through grade eight” (well beyond the third grade threshold in Florida), but also make it illegal for those same educators to “discuss [their] own sexual orientation or gender identity with students in kindergarten through grade twelve.”
