James Finn
1 min readMar 30, 2022

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This is an excellent idea, especially regarding the book censorship and so forth. It's easy to find harm in race-based academic censorship.

With Don't Say Gay in Florida, the tactic looks much more difficult. While the law does on its face prohibit instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade classrooms, and in all classrooms where such instruction could be seen as developmentally inappropriate, how would anyone ever make a non-frivolous argument that teaching about opposite sex couples and cisgender people is harmful?

I mean, I hate the law, and it strikes me as poetically just to try to enforce it in ways that legislators didn't intend, but I'm not seeing how that could work practically.

Opposition to the law centers around the idea that discussing or teaching about LGBTQ people and issues cannot be harmful, that many children come from LGBTQ families and declaring their families off limits in school instills shame in them and teaches other children to discriminate.

So I'm not clear on how we could then turn around and say that acknowledging straight couples in classrooms or trans people in classrooms harms anyone.

How do you put a legal brief together a judge doesn't throw out of court, probably with an admonishment not to waste the court's time?

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James Finn
James Finn

Written by James Finn

James Finn is an LGBTQ columnist, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Act Up NY, and an agented but unpublished novelist.

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