Sexuality in Florida? For children only in the variant: father mounts mother to sire offspring. That’s the gist of a new law outlawing sexual orientation and gender identity “to teach in a manner that is not age or developmentally appropriate for students” may be. If we delete the legal style, stay put: There is a normality that we teach in kindergarten and in elementary school. Only then can we confront our offspring with the abnormal.
Indoctrination for the so-called “normal”
The tenor of this law: to protect children from indoctrination that puts them on the wrong track. They are still malleable – and thus their souls are defenseless against the abuse caused by the propaganda of trans people and homosexuals. One’s own sexuality is considered healthy and normal, all other forms are branded as deviation, special case and confusion. A discourse of exclusion, as we know it from Poland, Hungary and Russia, where propaganda for homosexuality is also punishable. The law now passed in Florida establishes a hierarchy between the different forms of sexuality. It pretends to protect minors. In fact, however, the curricula are no longer allowed to present all forms of sexuality. In other words, human diversity is curtailed. There is only one definitive form – and otherwise only deviations.
Any other opinion would curtail freedom
The Republicans, who pushed through this law against major protests, are concerned with getting through the concerns of evangelical and conservative groups at any price – including trampling on the constitution’s principle of equality. Her framing, her argumentation strategy is rough but successful. They sell their heteronormative propaganda as a protective measure. They don’t curtail freedom, they preserve it: as tradition, as common sense, as biology, as “common sense”. Anyone who questions this “normality” is guilty of cancel culture and curtails freedom of expression. This framing has long left the Tea Party or evangelicals – even people who see themselves as progressive pray this discourse of exclusion. Alice Schwarzer, for example, claims that young people only succumb to a “fashion” if they change their gender identity. That doesn’t sound far removed from the failures of the AfD towards the trans woman and green member of the Bundestag Tessa Ganserer.
How liberal a society is is measured by how many freedoms it grants. And explicitly those who deviate from the majority society, from the majority opinion, from the majority sexuality. What we see in Florida is legal exclusion. Because of the segregation laws, everyone in the USA should know how this works, but unfortunately racism can no longer be treated in all states.
Yes, people are not the same. But that must in no way mean that it is okay, yes, that it is enshrined in law, to mark them, to exclude them, to dismiss their life plans. Florida has enshrined hatred and fear of the other, of other forms of sexuality, into law. It doesn’t sound like the language of the monsters, as the publicist Dolf Sternberger called the Nazi jargon, but it breathes his spirit.