As pride month comes around the corner again issues in government policies are still working to restrict discussion about the LQBTQ+ community. Fifteen states have been talking about following in Florida’s footsteps of restricting  the discussion of LGBTQ+ ideas in certain grades of schools. Republicans and other supporters of these bills believe that gender identity and sexual identity are inappropriate for kids. Creating the title “Don’t Say Gay” of these bills. 

While on the other side LGBTQ+ activists can see the very deliberate choice to create a stigma around this already marginalized group of people and to remove the possibility of important conversations. Teaching gender identity and expression are more about the kids themselves  are still important and understanding that different sexualities exist are still valuable. The incessant bullying of anybody that doesn’t conform to heteronormative standards that society has pushed on kids or anybody throughout the years should never be tolerated and can be prevented through understanding. 

As Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist for the ACLU told CNN, “These bills are predicated on the belief that queer identities are a contagion while straight, cisgender identities are somehow more pure or correct.” Everybody deserves to be seen somewhere in the information being presented. In high school discussing these ideas becomes much more important because some people may have been very sheltered and in turn bigoted. The Don’t Say Gay Bill has been expanded to highschool levels as well creating a wave of student protests. These students have performed school walkouts in response and retaliation. To ban these discussions from even happening feels like more of an attempt to censor ideas that the people pushing these bills disagree with, with the veil of trying to “protect kids”. Though in reality, it is just there to block the ideas from potentially getting to these kids that otherwise might be ignorant of them since their parents don’t want to even mention LGBTQ+ topics. 

To otherwise silence the already suppressed voices in our country is to eliminate the story, experiences and history of what this group has had to overcome and are still over overcoming. Even in places that are very accepting like Vermont, inclusivity acts are still being turned down or away. The Derby school board has denied the act from being implemented in their schools because the act originated in somewhere other than derby itself and thus doesn’t apply to every school district, that these ideas are ”outside agitators”. But this discrimination is still an issue and should be addressed in some capacity because as Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1963, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”