Things are getting dicey in Florida. A fifth-grade teacher showed her students a Disney film that included a gay character.
Have any of the students suffered irreparable harm? Have any of them turned gay since viewing the film? These are questions that demand answers in light of the state’s law banning exposure to anything gay.
Fortunately the state has no problems bigger than protecting children from exposure to anything about gay people.
The Florida Department of Education could visit a K-8 school in Hernando County as early as Wednesday as part of an ongoing investigation into a fifth-grade teacher’s decision to show a Disney movie featuring a gay character in her classroom.
A letter sent home to parents Friday and obtained by the Miami Herald indicated a representative from the Office of Professional Practices of the state’s education department “will be on campus on or about Wednesday, May 17, 2023.” If the parent has no objection, the representative “may interview your daughter/son in connection with an investigation of a Florida certified educator,” the letter read….
Winding Waters K-8 has made national headlines in recent days over teacher Jenna Barbee’s decision to play the 2022 movie “Strange World” — which features Disney’s first character who is out and gay, and is rated PG — and the Department of Education’s decision to investigate her after a school board member allegedly reported the incident….
Barbee has spoken publicly about the incident and defended her decision, arguing the movie was related to her students’ science lessons and did not have sexually inappropriate content — now a polarizing political issue in the state.
The Parental Rights in Education Act, passed last year and known by critics as “Don’t Say Gay,” prohibits educators from teaching about gender and sexual identity in kindergarten through third grade, and in older grades in cases when the lessons are deemed to be not “age appropriate.”
Educators, however, have routinely expressed concern about the law’s vague wording and the subjectivity of deciding what is considered age appropriate. “Nobody in my class, including myself, thought anything of the little bit of LGBTQ [topics] going on with that one main character” and the supporting character, Barbee told the Herald Monday. “Because of this, my students are [questioning] why this is such a big deal…”
Barbee has no plans to return to the classroom next year. She had already submitted her resignation before the incident occurred, she told the Herald.
At least we know she won’t be fired. She already quit.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article275456086.html#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The law, as written, would also prohibit mention of a heterosexual cis married relationship.
“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.”
The entire act: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557/BillText/er/PDF
No one can mention their parents.
Will they be wearing their SS uniforms when they interview the children.
good question
Maybe that teacher will move to California where she’ll still be free to teach without fascist intervention and punishment.
Do “State Actors” not realize
there is no wall of separation
between school and state?
Going forward there is one way to deal with this- Any media, including movies shown in the classroom must meet with Admin approval. If you don’t have Admin approval in writing don’t show it. You are teaching in a State where they obviously don’t trust the judgment of trained professionals. It’s truly unbelievable in the year 2023.
The adminimals tried that crap back in the late 90s. I never bothered with getting their approval because I made it a point to show harmless Disney animated films translated into Spanish–the adminimals had no clue what was being said.
How many students did they interview after the Parkland shooting?
These are sick people. Seriously. Their holier-than-thou spewing has to have every any psychology professors left in the state digging into what is really going on here.
Earlier this month during a school board meeting, Barbee accused Hernando County School Board member Shannon Rodriguez for reporting her to the department. Rodriguez’s daughter is in Barbee’s class, as reported by the Democrat.”
Miami Herald
I imagine this kid gets grilled when she gets in the mini-van after school every day. That’s what should get reported
She posted a tiktoc video; Florida’s kids are losing a terrific educator.
Wow. What a loss for those kids!!!!
The teacher’s video says it all. Afternoon entertainment for kids who spent all a.m. in annual state-standardized testing— motley groups divvied among 5th-grade classrooms as some were still testing— so this teacher chose a DIsney movie rated PG [& entire 5th grade had written parental permission to show PG movies]— so, like a good teacher, she chose one that related to what 5th-grade was currently studying [ecology]. Sadly, a 2-min part of the 90-min film featured a gay couple— and 1 parent [member of SchBoatd with a history] chose to object.
Enter state investigation of teacher, consisting of pulling every 10yo member of movie-viewing group out for interviews— not once, but twice— to grill them on what they gleaned from this PG Disney movie.
Most likely this group barely noticed, when viewing the movie in class, the side characters given 2.5% of attention. Perhaps there were 1 or 2 who gained a sense of belonging by their families being included.
But we can be sure, after being twice grilled 1-on-1by state reps that all 25 got the message: there was something definitely wrong with, and socially disapproved of those characters— including anyone in class whose families, or own predilections might place them within that [to be shunned] group.
That was a cute movie. I wondered why I wanted to ask the popcorn guy out.
I’ll never understand why people worry that someone’s going to turn their kids gay. For the vast majority of people, there’s an almost perfect failsafe in place that prevents that from happening.
I don’t agree, Flerp, unless this is what you mean. In every culture, at every time and place, where people were not taught from childhood to be strictly heterosexual, almost everyone was bisexual.
These parents want to become the curriculum police and to be book burners and to punish people with authority who do not share their backward intolerance, but they don’t grok that what we’re seeing IS NOT THE RESULT OF LIBERAL INDOCTRINATION but, instead, is a result of GENERAL CHANGES IN OUR CULTURE AS A WHOLE. Stopping those would require massive repression and violence.
I just mean that men tend not to have sex with men unless they’re attracted to men. (I can’t speak for women.)
Although every culture has certain amounts of homo and bi sexuality , I am not sure it is the case that “almost everyone was bi sexual “. Among other primates dominance hierarchies that limit access to females to the dominant male results in homosexuality. The same applies to humans as seen in prison populations. How much does that sexual activity continue upon release?
In humans sexual Identity or attraction may be formed as early as 3-4 years of age. Which is why as hard as they try the Matt Schlapps and Ali Alexanders can not repress their closeted homosexuality. Probably a good percentage of the Catholic Clergy as well. They pursue celibacy and seek guidance from the “Lord” to squash their “demonic thoughts” only to wind up assaulting the alter-boys. Conversion therapy a discredited total failure. The idea that children’s sexual preference would be converted (groomed)in schools, flies in the face of the inability of parents to successfully convert their young homosexual or trans children to be straight.
DeSatanist might have to send his Gestapo into the nursery schools to make sure the boys have no access to dolls or girls to toy trucks.
Before the 1960s, American society was sharply homophobic. If people are shaped by culture, no one would ever be gay.
Joel stated “I am not sure it is the case that “almost everyone was bi sexual “.”
I am sure that it is not the case that almost everyone was bisexual.
Duane E Swacker
I was being polite !
The point was you do not chose your sexual preferences nor can you be groomed one way or the other. You can repress the expression of sexuality but not attraction or feelings of Identity.
So when did you decide you were attracted to Girls, Boys or both. I suspect the answer to that was before you entered school and it was not a conscious decision.
The American Psychiatric Association for decades (since the 70s)has considered Reparative Therapy not only a waste of time but emotionally destructive increasing addictions and suicides. Which makes the inverse true as well. The only thing that needs grooming are the Trumpanzees in Flor a Duh. The larvae have entered their brains.
It’s not a matter of choice. That is EMPHATICALLY not the issue. However, people do not limit themselves with regard to their sexual partners EXCEPT in cultures where they are trained from EXTREMELY EARLY AGES not to. So, it seems likely that given this, while one might have a natural strong inclination toward a particular sort of MATE, one might not with regard to occasional sexual PARTNERS. Don’t confuse mating with sex. Julius Ceasar was married. He was attracted to women. And he had both male and female lovers. Abraham Lincoln was married. He was perhaps attracted to women soemtimes. And he had both male and female lovers.
Why was that the case for Ceasar? And for Abe Lincoln? Because they both grew up–spent their childhoods in–cultures where homosexual relations were common and, in the former case, not frowned upon. With regard to this aspect of Lincoln’s life, I recommend to you the book Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, by Harvard historian John Stauffer. The 19thy century in America wasn’t as some think it was. LOL.
For people IN GENERAL to abhor having partners of either sex, they have to be taught that abhorance. This is made clear, again, by the fact that if you remove the early microconditioning from a culture, then people commonly have sex with partners of both sexes, though they continue to have married PARTNERS (in most but not all of them).
Would not be me without a correction, .
choose
People have a tendency to confuse the accidents of their own acculturation with human nature. lol
But in cultures without the anti-homosexual acculturation, bisexuality is common, and this is true of both men and women. That this is the case is completely compatible with people establishing, in our culture, a strong sexual and mating preference early on. It makes a difference what sort of culture people grow up in.
Those cultures without strong anti-homosexual acculturation provide what Jared Diamond rightly refers to as “natural experiments.” Hold everything constant but this variable.
My brother identifies as gay. I identify as straight (or, if I am around a Repugnican and want to mess with him or her, as bi, lol). My earliest memory of getting into a particular state of., ahem, interest was playing in the leaves in Autumn with a neighborhood girl when I was a kid. My brother’s is of playing in the leaves with a neighborhood boy when he was a kid. This is completely compatible with my “you have to be taught” observation based on natural experiments throughout history. One can have a primary sexual orientation without having sexual exclusivity. Homo sapiens has been so successful because we are extraordinarily adaptable and opportunistic. We can be Spartans or Athenians or Mormons or the Taliban Morality Police.
One of the nastiest bits of cultural inheritance from two thousands years of sex shaming by the Church is the notion that sex is who you are rather than something that you sometimes do. Same sex interactions were a LOT more common in the 19th century in America than people might think. Foucault writes about how the CONCEPT OF THE HOMOSEXUAL–a category of person defined by his or her sexual orientation–was an INVENTION OF THE LATE 19th-CENTURY MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT. And it’s THAT that led to the flowering of intolerance in the 20th century. In many places and times throughout history, people sometimes had sex with others of the same gender, but they didn’t think of this as a huge deal and as DEFINING OF WHO THEY WERE.
Once again, here’s the proof of the pudding. Take a culture. Remove from it any acculturation that homosexual activity is wrong or abnormal, and you will find that large numbers of adults in that culture will have had both same sex and other sex experiences. This has been true throughout history. Without the early acculturation about same-sex experiences being bad, they are widespread.
So, I am NOT arguing that primary sexual orientation is culturally determined. What I am arguing is that in the absence of acculturation to the contrary, people have varied sexual experiences.
Bob, I’m not sure what to make of your argument—I’d need to read some sources for this—but it’s interesting. Thanks for laying it out.
I highly recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Evolutions-Rainbow-Diversity-Gender-Sexuality/dp/0520260120
And this:
People have to be taught (more accurately, acculturated via microconditioning) to be strictly straight. Among higher vertebrates generally, bisexuality is the norm as well. Why? Well, evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarten addresses this question in her magnificent book Evolution’s Rainbow, which demonstrates that sex serves not only a pair bonding function but a much broader function of social cohesion.
Ofc, all this goes–whoosh–right over the heads of the half of Americans who are fundy Christians or who are fundy Christian adjacent and have never in their lives thought through a received binary category.
“People have to be taught (more accurately, acculturated via microconditioning) to be strictly straight.”
No it is not, ay ay ay ay effin ay!
“bisexuality is the norm as well”
No it is not, ay ay ay ay effin ay!
You have to be taught, before it’s too late,
before you are six or seven or eight
Here’s why: If you take away the microconditioning that says that there is something wrong with same-sex attraction, as in, for example, ancient Greece or in upper-class English boarding schools of the late 19th century, you find that almost everyone does it.
This is difficult for people to wrap their heads around because they CONFUSE their strongly held adult views CAUSED BY THEIR OWN EARLY AND FORGOTTEN MICROCONDITIONING with “nature.”
If you don’t teach people early on that this is bad, then they do it. Sorry if that bothers you.
Bob,
Thanks for linking right wing religion to prohibitions about sex. Over and over again, we see attempts to distance “culture wars” from their source.
Repugnicans are really messed up about sex, and this is due to their practicing a religion that for two thousand years has taught repression of desire and contempt for the world. Among the ancient Greece, it was considered a truism that women were more naturally libidinous than are men. By the Victorian Era, after two thousand years of sexual repression/sex shaming by the Church, MOST European women went through their entire lives without ever having experienced orgasm. Meanwhile, every European city was filled with brothels where the men spent the family fortune and contracted diseases that they took home with them. Such was the disgusting, sickening legacy of all that repression, and the Repugnicans want to return to it. Because they share the sick attitudes of the Church fathers, of St. Jerome, for example, who wrote that it was sinful to sit in a garden because it was pleasurable.
There is one group that seems to me to be ignored more than any other. These are the people who do not experience sex drive at all. They are, like other subgroups in our society, beginning to write about how they interact with a society that is hypersexed, a a society that thinks they have a treatable disability. Bring color blind, I sort of understand them.
re: AlwaysLearning – ask the administrator approval.
THAT is the tactic that worries the heck out of administrators – especially in rural and small districts. Teachers should BOMBARD them with requests for permission to do anything – ANYTHING. Show a movie, read a story, select a poem, names of kids in math word problems, every science assignment…
And, if an administrator does not respond to the teacher – don’t teach (it). Why take the risk? And, bog down the offices to a halt.
They can’t fire a teacher for asking for permission to do something.
And, they can’t say to a teacher “use your judgement” because then the teacher is off the hook.
And, the law is not a bright line of “gay” or “not gay”
I hope the media are all over the “investigation” and use Freedom of Information Act to get every written note, every comment, sit in on meetings, all of it!
Hi Wait, What?
Sounds like a fun and rewarding job. One that intellligent, creative people would like to choose as a career!
Surely the state needs affirmative parental consent to interview minors in this non-emergency situation. Morality police with no morals! As it ever was.
right wing religious with no morals
About 50% of Catholic bishops prefer Fox as their news source (Religion News)
The USCCB has spent millions on anti-gay activities.
As the minds of, U.S. schools turn even more, conservative, the next to go will be, the rights of, non-Caucasian citizens’ children’s rights to their, education…
yes
Hope the state is sending in doctors as well–perhaps Dr. Scott Atlas could take this task on his shoulders–to examine the kids in case they touched the box the CD came in and caught Gay Cooties.
Florida’s State Surgeon General Ladapo could assist
I’d bet a quarter (never bet more than a quarter) the State says, “Never mind, we believe in local control. School Board – you figure it out!” Once they step in they can’t step out and the they-said-gay police will be called into districts everywhere! Or – maybe they have those brown shirts already monogrammed for thousands of inspectors.
DeSantis got a big appropriation from the legislature to create a state guard of 1,500, under his personal control. Some wondered what they would do. Now we know. They will stand guard at every bathroom to check for birth certificates or genitalia. Wearing their monogrammed brown shorts.
Their monogrammed brown shorts
ROFLMAO!!!!
I can’t imagine how the state is going to get kids not to say “gay.” I’ve been trying to get them to stop saying F— for years and it hasn’t worked! 🙂 Not to mention talking about every kind of sex act you can imagine. I’ve heard kids say stuff that would knock your socks off.
Excellent point, Mamie. I expect the middle school kids are saying gay as often as possible. Can’t arrest them or fire them!
The governor and lapdog legislature do not believe in local control. The governor fired the elected states attorney for Hillsborough County (Tampa) for saying that he would not prosecute abortion cases. The governor fired school board members in Broward County (Fort Lauderdale), supposedly because of a school shooting there, two elections after that tragedy. The legislature continues to add limits to what urban counties can do. The governor threatened to withhold the pay of elected school board members who dared to have covid precautions.
It would be completely in character for the governor to fire the Leon County superintendent for some invented reason, and replace him with a crony.