“These are targeted messages to a subset of the right - an ever-shrinking core of the Republican base.” Americans’ increasing comfort with the LGBTQ community
“It’s not something that resonates with the majority of American voters and it’s not something that resonates with all Republicans,” she said. Parker, the first openly LGBTQ mayor of a major American city, Houston, said the anti-LGBTQ talk that has surrounded the debate over what can be discussed in the classroom is an attempt to motivate a limited audience of people with fear. Those parents were more likely to say they are uncomfortable having an LGBTQ person interact with their children than the roughly two-thirds who do, 44% to 25%. Roughly 3 in 10 Republican parents said they do not personally know or associate with an LGBTQ person. Vast majorities of parents who are Democrats or independents said they are comfortable with LGBTQ people interacting with their kids, while nearly 3 in 5 Republican parents agreed. “Sexual content does not belong in the K-3rd grade classroom, and classroom instruction should always be age appropriate.” “There is no First Amendment right for anyone to incorporate gender theory or sexually explicit material into classroom instruction, and it is certainly wrong if done behind a parent’s back,” Griffin said. He said the law was not meant to target any members of the LGBTQ community and alluded to DeSantis’ comments at the bill signing, when he cast the law as part of a package of actions to protect parental rights in education. “Right now, they think it’s a winner - and it probably is a mild one - because it’s being tucked into this broader conservation about what’s appropriate in schools and ‘woke’ indoctrination of students,” he said.īryan Griffin, a DeSantis spokesman, denied that politics played any role in the governor’s decision to sign the bill.
Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist who worked on Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign, agreed that focus by state officials on LGBTQ discussion in classrooms can’t be decoupled from American parents’ dissatisfaction about how schools handled the pandemic, which helped to fuel an earlier conservative uproar about critical race theory. “For an issue that it took some education for my own community to come to grips with, we shouldn’t be surprised it’s much harder for the broader society.” The transgender issue is still unknown for a lot of folks,” she said. “One of the reasons we’ve made such great progress over the years in terms of how the public perceives people who are gay and lesbian is because of proximity - knowledge of people coming out individually. Parents are slightly more likely to support (44%) than oppose (40%) instruction about the LGBTQ civil rights movement.Īnnise Parker, president and CEO of the pro-LGBTQ Victory Fund, said schools have often marked the frontlines of the culture wars, and this time, proponents of legislation like Florida’s have been especially able to wedge Americans’ still-mixed views about rights for transgender people. Where Americans stand on LGBTQ in the classroomĪmerican parents or guardians of children 18 years old or younger are essentially split over the teaching or discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in K-12 classrooms: 41% support it and 44% are opposed. While American parents offer mixed views about what is fair game for classroom education, Morning Consult surveys show people across the political spectrum - including parents, Republican and Democratic alike - have largely become more comfortable with increasing LGBTQ prominence in everyday life over the past few years, putting the GOP in tricky political territory. Across the country, Republican state lawmakers have increasingly used parental rights as their justification for pushing measures like Florida’s new law to curtail the discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms that critics cast as anti-LGBTQ.