After widespread public ridicule, Republican Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen has pledged to remove a section of Senate Bill 1082, a bill she authored, which sought to ban the word “homosexuality” from all public school teaching materials.
Even still, Kathy Hoffman, Arizona’s elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction, said she was “appalled” at Allen’s bill which seeks to dramatically revise the state’s sexual education curriculum to make sex seem scary to teens. She also said lawsuits are likely if Allen’s bill becomes law.
Related: Conservatives are shocked — shocked! — that a college has sex education
Under Allen’s bill schools must present sexual contact between minors as dangerous and allow the entire community to comment on any sex-ed curriculum for two months before its use. It also allows parents and students to sue any school that doesn’t follow Allen’s new provisions.
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
In a statement, Allen said, “Several news outlets … are misinterpreting the language. That was absolutely not my intention. I regret that it has diverted attention from the main goal of the bill, which is to assist parents with more access and transparency so that they could make informed decisions about the health and welfare of their children.”
In her statement, Allen never explains her original intention for seeking to ban any mention of homosexuality from schools. But progressive lobbyist Geoff Esposito says that Allen’s legislation is merely a conservative response to the state’s April 2019 repeal of its infamous “no promo homo” law which prohibited schools from “promoting… a homosexual lifestyle or … homosexual sex” by mentioning the existence of either.
Here is a video of Allen briefly discussing her bill:
NBC 12 News reports that Allen’s bill is just the latest salvo in a statewide conservative effort to prevent schools from updating their sexual education curriculum. In several cases, conservatives and parents have successfully pressured schools to cancel their sex-ed classes by arguing that such classes are a “radical” form of indoctrination.
Allen once authored a bill that would’ve forced all Arizonans to attend church.
