Utah is doing its finest to hitch President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the GOP’s nationwide anti-diversity tradition struggle. A brand new invoice banning pleasure flags from colleges, authorities buildings, or any authorities property whereas nonetheless permitting Nazi and Accomplice flags for use in lecture rooms, handed by way of the Utah Home Training Committee.
The HB77 invoice bans pleasure flags but it surely does have a listing of exemptions that embody, “a historic version of a flag … that is temporarily displayed for educational purposes.” Based on the Salt Lake Tribune, invoice sponsor Rep. Trevor Lee defined to the committee what these exemptions would come with.
“There are instances where in classrooms, you have curriculum that is needed to use flags such as World War II, Civil War,” he mentioned. “You may have a Nazi flag. You may have a Confederate flag, and so you are allowed to display those flags … as part of the curriculum, and that is okay.”
Lee later claimed he by no means talked about a Nazi flag throughout the committee assembly. “There is a difference between displaying flags in curriculum when you’re teaching on them,” Lee mentioned, and added that colleges shouldn’t “censor history.”
The invoice, which began out as merely a bigoted faculty invoice, has been expanded to incorporate all authorities buildings within the state.
Lee and proponents argue that the invoice retains folks’s “ideologies” out of the classroom. Opponents level out that the LGBTQ+ communities in Utah are folks, and the one political image {that a} pleasure flag extols is that LGBTQ+ folks deserve fundamental human and civil rights—which whereas “political” to bigots, is a constitutionally protected proper (for now).
Throughout a listening to on the invoice Millie Dworkin from the Salt Lake Heart for Science Training referred to as the ban “unconstitutional,” reported LGBTQ Nation.
“You all argue semantics, but you all know this is wrong and immoral. Queer people commit suicide at a higher rate than everybody else,” she mentioned. “This is not because they are inherently prone to commit suicide due to their sexual orientation or gender identity. It is because of how they are treated. If you pass this, you will have queer blood on your hands.”
“This new language is likely unconstitutional and a violation of the First Amendment rights of governments to engage in free speech,” Equality Utah’s coverage director Marina Lowe advised Deseret Information.
Lee is your run-of-the-mill trendy anti-choice, anti-climate-change Republican, but he appears eager to up his profile and be part of the anti-DEI tradition struggle sideshow the Republican Social gathering is concerned in.
The GOPy’s lengthy historical past of bigotry, its historic revisionism in training, and the occasion’s marketing campaign guarantees to drag America backward by erasing our historical past, makes the concept Lee and his fellow Republicans are selling something in addition to censorship laughable.
And whereas companies start stripping away inner DEI initiatives and tech giants scrub their digital world maps, the GOP’s billionaire donors raid the coffers.
