Keystone State Governor Vows To Veto Florida-Style Education Regulations

The Pennsylvania state senate passes a bill to restrict classroom instruction on gender orientation and sexual identity.

AP/Marta Lavandier, file
Governor DeSantis on May 9, 2022. The governor of Pennsylvania has vowed not to go in the same direction on education regulations. AP/Marta Lavandier, file

Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature and Democratic governor are headed for a confrontation over a new bill that would restrict classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The “Empowering Families in Education Act” was passed by the Keystone State’s senate last week. The governor, however, has vowed to veto the legislation, likening it to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which has drawn the ire of Democrats across the country and catapulted Governor DeSantis into the center of America’s culture wars.

“The governor has made it clear time and time again that Pennsylvania is welcoming to all, and hate has no place here, and he would veto any legislation that discriminates against LGBTQIA+ Pennsylvanians,” a spokeswoman for the governor, Beth Rementer, said.

The bill prohibits curricular instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for students in kindergarten through fifth grade. It mandates that any instruction for sixth grade students and beyond must be “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate in accordance with State standards.”

The Pennsylvania bill would restrict curricular instruction but not student speech on the topics, comparing the role of such conversations to the place of religion in public schools. 

It also would mandate that schools develop reporting policies regarding changes to their student support services — namely, prohibiting schools from withholding information about whether teens are transitioning. 

“Parents of young children across the Commonwealth have reached out to their legislators with concerns that age-inappropriate conversations about gender identity or sexual orientation are occurring prematurely in their local elementary school classrooms,” one the bill’s authors, Senator Scott Martin, said in a statment. 

Such conversations, he said, “should occur when a child is mature enough to fully understand the concepts of gender identity and sexual orientation, and they certainly should not occur behind the backs of parents.”

Mr. Martin’s statement included a list of recent incidents that prompted the bill. Most examples were related to classroom instruction or school books about transgenderism and preferred pronouns. In one incident, a Chester County school district told teachers not to report to parents if their children were questioning their genders. 

Mr. Martin, however, denied the parallels between this bill and the Florida legislation, which went into effect on Friday.

“This bill does nothing to prohibit organic, student-initiated discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity for any age group,” he said. “If pre-K / K-5 students are too young to be exposed to general sexual education curriculum, then they are also too young to be exposed to issues surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation.”

The Florida law prohibits classroom instruction on such topics in kindergarten through third grade, and bars the withholding of information about student support service changes.

The Pennsylvania ACLU charges that the state’s bill is “more restrictive” than Florida’s, “which was limited to K-3 instruction.”

If the governor vetoes the bill, the state house would need a two-thirds majority to override. The Republicans control only slightly more than half of the house, making it likely the bill would die.


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