Tennessee Rep. John Hagan (R)

Tennessee’s odious “Don’t Say Gay” bill has not yet advanced, but it might be getting another new provision to make it even worse. Its original intent — to ban teachers in grades K-8 from even mentioning homosexuality — was bad enough, and this year’s bill also includes a provision to out gay students to their parents. Now House sponsor Rep. John Ragan (R) is offering a new amendment that would completely bar school personnel from providing any kind of “mental health” guidance, according to WBIR:

A measure in the works in the Tennessee legislature would bar school personnel from advising students on “mental health” issues, ‘lifestyle’ choices or other conditions or activities outside career and educational counseling” unless they have been licensed as a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist. [...]

“School counselors in general are licensed, hired and paid to be counseling on academic and career education,” said state Rep. John Ragan, R-Oak Ridge. “We do not pay them nor license them to counsel on anything else.” [...]

Teachers, counselors and principals instead would be asked to give students a referral for psychiatric care if they bring up mental health or lifestyle issues. School districts would also have to train educators on how to handle such questions.

It’s troubling enough that LGBT students would not be able to ask any counselor about their issues — and would be told they need to see a therapy. But Ragan could not be more wrong; this amendment completely undermines the work many counselors do every day, including providing support for depression, suicidal thinking, eating disorders, problems at home, grief, and overall social development. Tennessee already requires that school counselors have completed a graduate degree in counseling, as opposed to just education. Ragan is trying to prevent them from doing the very job they are expected to do.

This is the significant overstep from the usual assumptions about “parents’ rights,” the line of reasoning that attempts to justify censorship in schools, as this bill does. The entire point of school counselors is to supplement what support students may or may not get at home. Ragan’s amendment is nothing short of a guarantee to make schools less safe and ensure young people have even less support for their academic success.

(HT: The New Civil Rights Movement.)

A new poll from Middle Tennessee State University shows that a solid 62 percent of Tennesseans oppose marriage equality, while only 28 percent in favor. This opposition is significantly higher than is often found across several southern states. Nevertheless, 57 percent also oppose the odious “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prohibits schools from discussing sexual orientation until after 8th grade — which includes related anti-bullying efforts — and only 31 percent support it. Additionally, 49 percent oppose the bill’s new provision requiring school officials to notify parents of students’ sexuality, while only 33 percent such a provision. Interestingly a position on marriage was not necessarily predictive of a position on the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.

It seems clear that Tennessee is a particularly toxic place for LGBT people, but even so, even Tennesseans realize that the outright censorship of homosexuality and violation of young people’s privacy are wrong.

Tennessee Sen. Mae Beavers (R)

Tennessee is the latest state to be considering bills that would enshrine discrimination on university campuses. A bill from Rep. Mark Pody (R) threatening campus police departments has been withdrawn for now, but Sen. Mae Beavers (R) has introduced a bill (SB 0802) to match another House proposal that would prohibit state universities from requiring campus religious groups to not discriminate.

The argument behind this legislation is that religious groups on campus should not have to accept people who do not currently identify with that religion or with its creeds — i.e. a Christian evangelical group would be free to exclude gay students because of their anti-gay beliefs. And Tennessee has been at the center of such proposals because of Vanderbilt University’s “all-comers” non-discrimination policy. The principle behind the policy is simple: all students pay into student fees so all students should have equal access to groups who utilize that funding (“all who come are welcome”). Ohio passed a law last year banning such policies, Virginia just passed one a few weeks ago, and another has been proposed in Texas. The intention behind them all is clear: let groups discriminate.

But that’s not the only pro-discrimination legislation proposed in Tennessee this session. Rep. John DeBerry (D) has proposed a bill (HB 1185) that would also allow university counseling students to discriminate against clients. The motivation for such a policy comes from conflicting cases in Michigan and Georgia in which Christians in graduate counseling programs refused to work with gay clients because of their beliefs. Counseling curricula are based on professional standards, which dictate that gay clients should be affirmed in their identity. The passage of a such a bill would compromise those standards and encourage anti-gay discrimination.

As the ACLU describes, these bills are clearly designed to protect discrimination under the guise of religious freedom. No amount of respect for individuals’ religious beliefs justifies entitling them to discriminate against others.

Higher education is becoming a growing front where conservatives are using claims of “religious freedom” to justify discrimination against the LGBT community. This month, the Virginia legislature approved a bill that would require state universities to continue funding student organizations even when they discriminate based on sexual orientation in violation of university policies. Those funds come from fees students pay into, inherently privileging religious groups to funding that all students should have access to. Now, a bill (HB 1046) introduced (and immediately withdrawn) in Tennessee’s legislature by Rep. Mark Pody (R) is raising the stakes: if universities don’t tolerate the faith-based anti-LGBT discrimination, they won’t be allowed to have police departments.

Pody has led this campaign for several years because he is particularly troubled by a conflict playing out at Vanderbilt University. Christian student groups on campus have objected to the requirement that they not discriminate based on sexual orientation, claiming they themselves are being discriminated against by having to allow gay students to attend meetings and run for officer positions. The Tennessee legislature passed another of Pody’s bills last year stripping funding for Vanderbilt and any other public university with such an “all-comers” policy, but Gov. Bill Haslam (R) vetoed it. (“All-comers” is shorthand for “all who come are welcome.”)

Unsatisfied by that result, Pody is now threatening the very safety of students on campus with his will to discriminate. Though he immediately withdrew his bill, he says he still intends to replace it with another version. A separate bill also introduced (HB 534) simply creates a new law requiring the universities to tolerate discrimination, as opposed to threatening to cut their police departments if they don’t.

Pody and his allies clearly do not understand university living or learning environments. The entire purpose of nondiscrimination provisions like Vanderbilt’s “all-comers” policy is to ensure that all students have equal access to all resources on campus that they pay into. This ensures a safe and efficient learning environment for all students. It is exactly the eagerness to discriminate exhibited by these Christian groups that makes a campus environment toxic for LGBT students or other affected groups, which quickly becomes a financial burden for the university because recruitment and retention rates decline. That Pody is considering holding campus safety forces hostage to enforce this discrimination shows his motivations are selfish and guided by animus, having little to do with the academic, social, or financial success of Tennessee universities.

Tennessee state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) is making the press rounds to stump for the new and worsened version of his odious “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prohibits teachers in grades K-8 from acknowledging the existence of homosexuality and also requires school officials to out gay students to their families. He has already made it clear he believes homosexuality itself is dangerous, and in an interview with TMZ, he doubled down on that absurd belief. After explaining the AIDS epidemic in Africa by claiming that sodomy was more common there among heterosexuals, Campfield went on to compare being gay to using heroin:

TMZ: If they’re going to engage in homosexual acts anyway, why not teach them how to protect themselves from [HIV]?

CAMPFIELD: You know, you could say the same thing about kids who are shooting heroin. We need to show them the best ways to shoot up. No, we don’t. Why do we have to hypersexualize little children? Why can’t we just let little kids be little kids for a while? Why do we have to have little kids be…?

TMZ: Do you believe in sex education period?

CAMPFIELD: …If you can show me where it works, great.

Watch the whole interview (HT: Alvin McEwen):

Sex education actually works when a comprehensive safe sex curriculum is taught, and fails in states that only teach abstinence. Southern states like Mississippi, which has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the country, are starting to realize this. It’s doubtful, however, that Campfield would be interested in such facts.

Campfield’s understanding of homosexuality is limited to the performance of sex acts. It seems beyond his comprehension that those “little kids” might have same-sex parents. He has no sympathy for those children who might realize at a very young age that they are not the same as all the other kids. Discussing the existence of gay people does nothing to “sexualize” young people, whatever that would even mean. It’s no surprise that the TMZ crew had to wrestle with the idea that Campfield had ever been elected; his understanding of the world around him is severely narrow.

TN Sen. Stacey Campfield (R)

Tennessee state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) has reintroduced his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which not only prevents public school educators from discussing the existence of LGBT people, but now also would mandate teachers and counselors out LGBT students to their parents without their consent. Campfield’s views on homosexuality live up to the threat of his odious bill, according to Nashville Public Radio:

CAMPFIELD: I can’t speak from personal experience, but being homosexual in and of itself is not deadly or dangerous. The act of homosexuality is very dangerous.

He made similar comments in a video interview with The Tennessean, blaming the likelihood of getting AIDS for his “deadly” condemnation. Watch it:

Campfield is borrowing his narrative from the “love the sinner, hate the sin” motto adopted by the Catholic Church and other religious groups to sugarcoat their continued stigmatization of gays and lesbians. A person’s sexual orientation is a core part of their identity that transcends any sexual behavior they might engage in. To separate the two is to erase the community entirely.

But Campfield’s views are more absurd than that. He doesn’t just believe that homosexuality is “dangerous” because of the potential spread of HIV, he actually believes that AIDS “came from the homosexual community — it was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.” He also believes that homosexuality is a “learned behavior” comparable to bestiality. Defending his bill, Campfield has described any teacher who might mention the existence of gay people as “radical,” because they ought to “spend more time on arithmetic.”