Utah is doing its best to join President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the GOP’s national anti-diversity culture war. A new bill banning pride flags from schools, government buildings, or any government property while still allowing Nazi and Confederate flags to be used in classrooms, passed through the Utah House Education Committee.
The HB77 bill bans pride flags but it does have a list of exemptions that include, “a historic version of a flag … that is temporarily displayed for educational purposes.” According to the Salt Lake Tribune, bill sponsor Rep. Trevor Lee explained to the committee what those exemptions would include.
“There are instances where in classrooms, you have curriculum that is needed to use flags such as World War II, Civil War,” he said. “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 never mentioned a Nazi flag during the committee meeting. “There is a difference between displaying flags in curriculum when you’re teaching on them,” Lee said, and added that schools should not “censor history.”
The bill, which started out as simply a bigoted school bill, has been expanded to include all government buildings in the state.
Lee and proponents argue that the bill keeps people’s “ideologies” out of the classroom. Opponents point out that the LGBTQ+ communities in Utah are people, and the only political symbol that a pride flag extols is that LGBTQ+ people deserve basic human and civil rights—which while “political” to bigots, is a constitutionally protected right (for now).
During a hearing on the bill Millie Dworkin from the Salt Lake Center for Science Education called 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 said. “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 policy director Marina Lowe told Deseret News.
Lee is your run-of-the-mill modern anti-choice, anti-climate-change Republican, yet he seems keen to up his profile and join the anti-DEI culture war sideshow the Republican Party is involved in.
The GOPy’s long history of bigotry, its historical revisionism in education, and the party’s campaign promises to drag America backward by erasing our history, makes the idea that Lee and his fellow Republicans are promoting anything besides censorship laughable.
And while corporations begin stripping away internal DEI initiatives and tech giants scrub their digital world maps, the GOP’s billionaire donors raid the coffers.
Campaign Action Walter Einenkel February 14, 2025 at 11:30PM From Daily Kos
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