Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach says public school teachers are required to tell parents if their children are transgender or nonbinary, even though there is no state law covering the issue.
Brandon Wolf, national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign and a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting, tells The New Abnormal’s co-host Danielle Moodie that MAGA Republicans like Kobach are trying to “drum up this phony friction between parents and teachers.”
ADVERTISEMENT
“It is absolutely inappropriate for the state to be forcibly outing students when that could put them in harm’s way,” he says.
Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast.
Wolf said positioning the debate as being one about parental rights is disingenuous.
“These right-wing politicians don’t care about parents’ rights. These are the very same politicians who in the same breath that say they are champions for parental rights argue that those same parents cannot be trusted to seek out the best possible health care for their families, namely their trans kids, and should be subject to government bans and mandates,” he said.
Wolf said more than 500 pieces of anti-LGBTQ policies were filed in state legislatures last year, which is a record that looks set to be eclipsed this year with 340 similar bills already being debated.
“I think what’s really sinister about all of it is that it’s part of this bigger national strategy to wage war on freedom,” he said. “That strategy is being driven by MAGA politicians who are only using the LGBTQ+ community as a scapegoat, which by the way, they’ve done throughout generations.”
“Voters over and over again are rejecting the right-wing MAGA extremist ideology. People who run millions of dollars worth of anti-trans ads in their campaigns are losing. People who make their entire political personalities about tormenting LGBTQ+ people—I’m looking at you Ron DeSantis—they’re not finding success electorally. It isn’t working.”
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
