Intolerance Codified

If you thought there was a lot of oversight of student groups at your high school, think again. Next month a new law will go into effect in Utah that regulates almost everything relating to student groups in public schools—how they can form, what they can discuss, and who can join. In addition to tedious bureaucratic impositions like a parental signature requirement, the law also regulates the content of student discourse by specifically barring clubs that address “human sexuality.” Such content-based regulation not only denies students a necessary forum for discussion and education about sexuality, but, more appallingly, it thinly disguises the legislature’s discriminatory interest in banning gay-straight alliances.

Our primary objection to this legislation stems from its brazen attempt to regulate the content of student discourse; such regulation, in nearly all forms, stifles the freedom of inquiry so fundamental to education. Like classrooms, student groups and clubs provide an essential venue through which students can explore new subjects, develop existing interests, and engage with their fellow students. Such exposure breeds a community of tolerance and understanding—a lesson fundamental to the educational mission of any school.

While we understand the Utah legislature’s desire to give schools the authority to “make decisions to protect the physical, emotional, psychological, or moral well being of students,” this heavy-handed regulation stifles the very educational benefits that student groups serve to provide—and it ostensibly does so in the interest of protecting a “moral being” whose definition is strongly influenced by a tradition intolerant toward gays. That the legislation seems to be so clearly motivated by such conservative homophobia fundamentally violates that very notion of tolerance that our educational institutions ought to promote.

But beyond our objections to the discriminatory nature of the legislation, we are also concerned with the impact that such a law will have on sexual and health education. By denying students the opportunity to discuss “human sexuality” in any extracurricular context, the legislature is inappropriately denying students access to information about healthy, safe sexual practices. Withholding such information from students is reprehensible, unless the specific content clearly damages the student’s educational development. In this case however, the ban on sexual discourse certainly fails to meet that standard; rather, the restriction is plainly motivated by Utah’s conservative standards of “socially appropriate behavior,” a standard that the bill’s co-sponsor, State Senator D. Chris Buttars, seeks to enforce in schools. The law will also put principals in the precarious position of constantly making delicate value judgments. Not surprisingly, the State Board of Education opposed the law for this very reason.

Ultimately, we recognize the community’s interests in inculcating its children with certain values and norms, even in an extremely conservative state like Mormon-dominated Utah. Yet we firmly believe that the primary role of the school must be to provide a forum for intellectual exploration and freedom of inquiry. Educational institutions must, first and foremost, foster discussion and engagement with a variety of perspectives—both in the classroom and through extracurricular activity. To bar extracurricular discourse on sexuality in the name of a conservative and intolerant notion of social propriety violates this sacrosanct educational mission, instead reinforcing a discriminatory practice and denying students their basic right to information.