Tennessee teachers are suing over the state’s 2021 law restricting teaching about race, gender, and oppression, arguing that the law is unconstitutionally vague. The Tennessee Education Association and five educators joined in the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court on Tuesday.
The law bans any indication that "an individual, by virtue of the individual's race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously" or that "a meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist, or designed by a particular race or sex to oppress members of another race or sex." Any parent, student, or school employee can file a complaint if they believe the law has been violated.
For instance, in Williamson County, Tennessee, a right-wing parent group has complained about Wit & Wisdom, an English/language arts curriculum that they claim is ”replete with racial discrimination, age-inappropriate material that causes children guilt, anguish, and other forms of psychological harm, it discusses the United States as an irredeemably racist country, and is overall hyper-focused on racial indoctrination.” Its offenses include a first-grade book about seahorses in which the female seahorse puts eggs in the male seahorse’s pouch. According to Parents Choice Tennessee, this is “highly age inappropriate, introducing ideas that attempt to normalize males becoming pregnant, and suggesting gender can be fluid.”
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In reality, female seahorses do put eggs into male seahorses' pouches, where the male seahorse fertilizes and carries the eggs. This group is angry that a book accurately depicting seahorse reproduction is “attempt[ing] to normalize males becoming pregnant, and suggesting gender can be fluid.” They are seahorses.
Parents Choice Tennessee also objected to a whole set of second grade-level books on the Civil Rights Movement, including one on Ruby Bridges I previously discussed in some detail. They claim the books violate the law through “relentless teaching of whites versus people of color under the dichotomy of oppressor versus oppressed.”
That’s the type of complaint Tennessee teachers have to worry about.
“Laws need to be clear. The prohibited concepts law conflicts with the state’s own academic standards and curriculum, which creates unfair risks to Tennessee teachers using state approved materials, following state standards, and providing fact-based instruction,” Tanya Coats, the president of the Tennessee Education Association, said of the basis for the lawsuit. “Educators have already spent countless hours trying to understand and navigate the law’s unclear requirements.”
The lawsuit argues, "Tennessee educators have been faced with the threat that a student or parent will trigger an enforcement proceeding under the Ban's ill-defined standards, resulting in termination, license revocation, and reputational damage, for teaching lessons they have taught for years."
This lawsuit follows similar efforts by teachers and their unions in New Hampshire and Oklahoma, both of which likewise point to the vagueness of their states’ laws.
In Oklahoma, "HB 1775 is so poorly drafted—in places it is literally indecipherable—that districts and teachers have no way of knowing what concepts and ideas are prohibited," ACLU attorney Emerson Sykes said. "The bill was intended to inflame a political reaction, not further a legitimate educational interest. These infirmities in the law are all the more troubling because the bill applies to public colleges and universities, where the First Amendment is especially protective of academic freedom."
In New Hampshire, teachers and the ACLU argued that the law’s vagueness opened educators up to “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” In January a federal judge allowed that lawsuit to go forward, writing that “teachers could, in plaintiff’s words, be left with ‘an impermissible Hobson’s choice’: shirking their responsibilities under [state law] or teaching what [the law] requires and potentially violating the prohibition against teaching a banned concept.”
As always, vagueness is a feature, not a bug, when Republicans ban something. They want people to be scared into going way beyond what they could put in law—for teachers to be worried that if they teach basic facts about the Civil Rights Movement or slavery (or, apparently, those gender-fluid seahorses), they’ll be hit with a complaint that could threaten their careers. The laws always include passages that Republican lawmakers can point to in order to say the truly outrageous effects weren’t required by the law, but they know what a chilling effect is, and it was the outcome they intended all along.