If you think the new Florida “Don’t Say Gay” law is unnecessary, the read below may change your mind. In his essay, which first appeared in the Epoch Times, Roger Simon opines on one of the points I have been making: Not all books are appropriate for all ages. I would go further: Some books have no business in schools – ever. The GayBCs would be one example.
I had never heard of this book. So, I checked out the GayBCs. The book is real. Here are a few highlights from a video of a four year old reading the propaganda:
The video begins with the little boy reading aloud the word for letter A: “ally.” Then the woman with him is heard introducing the rest of the letters, beginning with “B is for” ― and the tyke answers “bi.”
While some of the words don’t possess immediate LGBTQ connotations ― H is for “hope” and M is for “mountain,” for instance ― others like “bi” hit right at the heart of it. And little boy with his cute little-boy voice reads all of them:
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C is for “coming out.”
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D is for “drag.”
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G is for “gay.”
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I is for “intersex.”
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L is for “lesbian.”
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N is for “non-binary.”
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O is for “orientation.”
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Q is for “queer.”
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T is for “trans.”
I am not sure what to call people who choose to try to teach kids to read via the GayBCs but I know it is WRONG. The GayBCs have no business in elementary school. I am not alone in this opinion!
Here is the commentary by Roger Simon. I added the emphasis/bold and edited it for length.
N is for Nonbinary and T is for Trans.
Did you know that?
If you were a Williamson Country, Tennessee, kindergartner and clicked on the book “The GayBCs” on the iPad given by your school for you to take home over the weekend, you would.
You’d also know the B is for Bi. (You can shout it out loud/ “I like boys and girls/ and that makes me proud.”)
C is―needless to say―for Coming Out and D is―what else― for Drag.
I won’t bother you with the noxious doggerel accompanying those―you can probably make it up for yourself. And no, it’s not a product of Disney, although, given recent developments, it almost seems as if it were. It was published in 2019 by Quirk Books with a recommended age range of 4 to 8.
According to GeekDad, this is “A great way to introduce 26 words to kids while teaching them to read.”
Teaching them to read? Do you teach the average 5-year-old reading with the word “nonbinary” (not to mention “I is for Intersex”)? Well, maybe if your kid is John Stuart Mill who is said to have learned Greek at age 3.
Actually, GeekDad inadvertently let the cat out of the bag. “The GayBCs” are educationally meaningless, in fact, an educational fraud. Hardly any children at that age are prepared to learn to read from them, with or without the traditional parental accompaniment.
It would most likely do the reverse, make the child so overwhelmed and baffled by what would have to be incomprehensible concepts for them, he or she (apologies for the old-fashioned pronouns) could be turned off reading altogether. It certainly wouldn’t help.
Even Mill undoubtedly wouldn’t have had the maturity to deal with bisexuality at the age of 4, a far more complicated emotional question than the largely intellectual challenge of learning a language.
But that emotional challenge is what is being put in front of the children of rich and Republican Williamson County and undoubtedly many other places across the country.
That material and more are readily available at online libraries. It is through one of those libraries that “The GayBCs” appeared on the kids’ iPads.
Also worth noting, if you are a third grader, you are required to spend 30 minutes nightly on your iPad.
So what really has been going on?
We are in an ideological war. The red state of Tennessee (Williamson County, notably) is one of the key battlegrounds, the battle already having been lost for a long time to come in larger blue states such as California and New York.
They and a statewide association of librarians are leading the charge in favor of this poison pill, in order to preserve what they claim is freedom of speech: All books should be available to all, even kindergartners, in their libraries.
As the author of 13 books and seven feature films, I think I am qualified to say “horse hockey.” Very few books―almost none―are available at all libraries, usually just those selected by the local librarians who have their prejudices like everyone else. All books are only available at the Library of Congress (with a considerable wait, of course.)
Would these same librarians make bomb-making materials available to 5-year-olds? They would probably say the kids wouldn’t understand them anyway. Do they understand “nonbinary”?
These children are being sexualized for nefarious purposes. It’s child abuse, pure and simple.
Randall Poulton
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