The GOP's anti-LGBTQ and education policies are linked — and echo authoritarian leaders

This story is part of a series on the origins and implications of the conservative campaign against transgender rights.

For years, LGBTQ rights seemed to be on the march in the United States, despite opposition from religious conservatives.

But in the last few years, a right-wing countermovement funded in part by powerful dark money interests and supported by conservative groups has taken shape.

Republican politicians have passed legislation banning gender-affirming care for minors, barring teachers from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, and rolling back transgender rights. Right-wing commentators are fueling the surge of anti-LGBTQ legislation, stoking panic about the supposed dangers of expanding LGTBQ rights.

Policies and rhetoric that have recently become mainstream in the Republican Party resemble those of authoritarian leaders around the world, reflecting a growing anti-democratic trend within the GOP. Leaders such as 2024 presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban both lean heavily on anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, and have passed legislation restricting LGBTQ rights and visibility. In particular, both weaponize anti-LGBTQ rhetoric to push their education policies, distinct features of both of their political careers. 

Both American conservatives and authoritarians abroad paint a false, dystopian picture of progressive or even communist teacher-activists converting their students to “leftism.” In darker tellings, conservatives blur the line between teachers and predators who they claim are preparing their students to be sexually abused, mixing them up in a toxic rhetorical blend of conspiracy theories and paranoia. In the United States, conservatives use the word “groomer” to gesture to that idea. 

And both Republicans and far-right leaders often use those ideas to promote policies that curtail the freedom of teachers, schools, and universities to set their own curriculums, and, in extreme cases, have been used to justify wholesale bans on public acknowledgment of LGBTQ people.

According to Andrea Peto, a professor of gender studies at the Central European University in Vienna who has written extensively on gender, modern politics, and World War II, right-wing leaders attack education because they see independent intellectual life as a threat to their power.

“Illiberal leaders consider it as a security issue: Those who control education are controlling the hearts and minds of the next generations,” she told the American Independent Foundation. “Besides that, education is also a very good business for the loyal commissars and the appointed experts.”

The Central European University was formerly based in Budapest. After years of pressure from Orban, the university announced in 2018 that it had been forced to relocate to Austria after Hungary’s government indicated it would not sign an agreement allowing the university to operate in the country. Orban further expanded his influence over the university system in 2021 by transferring control of 11 state universities and their public assets, worth billions of euros, to newly created foundations staffed by political loyalists.

“CEU was the embodiment of what [Orban] considered and created as a propaganda tool as an enemy of illiberal takeover: an independent institution where knowledge is produced and transmitted independently from his control,” Peto said.

The story of the university’s clash with the government points to the powerful synchronicity between authoritarians abroad and the Republican Party: Both are intensely preoccupied with transforming what is taught in schools, often through the blunt use of state power.

Many Republicans, such as former vice president and 2024 presidential contender Mike Pence, say insidious left-wing forces are at work in schools. At an event earlier this year in Minnesota, Pence attacked an Iowa school district’s policies that allow trans students to socially transition without informing their parents in now-typical terms: “What brings us here today is the now-radical gender ideology that has seeped into our classrooms.”

“Gender ideology” is a term that many conservatives now use to allege that social acceptance of transgender people and policies guaranteeing trans rights are part of a conspiracy to indoctrinate children, attack families, and push a far-left political agenda. It is particularly resonant for conservatives when they talk about education and schools under the broad frame of “parental rights.”

Former President Donald Trump, who is running for reelection, emphasizes those themes in his education plan. His platform calls for, among other things, ending federal funding for schools and programs “pushing race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children,” purging Department of Education employees deemed “radical,” and incentivizing schools to adopt a “parental bill of rights” that mandates so-called curriculum transparency.

Carol Corbett Burris, a former high school principal and the executive director of the pro-public school advocacy group Network for Public Education, told the American Independent Foundation that Republican leaders are increasingly emulating far-right leaders in their education policies and rhetoric. DeSantis, whom Burris called a bigger threat to democracy than Trump, “has engaged in multi-pronged attacks on public schools using charters and now voucher expansion to defund them,” she said.

Behind the anti-trans and anti-public school moral panic currently sweeping the Republican Party, Burris sees an older agenda in new clothes: the longstanding conservative ambition to undercut and even eliminate public schools, with an eye to ultimately replacing them with free-market alternatives.

“The radical Libertarian right has taken over the party,” Burris said. “Radical Libertarians want what their hero Milton Friedman wanted — a marketplace system of schooling and the elimination of what they call ‘government schools.'”

Burris described conservatives’ attacks on public education over the teaching of what they call “critical race theory” and “grooming” as part of a campaign to frighten parents out of the public school system and into privately run charter and religious schools. Chris Rufo, a right-wing activist who has stoked panics around “critical race theory” and “gender ideology,” made that connection himself in a speech he gave last year: “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust. Because in order for people to take significant action, they have to feel like they have something at stake.”

Some of the most aggressive attempts anywhere in the country by Republicans to assert political control over the education system are taking place in Florida. DeSantis won reelection with 59% of the vote, and Republicans won supermajorities in both houses of the state Legislature. Rufo is a close adviser to DeSantis.

DeSantis’ most well-known piece of education policy may be the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, passed in 2022 and known officially as the Parental Rights in Education bill, which bans “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” for students in kindergarten through the third grade. That law inspired Republican lawmakers across the country to introduce similar bills in their states. Last month, DeSantis expanded the law to cover students through the eighth grade.

Critics argued that the bill would censor discussion of LGBTQ history and life in schools, while defenders of the bill said it would protect kids against “grooming.” After the law was passed, amid a barrage of criticism from national figures, a DeSantis spokesperson accused opponents of the bill of being “groomers” or supporters of grooming.

Since signing the “Don’t Say Gay” law, DeSantis has made further moves to strengthen his influence over the state’s education system.

At the start of this year, DeSantis and the state board of governors, which oversees Florida’s public universities, appointed Rufo and six other new trustees to the board of New College, a small public liberal arts college with a strong progressive student culture. The newly minted conservative majority immediately set out transforming the school from a place, in a DeSantis spokesperson’s telling, “completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning” to a “Hillsdale of the South” — a reference to a small Christian conservative college in Michigan.

“Some have said these recent appointments amount to a partisan takeover of the college. This is not correct,” one of the newly appointed trustees told Politico at the time. “It’s not a takeover — it’s a renewal.”

In the months since, the new trustees have purged some of the college’s staff, including its former president, its diversity, equity, and inclusion staff, its librarian, and the school’s only U.S. history teacher, who had heavily criticized DeSantis and his political appointees. The college’s interim head, a state Republican politician, received a near half-million dollar raise in salary over that paid to its previous president.

The campaign to transform New College is just one node of a broader attempt to remake higher education in Florida.

House Bill 999, introduced in the state Legislature this session, would require that the board of governors of the state’s public university system review all programs for curriculums that either violate the state’s anti-discrimination laws or are “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, or economic inequities.” Fourteen of the board’s 17 members are appointed by the governor. The bill also grants the trustees of individual public universities the power to revoke tenure and hire staff without faculty input.

The ACLU of Florida has dubbed it the “higher education censorship and government control bill,” and the bill has been the subject of extensive debate as it moves through the Legislature.

As Burris noted, DeSantis has been a champion of school privatization, signing a bill in March that drains billions from the public school system by allowing public funding of privately run schools.

The governor’s moves have created a climate of self-censorship, anxiety and fear among Florida teachers, according to an investigative report from the Guardian. Some teachers report that they now refrain from directing LGBTQ students who confide emotional troubles to hotlines for LGBTQ youth in distress and that administrators have told them to downplay the history of American racism and to remove unapproved books — in one instance, a collection of poems by Emily Dickinson. The teachers say they fear running afoul of the governor’s vague new education policies, some of which carry significant legal penalties.

One piece of DeSantis’ agenda, H.B. 1467, left some school bookshelves empty. 

The law requires that, for a book to be allowed in public schools, an employee trained and certified as an educational media specialist by the state department of education must inspect it for content that is pornographic and make sure that it doesn’t violate the state’s laws against teaching “critical race theory.” Teachers who violate the law could be charged with a third-degree felony.

In at least two counties, school administrators instructed teachers to remove books from classroom libraries because of the law. One Jacksonville substitute teacher, Brian Covey, was fired after a video he posted to Twitter showing empty school bookshelves went viral and caught DeSantis’ attention. Covey was fired just days after the governor blasted his video for spreading a “fake narrative.”

Many of the battles over LGBTQ rights and education now rocking American politics have played out in other countries in concert with the rise of authoritarian leaders.

Tactics such as banning books and monitoring teachers and curriculums have been deployed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsanaro, and Hungary’s Orban.

In Hungary, lawmakers passed a bill banning all representation of nonheterosexual and noncisgender identities in K-12 education and in media aimed at minors. Supporters of the law framed it as an anti-pedophilia measure.

Last year, Putin signed a law banning so-called LGBTQ “propaganda.” Under that law, it is illegal to express public support for nonheterosexual people. Books and movies have been removed from circulation under the law. Nine years ago, the country passed a law similar to Hungary’s ban on LGBTQ representation in materials aimed at minors.

In Hungary, Peto noted that, despite the well-financed public campaign against gender studies and the government’s attack on education and LGBTQ life more broadly, the discipline has never been more popular.

“There has never been so many conferences and special issues and volumes published,” she said. For those opposing far-right politics, particularly in the education system, Peto emphasized the importance of not being cowed: “It really depends on the colleagues, how they teach and research, if they apply self-censorship or not when standing in front of their students,” she added.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.