Fighting Back in a Red State: Tennessee’s “Don’t Say Gay” and “License to Bully” Legislation

“Don’t Say Gay” and “License to Bully”—they sound like chapter titles out of a nightmarish, secret right-wing playbook and maybe they are. Unfortunately, the playbook is very much in use in Tennessee. “Don’t Say Gay” and “License to Bully” are the nicknames for two pieces of legislation that have been filed over the last few years in the Tennessee General Assembly. Neither bill has passed, but Tennesseans are likely to see variations of them over the coming years, which will doubtless result in our state making more appearances on The Colbert Report and in other national media outlets.

It is an interesting time to examine these bills. In March 2013, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill failed in the Tennessee General Assembly’s House Education Subcommittee when the House sponsor, State Representative John Ragan, failed to get a second when he moved an amendment to the bill. In other words, he stood before the subcommittee to introduce his bill with an amendment and no one—not even his Republican colleagues—would say the word “second,” which is necessary for the bill to be discussed and voted on. So the bill died for the year. As it happens, March is also the month in which Jeff Chu’s Does Jesus Really Love Me? A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America was released, and it includes a chapter on his visit to Nashville. At the time of Chu’s visit in May 2011, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill had just passed the Tennessee Senate, though it failed the following year in the Tennessee House of Representatives.

So what would these two bills do and why have they not succeeded in becoming law so far? To arrive at partial answers to these questions, I will offer my perspective as chairman of the board and president of the Tennessee Equality Project (TEP), a statewide organization advocating equal rights for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community in Tennessee. I have been in volunteer leadership with the organization since its founding in 2004 and we have fought off attack bills like “Don’t Say Gay” and “License to Bully” from day one. The two questions—the definition of these bills and why they have failed—are, I want to suggest, intimately related. Providing the public with a persuasive, compelling understanding of the bills has been vital to our efforts to defeat them in the Legislature. There will be more about that later.

Made famous by State Senator Stacey Campfield, who is also known for inflammatory comments about HIV/AIDS, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill has been through a few iterations over the years. In its earliest version, it would have prohibited the teaching or provision of any material on any sexuality other than heterosexuality in grades K–8 of Tennessee’s public schools. As amended in 2011 (the version passed by the Tennessee Senate), the bill would have limited instruction in grades K–8 to natural human reproduction science, which is another way of cutting off discussion of minority sexual orientations and gender identities. In 2013, a new version of the bill, which the sponsors attempted to rename “The Classroom Protection Act,” continued the attempt to ban any gender or sexuality material in the classroom other than natural human reproductive science, but it also added a sinister focus on students. If a student were to bring up issues of sexuality or gender to school personnel, they could counsel the student, but they were required to report the conversations to the student’s parents, in effect outing the student. Finally, after intense opposition to the new bill, the House sponsor, Rep. Ragan, attempted to amend the new bill in March 2013 to prohibit school personnel from counseling students in any matter other than education and career issues unless they were licensed to do so. If a student came to a school employee about an issue of gender of sexuality, the employee was to refer the student to a licensed counselor, which would result...