In Iowa, Redefined Obscenity, Forced Outing, And Retraining Sessions.

Senate Study Bill 1145 was proposed last week in Iowa. Supported by Governor Kim Reynolds, the bill plays hard to the right-tilted culture warriors.

Some of these features are, by now, familiar. The bill calls for a civics test, and full curriculum transparency. Also, a blanket ban for kindergarten through third grade, forbidding a district to provide “any program, curriculum, material, test, survey, questionnaire, activity, announcement, promotion, or instruction of any kind relating to gender identity or sexual activity.”

But three provisions go above and beyond the standard fare.

Redefining obscenity

In 1973, the Supreme Court articulated the Miller Test, a three-pronged test to determine if a work can be classified as obscene. The first prong asks if an average person, using community standards, would decide the work appeals to the prurient interest. Prong two asks if the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct.

The third prong is whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

That third prong has been a point of contention in many arguments about removing certain books from school libraries or classrooms.

The proposed bill tips its hat to the first two prongs, adds definition to “patently offensive,” then disposes of the third prong for any person under 18.

Taken as a whole, the material lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value as to minors. For purposes of this subparagraph, material lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value…

In other words, under this law, any work that fails either of the first two prongs cannot pass the third. The very idea that a work with literary, artistic, political or scientific merit could also include a depiction of sex is rejected by this law.

Forced outing

The issue of students who come out as gay or trans at school continues to be a difficult one in which it is challenging to balance the rights of parents and of the students themselves. This bill simply pushes student rights aside.

Each school district shall immediately notify the parent or guardian of a minor child enrolled in the school district if any employee of the school district reasonably believes that the minor child has expressed a gender identity that is different than the biological sex listed on the minor child’s official birth certificate or certificate issued upon adoption if the certificate was issued at or near the time of the minor child’s birth.

This language requires a forced outing, and not only for instances where a student might come out to a staff member, but also any situation where a student might have come out to friends and a staff member simply overhears it. If a staff member believes that the student has simply “expressed” such a gender identity different from their sex at birth, the student must be reported.

This language is followed by a clause noting that if the district determines that notifying parents “is likely to lead to a case of child abuse,” then the district may decide not to inform the parents but must instead turn the case over to the department of health and human services. And that paragraph is followed one making clear that parents will have full access to any records, including teacher notes and “documents created by the minor child.”

It would be serious mistake for any school district to adopt a policy whose default was to distrust parents, but this bill takes a chainsaw to any student hope for privacy. Students struggling with questions about their own gender and sexuality and who do not feel they’ll have support at home will feel forced to keep it all under wraps, to keep themselves unseen, unheard, and unacknowledged. Too many students struggling with these questions will find themselves with no safe place to turn.

LGBTQ youths are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. This is not the kind of thing that will help.

Retraining

The department of education is given the job of enforcing these rules. A first violation results in a written warning, but after that, each violation the department will “assess a civil penalty against the school district” of up to $5,000.

Expect such rulings to be a challenge. The department will be in charge of ruling whether books are obscene under the law. That may be challenging, but it may be far harder to determine that a school staff member should have “reasonably believed” that Student X was showing signs of a non-birth gender identity.

Should Tommy’s second grade teacher have suspected something when he wanted to play with dolls? Should Jane’s middle school principal have called home when she was seen holding hands with her girl friends in the hall? Should parents be called for the dozen students who really want to cross-dress for their class skit? Will their parents be able to bring action against the school years and years later for not calling home over these common and unexceptional behaviors when one student out of dozens comes out years later?

The money collected from these civil penalties is set aside for a particular purpose. The department is to collect it and use it “for purposes of training the employees of school districts that have violated this section on the requirements of this section.” Those who fail to comply with the law will be put in sessions to retrain them in proper compliance. No word yet on whether the re-education would include tips on how to spot incipient LGBTQ behavior in minors so that it can be quickly reported.

Ideally, of course, school and home work as a team seeking the best interests of the child. And trust in some quarters is running a little low these days (by design, in many cases). But when we start crafting laws to make sure that some students have no safe place, someone has lost the plot.