CARLTON FLETCHER: Summers’ bill makes a mockery of students’ constitutional rights

“And all the people living there, Have been silenced by their own lies. A man’s a man who looks a man right between the eyes.”

— David Crosby & Graham Nash

Given the way Donald Trump’s tenure as president ended and the downward trajectory of his current influence in the Republican party, you’d think politicians on the state, national and even local levels would have learned a lesson about hitching their wagon to a controversial figure and riding that wagon into the depths of hell if need be to show their loyalty.

You’d think.

But with Cordele state Sen. Carden Summers authoring a bill that takes loony-tunes Trump-lite Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ so-called “Don’t Say Gay Bill” a step or two farther in stomping on citizens’ constitutional rights, it’s apparent that some people will never learn.

Emboldened by Trump/Conservative-laden Supreme Court justices who have ignored the fact that they are bound by law not to allow political partisanship to cloud their decisions, elected officials in mostly gerrymandered “red states” are hell-bent on imposing their “evangelical” will on a populace that, poll after poll shows, does not approve of their actions.

From abortion to laws impacting LBGTQ individuals to Medicaid to gun rights to services for the poor vs. handouts to the super-rich, a group of politicians proclaiming itself “God’s warriors” is steadily making a laughingstock of the freedoms citizens in this country are promised by the documents that make up its foundation. Spurred by religious sects that make up a minority of this state and country’s populations but a huge sector of the base that supports these new conservatives, Americans’ very rights are under attack.

Summers’ bill would bar teachers, librarians, camp counselors and others responsible for watching over people age 16 and under from engaging in discussion about “information regarding a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity, other than the child’s biological sex” without written permission from the parent, even if the child starts the conversation.

It mandates that a student’s official record must be kept under their legal name at the time of enrollment and their name or gender on the record cannot be changed unless the school receives a copy of the child’s birth certificate and a form signed by all of the child’s parents.

It also bars caregivers from instructing while “dressed in a sexually provocative manner, applying current community standards,” a provision presumably aimed at people who dress in drag.

Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis said the bill would impose “an arbitrary barrier to vulnerable children seeking age-appropriate guidance.”

“Even transgender students who have the support of their parents will be unable to have appropriate recognition by their schools of their gender identity without involving the state in official changes to a child’s birth certificate,” Kreis said. “There is no rational basis to deny a student the equal protection of the law by mandating unnecessary hoops for gender non-conforming students to be acknowledged by their school with parental permission. This is little more than a bare desire to harm, which is not a legitimate basis to legislate under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Elected officials like DeSantis and Greg Abbott, his equally unbalanced counterpart in Texas, set the bar for denying rights to individuals who do not fall into lockstep with their and other so-called evangelicals’ Puritanical worldview, playing to the Trump crowd that became somehow convinced that one of the foulest men to ever hold elected office in this country was a “Christian leader.” And politicians on the state and local levels jump at the opportunity to parrot the actions of these newly chosen ones or even up the ante to generate their own 15 minutes of infamy.

The apparent notion with such legislation is to “protect” the “normal” kids from outliers like gay and transgender students, even if doing so ostracizes students who don’t fit their preferred mold and has proven to sometimes cause irreparable harm.

Making laws that emphasize the “differences” of children who are only trying to discover who they are in life, and claiming that doing so is the “will of God,” is a cruel joke that grown men and women orchestrate in order to win votes and play up to the very vocal minority of the fringe right that is about as “Christian” as a school of fish.

Sen. Summers has, I believe, always had the best interest of his constituents in mind while serving in the legislature. On this one, though, he has apparently strayed far afield in an effort to prove his bona fides with the DeSantis/Abbott crowd. And that serves the purpose of only a minority of the people he was elected to represent. No matter what his pals in Atlanta tell him.