Tennessee's "Flag Bill" Should Be Unnecessary

Public schools should teach tolerance, not ideology

Education

TENNESSEE’S “FLAG BILL” SHOULD BE UNNECESSARY

Public schools should teach tolerance, not ideology

Dave Gilbert

Tennessee’s “flag bill” has passed the House but become stuck in the Senate. The bill would prohibit most flags, including Pride flags and any flag “represent[ing] a political viewpoint…or other ideological viewpoint,” in public schools. It may well be a poorly written bill, but it was a predictable one.

In a liberal society, public schools shouldn’t push values onto students other than the values of liberal tolerance. (I mean “liberal” in the sense of Enlightenment liberalism, not the Democrats.)

Public schools have to educate the children of conservative Catholics, Evangelical Christians, Mennonites, Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Pastafarians, secular atheists, free market capitalists, libertarians, Marxist communists, communitarians, polygamists, LGBTQ+ activists, monogamists, hippies, preppers, vegans, and many, many more.

Given our Bill of Rights, all of these groups should reasonably expect that public schools won’t try to attack their cherished beliefs and attempt to indoctrinate their children.

And here’s the rub. Teaching children tolerance and respect for others who do not share their values is not the same as trying to turn kids into allies and activists. Public schools should do the former but not the latter.

Public schools should teach the children of Evangelical Christians to respect LGBTQ+ children just as they respect all people in general, and to understand that our system of government and laws do not and should not favor their Evangelical values over the values of LGBTQ+ children and their families. But the schools should not compel Evangelical Christian or Muslim children to celebrate Pride, pay any observance to Pride flags, or become “allies.”

There is nothing unconstitutional or illegal about holding the belief that any sort of sexual activity outside of a male-female monogamous relationship is sinful. If such beliefs bother you, there’s a process for revoking the First Amendment. There’s also nothing unconstitutional or illegal about believing that traditional Evangelical Christians are homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic. The point is that public schools have to educate everyone’s children, so they’re better off not taking any position on these things apart from the position of tolerance, which is importantly distinct from the position of endorsement.

Similarly, public schools should teach the objective truth about slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and the Civil Rights Movement. But they have no business flying the flag of an organization, such as BLM, that is identified with militant activism and that pushes tendentious policy prescriptions about law enforcement and other American institutions, such as the family.

There’s nothing unconstitutional or illegal about believing that “whiteness” is a terrible evil that should be eradicated or that white children should be taught about their white privilege. Similarly, there’s nothing illegal or unconstitutional about believing that the urban black underclass has developed a culture of dysfunction and that policies aimed at encouraging marriage and fatherhood combined with proactive law enforcement are the best ways to address it. But neither of these views—that our greatest racial challenge is white supremacy or black cultural dysfunction—has a place in public schools.

So, back to Tennessee’s “flag bill.” We wouldn’t see ham-fisted, interventionist bills like this if enough public school teachers and administrators simply did something that should really be quite easy to do: Leave other people’s kids alone and quit trying to indoctrinate them into becoming activists for fashionable causes.

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Dave Gilbert is a technologist and former visiting assistant professor of communication with interests at the intersection of technology, culture, and identity. Originally from rural Tennessee, he now lives in northern California with his photographer girlfriend and their four cats. Dave finds his greatest joy in bicycling through Big Sur and camping in the Mojave Desert. He is a founding member of Free Black Thought. He shares his views on X here.