Senator of a town called Snowflake blames snowflakes for unsuccessful bid to ban homosexuality from schools
Senator Sylvia Allen from Snowflake, Arizona (Facebook)
A senator of the actual town of Snowflake, Arizona, is now blaming liberal snowflakes for “tainting” her bill to ban the word homosexuality in schools.
Sylvia Allen was forced to backtrack on Senate Bill 1082, a bill that attacked the state’s sex education laws with a proposal to remove all mention of LGBT+ matters from public school teaching materials.
The legislation would also prevent children under 12 from receiving any form of sex education, and require all curricula to be available for for public comment for at least 60 days before a school board could adopt it.
It inevitably provoked a firestorm of criticism before it had even been raised for discussion. On January 10, Allen agreed to remove the homosexuality ban from her bill, stating, “That was absolutely not my intention. I regret that it has diverted attention from the main goal of the bill.”
But she is now saying that liberal opponents “falsely” claimed the bill would ban mentions of homosexuality in schools, and that this has now “tainted” the bill.
“Why was the bill held?” Allen asked a crowd of supporters at the Capitol on Tuesday. “Because it’s tainted. It has a label on it now and people are backing away. ‘Oh, we can’t support something if the perception is it is anti-gay.'”
Your work has paid off!
SB1082 has been stopped and will not be heard today in the Senate. Your calls tweets and emails have shown that discrimination is not an AZ value. #StopSB1082
CC: @AZLGBTQ https://t.co/W57GhLGsbG pic.twitter.com/fikSk4ZR9U
— Representative Daniel Hernandez Jr (@danielforaz) January 14, 2020
Allen was in Washington DC for the the first day of hearings in the Senate Education Committee, at which her bill was scheduled for discussion. She had planned for 30 witnesses to testify on behalf of the bill.
She has now conceded that her legislation has no hope of passing after a fierce campaign by LGBT+ advocates stopped it in its tracks.
The Snowflake senator says she is not giving up and has promised to submit two other bills in the near future that might help her crusade. “There can be more bills introduced and there will be,” she told reporters.
Arizona governor Doug Ducey said that he approved of the sex education that his two sons received in state schools, adding: “I don’t know exactly what the problem [Allen is] trying to solve.”
