Writer Anderson Dodd, in a guest column for the The Florida Times Union says that one of the outcomes of Florida’s“Don’t Say Gay” bill, could ban some of the most important works ever written from our schools.

Take for instance Cicero’s first speech against Cataline, a cornerstone of rhetoric and Roman history. It gets the boot thanks to Cicero’s rather detailed description of Cataline’s sexual relationships with men. Then there is Plato’s Symposium and its scandalous discussion of gender and homosexuality. While we are at it, Aristotle’s Politics has direct and explicit references to homosexual relationships. Sappho is an all too obvious victim.

The Iliad must be doomed for its depiction of the gender-nonconforming Amazonian women and possible romance between Achilles and Patroclus. Ovid was exiled in his time for his writing, so why not in ours? Euripides might be removed for his gender-bending comedy The Women at the Thesmophoria. Or since all Greek, Roman and Elizabethan drama was originally performed with men in drag, maybe the whole lot should be kicked out? And should we remove the letters of Hamilton and Jefferson that quote these works, just to be safe?

Many of the same voices bemoaning the death of Western culture seem to be doing a good job of driving the final nails into its coffin. We have not even begun to mention the pesky problems of Henry James, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde or Virginia Woolf. Will Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas taint the reputation of Ernest Hemingway? Time will only tell.

What is abundantly clear is that the proposed bill is not a reclamation of past morals but an aberration of illiberalism. Even Thomas Jefferson’s education plan would run afoul of the new legislation. The founders read and advocated reading Cicero, Aristotle and Plato, homosexual passages included. The framers of our constitution believed that a good education grounded in democratic ideals was vital to the survival of the burgeoning United States.

But with Florida’s new bill, the very foundations of our democracy will be removed from school libraries and classrooms as educators teach with an eye to litigation instead of education. Plato, Aristotle and, yes, Shakespeare will be cast aside in the virtuous name of parental rights and protecting children. For their pious victory in the culture war, these politicians are sacrificing the education of our children, the future of our nation.

And that is truly a cruel, irreligious piety. 

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash