An Oregon man who pleaded guilty in connection with LGBTQ hate crimes, including trying to hit people with a car in Idaho last year, has been sentenced to just over three years in prison.
Matthew Lehigh was sentenced Thursday to 37 months followed by three years of supervised release and he must pay restitution, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Lehigh, 32, previously pleaded guilty to two felony charges of violating the Hate Crimes Prevention Act as part of a plea agreement.
Last October, Lehigh punched and threatened a transgender librarian in Boise before trying to run over a library security guard with his vehicle, according to court documents.
Days later, he saw two women he “assumed, based on their appearance and dress” were lesbians, documents said. Lehigh shouted threats and slurs at them and accelerated his car toward them. The women jumped out of the way and Lehigh’s vehicle hit the car belonging to one of the women, documents said.
The Justice Department said Lehigh, as part of the agreement, also admitted responsibility for punching someone else after using an anti-LGBTQ+ slur and setting on fire a pride flag that was on a same-sex couple’s porch.
Lehigh’s attorney said as a Christian, Lehigh believes homosexuality is a sin, the Idaho Statesman reported. The attorney also said Lehigh didn’t wish to harm members of the LGBTQ community until his mental health worsened.
Lehigh, who has been in treatment, apologized in court. “I don’t have too much to say other than just my regret and my great gratitude that things didn’t end up worse than they did,” Lehigh said.
Local law enforcement could not pursue a hate crime case against Lehigh because the state’s malicious harassment statute does not cover sexual orientation or gender identity. Boise and Ada County prosecutors dismissed assault and other charges after the federal charges were brought.
Vegas Shegrud, one of the people Lehigh tried to hit with his vehicle, said in court that she struggled with her mental health after the incident and eventually dropped out of school.
“The fear I felt that day is unparalleled by any other event in my life,” Shegrud said.
The state of Georgia will start paying for gender-affirming health care for state employees, public school teachers and former employees covered by a state health insurance plan, settling another in a string of lawsuits against Georgia agencies aiming to force them to pay for gender-confirmation surgery and other procedures.
The plaintiffs moved to dismiss their case Thursday in Atlanta federal court, announcing they had reached a settlement with the State Health Benefit Plan.
The December lawsuit argued the insurance plan illegally discriminated by refusing to pay for gender-affirming care.
“There’s no justification, morally, medically, legally or in any other way for treating transgender healthcare as different and denying people access to it,” David Brown, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a phone interview Thursday.
The state Department of Community Health, which oversees the insurance plan, did not immediately respond Thursday to an email seeking comment.
Benjamin Johnson.Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund
The state will also pay a total of $365,000 to the plaintiffs and their lawyers as part of the settlement. Micha Rich, Benjamin Johnson and an anonymous state employee suing on behalf of her adult child all said they spent money out of their own pockets that should have been covered by insurance.
Starting July 1, Georgia legally barred new patients under the age of 18 from starting hormone therapy and banned most gender-affirming surgeries for transgender people under 18. That law, challenged in court but still in effect, lets doctors prescribe puberty-blocking medications and allows minors already receiving hormone therapy to continue.
But Brown said Thursday’s settlement requires the health plan to pay for care deemed medically necessary for spouses and dependents as well as employees. That means the health plan could be required to pay for care for minors outside the state even though it’s prohibited in Georgia.
“The plan can’t treat the care any differently from other care that’s not available in the state,” Brown said.
The lawsuit cited a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that treating someone differently because they are transgender or gay violates a section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex. The plaintiffs in that case included an employee of Georgia’s Clayton County.
Micha Rich.Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund
Affected are two health plans paid for by the state but administered by Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and UnitedHealthcare.
It’s the fourth in a line of lawsuits against Georgia agencies to force them to pay for gender-confirmation surgery and other procedures. State and local governments lost or settled the previous suits.
A jury last year ordered Houston County to pay $60,000 in damages to a sheriff’s deputy after a federal judge ruled her bosses illegally denied the deputy health coverage for gender-confirmation surgery. Houston County is appealing that judgment, and oral arguments are scheduled in November before the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit settled Thursday included three transgender men. Micha Rich is a staff accountant at the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts, and Benjamin Johnson is a media clerk with the Bibb County School District in Macon. The mother of the third man, identified only as John Doe, is a Division of Family and Children Services worker in Paulding County and covers the college student on her insurance.
All three were assigned female at birth but transitioned after therapy. All three appealed their denials for top surgery to reduce or remove breasts and won findings from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Georgia was discriminating against them.
“I am thrilled to know that none of my trans colleagues will ever have to go through what I did,” Rich said in a statement.
Parts of a controversial Southern California school district policy that require school staff to tell parents if their child asks to change their gender identification will remain halted after a judge granted a preliminary injunction Thursday to block them until a final decision is made in the case.
The ruling by San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Michael A. Sachs, who called portions of the policy unconstitutional, came after another judge temporarily halted the policy in September. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who filed a lawsuit against the Chino Valley Unified School District in August, said the policy is harmful to transgender and gender-nonconforming students.
“This case is about a policy that is discriminatory,” Delbert Tran, a deputy attorney general representing the state, said at the hearing.
The Chino Valley school board approved the policy over the summer to require school staff — including principals, counselors and teachers — to notify parents in writing within three days of the school finding out their child asks to be identified as a gender different from what is listed on official records. The policy also requires staff to tell parents if their child begins using bathrooms designated for a different gender.
Sachs denied on Thursday the state’s request to block another part of the policy requiring school staff to notify parents if their child asks for information in their student records to be changed.
Emily Rae, a lawyer representing the school district, said at the hearing that parents have the right to know if their child asks to identify as a different gender so that they can better support the child’s needs.
“Chino Valley implemented this policy because it values the role that parents play in the educational process and understands that giving parents access to important information about their children is necessary,” Rae said.
Several other school districts near Chino Valley, which serves roughly 27,000 students, and in other parts of the state have debated or adopted similar policies. Last month, a federal judge blocked a policy at the Escondido Union School District in Southern California that requires staff to refrain from notifying parents if their child identifies as transgender or gender-nonconforming unless the student gives them permission.
School district policies requiring school staff to notify parents of their child’s gender identification change bubbled up after a bill by Republican Assemblymember Bill Essayli, which would have implemented the policy statewide, failed to receive a hearing in the Legislature this year. Essayli then worked with school board members and the California Family Council to help draft the policy that was voted on at Chino Valley.
The lawsuit is part of an ongoing battle between California officials and some local school districts over the rights of parents and LGBTQ students. In July, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said at a meeting on the Chino Valley policy that it could pose a risk to students who live in unsafe homes.
In August, the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus planned to announce a bill to somehow combat the policies, but lawmakers decided to hold off for the year. Assemblymember Chris Ward, a Democrat and vice chair of the caucus, said Monday that the outcome of the lawsuit against Chino Valley “will inform the range of possibilities for what we should or shouldn’t do with regard to legislation.”
This all comes amid debates across the country over transgender rights as other states have sought to impose bans on gender-affirming care, bar trans athletes from girls and women’s sports, and require schools to out trans and nonbinary students to their parents. In Wisconsin, a judge earlier this month blocked a school district’s policy allowing students to change their names and pronouns without permission from parents.
The World Bank will aim to ensure gay and transgender Ugandans are not discriminated against in its programs before resuming new funding, which was halted in August over an anti-LGBTQ law, a bank executive said.
World Bank project documents will make it clear that LGBTQ Ugandans should not face discrimination and that staff will not be arrested for including them, Victoria Kwakwa, the bank’s head for eastern and southern Africa, told Reuters.
Rights groups have said that the Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA), which was enacted in May and prescribes the death penalty for certain same-sex acts, has unleashed a torrent of abuse against LGBTQ people, mostly by private individuals.
“We’re doing all this to clarify this is not what you should be doing in World Bank-financed projects and to say you are allowed to do it the right way and you will be not be arrested,” Kwakwa said, on the sidelines of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s annual meetings in Marrakech, Morocco.
She declined to give a timeline for assessing the measures’ efficacy and moving to a decision on whether to resume new funding for Uganda.
“We have discussed this at length with government. Government is comfortable with that,” Kwakwa said.
When the World Bank suspended new funding, Ugandan officials accused the development finance institution of hypocrisy, saying it was lending to countries in the Middle East and Asia that have the same or harsher laws targeting LGBTQ people.
The government would need to revise its budget to reflect the suspension’s potential financial impact, a junior finance minister said at the time.
The World Bank’s portfolio of projects in the East African country was $5.2 billion at the end of 2022. These have not been affected by the decision to suspend new financing.
In fifth grade, Stella Gage’s class watched a video about puberty. In ninth grade, a few sessions of her health class were dedicated to the risks of sexual behaviors.
That was the extent of her sex education in school. At no point was there any content that felt especially relevant to her identity as a queer teenager. To fill the gaps, she turned mostly to social media.
“My parents were mostly absent, my peers were not mature enough, and I didn’t have anyone else to turn to,” said Gage, who is now a sophomore at Wichita State University in Kansas.
Many LGBTQ students say they have not felt represented in sex education classes. To learn about their identities and how to build healthy, safe relationships, they often have had to look elsewhere.
New laws targeting LGBTQ people have been proliferating in GOP-led states. Some elected officials, including candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, have been pushing to remove LGBTQ content from classrooms.
Sex education curriculum varies widely. Some groups including Planned Parenthood have called for sex education to be inclusive of LGBTQ students, but some states outright forbid such an approach.
The penal code in Texas, for one, still says curriculum developed by the Department of State Health Services must say homosexuality is not acceptable and is a criminal offense, even though such language was deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003. Attempts in the Legislature to remove that line from state law have failed.
In practice, LGBTQ students say they have looked elsewhere for sex education. Some described watching their peers turn to pornography, and others said they watched videos on YouTube about how to tell if someone is gay and how to flirt with people of the same sex.
Gage grew up in Oklahoma before her military family relocated and she spent her eighth and ninth grade years in a U.S. Department of Defense school in the Netherlands. She then finished high school in Kansas, where she began to recognize she wasn’t attracted only to men.
Not seeing a safe outlet at her high school to explore who she was, she went online to research for herself the history of the LGBTQ community in the U.S.
“I started to realize there is a huge portion of our history that is conveniently left out. But that history is important to queer youth,” she said. She never really questioned gender or social norms, she said, until she started to learn about discrimination others have faced throughout history. “We have such rigid boxes that we expect people to fit into. If you didn’t fit, you were called slurs. I wasn’t really aware that if you strayed from those norms that people would feel you were attacking their way of life.”
Still, the internet contains vast amounts of false information. Some advocates worry students turning to the internet to fill gaps in sex education will struggle to find their way through the morass.
“Any time you have a political controversy, there is a greater potential for a lot more disinformation to be generated,” said Peter Adams, senior vice president of research and design at the News Literacy Project.
When schools address sexuality, it is often in the context of disease prevention or anti-bullying programs. School can be a difficult place if your identity is seen only in such negative ways, said Tim’m West, a former teacher and now executive director of the LGBTQ Institute at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. West can relate: He grew up in Arkansas as a queer Black kid and preacher’s son and was constantly made to feel ashamed.
“What if you are a boy in high school that knows you like boys, and you sit in a divided room and listen to a teacher explain how not to have sex with girls. You would be sitting there rolling your eyes, because that is not your issue. But you also haven’t been given any instructions on how to protect yourself should you experiment with a person of the same gender,” West said.
Students need more applicable sex education regardless of their gender identity or expression, said Gage, who volunteers with a youth justice advocacy group and is also president of the Planned Parenthood Generation Action Chapter at Wichita State.
“We all have to make large decisions for ourselves about our sexuality and reproductive health. Those decisions should be grounded in knowledge,” she said.
Growing up in Washington, D.C., Ashton Gerber had more sex education classes than most. But Gerber, who is transgender, said the lessons weren’t all that applicable to their experience.
“Even if you can have sex education every day of the year, there is always going to be something that gets left out,” said Gerber, who is a student at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Gerber said educators should point students to trusted online resources so they can do their own research.
Not knowing who you are is a horrible feeling many LGBTQ students wrestle with, Gage said. But equally horrible is not feeling accepted once you do understand your sexual identity.
“Had I known then what I know now, I would have felt safe and confident coming out sooner,” Gage said. “No one should feel like they don’t understand themselves because we are forced to conformity in a world that doesn’t care. We can all be inclusive.”
Marina Machete became the first transgender woman to win Miss Portugal last week, making her one of two trans contestants so far to compete for Miss Universe later this year.
Machete, a 28-year-old flight attendant, thanked her supporters for the “positive and empowering” messages she has received since being crowned Thursday.
“To all of you watching, I just want to say that, just like the universe, your possibilities in life are limitless,” she said in a video shared on Instagram over the weekend. “So don’t limit yourself to any dream that you have.”
She added that she is excited to meet the other delegates at the 72nd Miss Universe pageant in El Salvador in November.
“Yes I’m trans and I want to share my story but I’m also Rikkie and that’s what matters to me,” she wrote in an Instagram post at the time. “I did this on my own strength and enjoyed every moment.”
“I thought we were really accepting … in the Netherlands, but the hate comments show the other side of our society. I hope that’s a wake-up call,” she told Reuters at the time. “For now, I fully ignore it. I focus on the good things coming my way.”
It appears that Machete and Kolle will be the only transgender contestants among the 90 women who will compete for the crown on Nov. 18. There are two more qualifying pageants — in Mongolia and China — before the Miss Universe pageant next month, and no local reporting has identified any trans contestants.
In 2021, Kataluna Enriquez became the first trans woman to compete in the Miss USA pageant after she was crowned Miss Nevada, though she did not go on to compete in that year’s Miss Universe pageant. In February, Daniela Arroyo González became the first trans woman to compete in Miss Universe Puerto Rico, where she finished within the top 10 finalists, according to her Instagram.
However, not all pageants have been open to including trans women.In July, more than 100 transgender men entered the Miss Italy pageant after the pageant’s organizer said Miss Italy wouldn’t allow trans women to compete.
Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday he did not “recognize LGBT” and vowed to combat “perverse” trends which he said aimed to destroy the institution of family in the country.
Turkey’s government, led by Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted AK Party, has toughened its stance on LGBTQ freedoms in recent months, particularly while campaigning for this year’s elections in May.
Homosexuality is not a crime in Turkey, but hostility to it is widespread, and police crackdowns on Pride parades have become tougher over the years.
Speaking at an AK Party congress in Ankara, Erdogan, who has frequently labeled members of the LGBTQ community as “deviants,” said neither his party, nor their nationalist MHP allies, recognized the LGBTQ community.
“We do not recognize LGBT. Whoever recognizes LGBT can go and march with them. We are members of a structure that holds the institution of family solid, that strongly embraces the family institution,” he said.
“We will dry the roots of sneaky acts aiming to destroy our family institution by supporting perverse political, social and individual trends,” he told tens of thousands of flag-waving and chanting supporters.
After the United Nations General Assembly in New York last month, Erdogan complained that he was uncomfortable with the use of what he described as “LGBT colors” at the U.N., which at the time was decorated with bright colors promoting the Sustainable Development Goals.
On the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington this summer, a few Black queer advocates spoke passionately before the main program about the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ rights. As some of them got up to speak, the crowd was still noticeably small.
Hope Giselle, a speaker who is Black and trans, said she felt the event’s programming echoed the historical marginalization and erasure of Black queer activists in the Civil Rights Movement. However, she was buoyed by the fact that prominent speakers drew attention to recent efforts to turn back the clock on LGBTQ rights, like the attacks on gender-affirming care for minors.
And despite valid concerns around the visibility of Black queer advocates in activist movements, progress is being made in elected office. This month, Sen. Laphonza Butler made history as the first Black and openly lesbian senator in Congress, when California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed her to fill the seat held by the late Dianne Feinstein.
Rectifying the erasure of Black queer civil rights giants requires a full-throated acknowledgment of their legacies, and an increase of Black LGBTQ representation in advocacy and politics, several activists and lawmakers told The Associated Press.
“One of the things that I need for people to understand is that the Black queer community is still Black,” and face anti-Black racism as well as homophobia and transphobia, said Giselle, communications director for the GSA Network, a nonprofit that helps students form gay-straight alliance clubs in schools.
“On top of being Black and queer, we have to also then distinguish what it means to be queer in a world that thinks that queerness is adjacent to whiteness — and that queerness saves you from racism. It does not,” she said.
In an interview with the AP, Butler said she hopes that her appointment points toward progress in the larger cause of representation.
“It’s too early to tell. But what I know is that history will be recorded in our National Archives, the representation that I bring to the United States Senate,” she said last week. “I am not shy or bashful about who I am and who my family is. So, my hope is that I have lived out loud enough to overcome the tactics of today.”
“But we don’t know yet what the tactics of erasure are for tomorrow,” Butler said.
Butler is a bellwether of increased visibility of queer communities in politics in recent years. In fact Black LGBTQ political representation has grown by 186% since 2019, according to a 2023 report by the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute. That included the election of now-former New York Representatives Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres, who were the first openly gay Black and Afro-Latino congressmen after the 2020 election, as well as former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
These leaders stand on the shoulders of civil rights heroes such as Bayard Rustin, Pauli Murray, and Audre Lorde. In accounts of their contributions to the Civil Rights and feminist movements, their Blackness is typically amplified while their queer identities are often minimized or even erased, said David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, a LGBTQ civil rights group.
Rustin, who was an adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a pivotal architect of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, is a glaring example. The march he helped lead tilled the ground for the passage of federal civil rights and voting rights legislation in the next few years.
But the fact that he was gay is often reduced to a footnote rather than treated as a key part of his involvement, Johns said.
“We need to teach our public school students history, herstory, our beautifully diverse ways of being, without censorship,” he said.
An upcoming biopic of Rustin’s life will undoubtedly help thrust the topic of Black LGBTQ political representation into the public conversation, said Shay Franco-Clausen, a commissioner of Alameda County in California.
“I didn’t even learn about those same leaders, Black leaders, Black queer leaders until I got to college,” she said.
The film, titled “Rustin,” debuts in select theaters Nov. 3 and Netflix on Nov. 17.
Some believe the erasure of Black LGBTQ leaders stems from respectability politics, a strategy in some marginalized communities of ostracizing or punishing members who don’t assimilate into the dominant culture.
White supremacist ideology in Christianity, which has been used more broadly to justify racism and systemic oppression, has also promoted the erasure of Black queer history. The Black Christian church was integral to the success of the Civil Rights Movement, but it is also “theologically hostile” to LGBTQ communities, said Don Abram, executive director of Pride in the Pews.
“I think it’s the co-optation of religious practices by white supremacists to actually subjugate Black, queer, and trans folk,” Abram said. “They are largely using moralistic language, theological language, religious language to justify them oppressing queer and trans folk.”
Not all queer advocacy communities have been welcoming to Black LGBTQ voices. Minneapolis City Council President Andrea Jenkins said she is just as intentional in amplifying queer visibility in Black spaces as she is amplifying Blackness in majority white, queer spaces.
“We need to have more Black, queer, transgender, nonconforming identified people in these political spaces to aid and bridge those gaps,” Jenkins said. “It’s important to be able to create the kinds of awareness on both sides of the issue that can bring people together and that can ensure that we do have full participation from our community.”
Black LGBTQ leaders are also using their platforms to create awareness about groundbreaking historical figures, especially Rustin. Maryland Delegate Gabriel Acevero and several LGBTQ advocates fought to get the only elementary school in his district named after Rustin in 2018. He has also urged Congress to pass legislation to create a U.S. Postal Service stamp depicting Rustin.
“Black queer folks have contributed to so many movements that we do not get acknowledgment for,” Acevero said. “And this is why we should not only ensure that our elders get their flowers, but we should push to have their names and statues built … so that they are not forgotten.”
Nebraska is requiring transgender youth seeking transition-related care to wait seven days to start puberty blocking medications or hormone treatments under emergency regulations announced Sunday by the state health department.
The regulations also require transgender minors to undergo at least 40 hours of “gender-identity-focused” therapy that are “clinically neutral” before receiving any medical treatments meant to affirm their gender identities. A new law that took effect Sunday bans transition-related surgeries for trans youth under 19 and also required the state’s chief medical officer to spell out when and how those youth can receive other care.
The state Department of Health and Human Services announcement that Republican Gov. Jim Pillen had approved the emergency regulations came after families, doctors and even lawmakers said they had largely gotten no response from the department on when the regulations would be in place. They worried that Pillen’s administration was slow-walking them to block treatments for transgender youth who hadn’t already started them.
“The law went into effect today, which is when the emergency regulations were put in place,” department spokesperson Jeff Powell said in an email Sunday to The Associated Press. “Nothing was slow-walked.”
The new regulations remain in effect while the department takes public comments on a permanent set of rules. The agency said it plans to release a proposed final version by the end of October and then have a public hearing on Nov. 28 in Lincoln, the state capital.
Grant Friedman, a legal fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska, said it’s helpful to have the rules in place so that new transgender patients can get care. However, he said, medical professionals already follow international standards for treating trans youth, making the Legislature’s intervention unnecessary.
“These are decisions to be made between patients, parents, providers,” he said after a transgender rights rally Sunday at the Nebraska State Capitol.
Nebraska’s ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors and its restrictions on other gender-affirming care were part of a wave of measures rolling back transgender rights in Republican-controlled statehouse across the U.S.
At least 22 states have enacted laws restricting or banning transition-related medical care for transgender minors, and most of those states face lawsuits. An Arkansas ban mirroring Nebraska’s was struck down by a federal judge in June as unconstitutional and will be appealed to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court, which also handles Nebraska cases.
During the signing ceremony for the new Nebraska law, Pillen suggested that children and their parents who seek gender-affirming treatment are being “duped,” adding, “that is absolutely Lucifer at its finest.” The state’s chief medical officer, Dr. Timothy Tesmer, is a Pillen appointee.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends gender-affirming care for people under 18, citing an increased risk of suicide for transgender teens.
Nebraska’s new regulations require that a patient’s parents or legal guardians be involved in any treatment, including the 40 required hours of therapy. It also requires at least one hour of therapy every three months after that care starts “to evaluate ongoing effects on a patient’s mental health.”
The seven-day waiting period for puberty blockers or hormone treatments would start when a doctor receives a signed consent form from a parent or legal guardian. Patients who are emancipated minors also could sign off on their own.
The department said in an online document meant to answer frequently asked questions that the waiting period would give patients and their families “enough time to weigh the risks and benefits of treatment.” Friedman said it’s not yet clear what the practical effect will be on patients getting care.
The same state health department document says that the required 40 hours of therapy would allow doctors “to develop a thorough understanding of a patient’s needs.”
But Friedman said the requirement is problematic because of a lack of mental health providers able to provide the therapy.
“It just adds an additional barrier to existing care barriers that already exist in our health care system,” he said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Monday to ban school boards from rejecting textbooks based on their teachings about the contributions of people from different racial backgrounds, sexual orientations and gender identities.
Newsom called the measure “long overdue.”
“From Temecula to Tallahassee, fringe ideologues across the country are attempting to whitewash history and ban books from schools,” Newsom said in a statement. “With this new law, we’re cementing California’s role as the true freedom state: a place where families — not political fanatics — have the freedom to decide what’s right for them.”
The bill takes effect immediately.
The topic of banning and censoring books has become a U.S. political flashpoint, cropping up in statesaround the country. Many of the new restrictions enacted by conservative-dominated school boards have been over textbook representations of sexuality and LGBTQ history.
The California bill garnered heightened attention when a Southern California school board this summer rejected a social studies curriculum for elementary students that had supplementary material teaching about Harvey Milk, who was a San Francisco politician and gay rights advocate.
A 2011 state law requires schools to teach students about the historical contributions of gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.
Newsom threatened the school board with a $1.5 million fine and the board later voted to approve a modified curriculum for elementary students that met state requirements.
The new legislation bars school boards from banning instructional materials or library books because they provide “ inclusive and diverse perspectives in compliance with state law,” according to a press release from Newsom’s office.
The bill cleared the state Legislature after intense debates about what role the state should have in curricula approved by local districts and how lawmakers can make sure students are exposed to diverse and accurate portrayals of history.
Democrats in the Assembly Public Safety Committee blocked the proposal earlier this year. Some lawmakers initially opposed it because they were concerned it could inadvertently punish victims of child trafficking.
After it was blocked, Newsom weighed in with his disapproval of the bill’s failure to advance, and lawmakers revived it. Republican state Sen. Shannon Grove, who authored the bill, later amended the bill to protect victims from being criminalized.
