Katrina vanden Heuvel

Katrina vanden Heuvel

: Photo from Creative Commons / Author of Photo: Generation Progress

Overview

* Editor and co-owner of the leftwing magazine The Nation

Background & Career Trajectory

Born on October 7, 1959 in New York City, Katrina vanden Heuvel is the granddaughter of the late Jules Stein (1896-1981), who founded the fim-production company MCA Inc., later known as Universal Pictures. Her father, William J. vanden Heuvel (1930-2021), served as executive assistant to Central Intelligence Agency founder William Donovan, during Donovan’s tenure as U.S. Ambassador to Thailand between 1953-54.  Mr. vanden Heuvel later became a Board Member of the Farfield Foundation, and by the early 1960s he was a special assistant to New York Governor Averill Harriman, and then to U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In 1976, Mr. vanden Heuvel was named chairman of Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter‘s New York primary campaign committee. He then served from 1979-81 as Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, with the rank of Ambassador.

Katrina vanden Heuvel studied politics and history at Princeton University, writing her senior thesis on McCarthyism. During her time at Princeton, she spent nine months working as an intern at The Nation magazine after taking the “Politics and the Press” course taught by Blair Clark, the magazine’s editor from 1976 to 1978. would later recall that during her college years, she sometimes “felt like a Russian.”

After graduating summa cum laude from Princeton in 1981, vanden Heuvel took a job as a production assistant at ABC Television. She later returned to The Nation in 1984 as its assistant editor for foreign affairs.

In 1988, vanden Heuvel married New York University history professor Stephen F. Cohen (1938-2020), an expert on the Soviet Union. The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, former senior minister of the Riverside Church in New York, performed the non-denominational ceremony. The couple went on to have one child, a daughter named Nicola.

Vanden Heuvel became The Nation‘s correspondent in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. In 1989 she was promoted to the position of editor-at-large, responsible for the magazine’s coverage of the USSR.

In 1990, vanden Heuvel co-founded Vyi i Myi (You and We), a quarterly feminist magazine linking American and Russian women. She also did some reporting for the Moscow News.

Vanden Heuvel became a part-owner of The Nation in 1995 when she was one of several investors who were brought together by then-editor Victor Navasky in a for-profit partnership to buy the magazine — which was then losing a great deal of money each year — from investment banker Arthur Carter. That group of investors also included, among others, former Corporation for Public Broadcasting chairman Alan Sagner, novelist E.L. Doctorow, actor Paul Newman, and the computer software creator Peter Norton.

After vanden Heuvel was named editor-in-chief of The Nation in 1995, she and Navasky moved aggressively to expand the magazine via synergistic initiatives like books, radio, and the Internet. Vanden Heuvel would remain editor-in-chief for the next 24 years until, in 2019, she became The Nation‘s editorial director and publisher.

Falsely Suggesting That She Lived in a Poor Section of Harlem, NY

In May 2002, during one of her frequent appearances on MSNBC’s Hardball, vanden Heuvel spoke about how she lived in Harlem and thus understood the needs of the poor. But host Chris Matthews let his audience know that in fact vanden Heuvel lived in a multimillion-dollar townhouse in a posh section of Morningside Heights.

Participation in a Soros-Organized Event

On November 29, 2006, vanden Heuvel participated in a roundtable discussion entitled “How Do Progressives Connect Ideas to Action?” The event was organized by George Soros‘s Open Society Institute.  Other participants in the discussion included:

Board Member of the Institute for America’s Future

As of March 2009, vanden Heuvel held a seat on the board of the Institute for America’s Future.

“Take Back the American Dream” Conference

In 2011, vanden Heuvel spoke at the the “Take Back the American Dream” Conference hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Campaign for America’s Future.

Characterizing the Republican Party as Hateful & Racist

In a November 2014 appearance on ABC’s This Week, vanden Heuvel accused the Republican Party of being “driven in large measure by a know-nothing nativism, anti-immigrant stance.”

Consulting with Bill de Blasio for His “Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality”

In 2015, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, in formulating his highly publicized Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality (PACII) in America, consulted privately at Gracie Mansion with such leftwing luminaries as Katrina vanden Heuvel, former ACORN and America Coming Together activist Emma Wolfe, Senator Sherrod Brown, Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy, and ex-Obama green-jobs czar Van Jones. De Blasio publicly unveiled his PACII at a May 12, 2015 news conference held outside the U.S. Capitol. Its stated objectives were to:

1) Lift the Floor for Working People:

  • Raise the federal minimum wage, so that it reaches $15/hour, while indexing it to inflation.
  • Reform the National Labor Relations Act, to enhance workers’ right to organize and rebuild the middle class.
  • Pass comprehensive immigration reform to grow the economy and protect against exploitation of low-wage workers.
  • Oppose trade deals that hand more power to corporations at the expense of American jobs, workers’ rights, and the environment.
  • Invest in schools, not jails — and give a second chance to those coming home from prison.

2) Support Working Families:

  • Pass national paid sick leave.
  • Pass national paid family leave.
  • Make Pre-K, after-school programs and childcare universal.
  • Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit and protect and expand Social Security.
  • Allow students to refinance student loan debt to take advantage of lower interest rates, and support debt-free college.

3) Tax Fairness:

  • Close the carried interest loophole.
  • End tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.
  • Implement the “Buffett Rule” so millionaires pay their fair share.
  • Close the CEO tax loophole that allows corporations to take advantage of “performance pay” write-offs.

Also attending and/or participating in the May 12 news conference were Howard Dean, Rosa DeLauro, Al Sharpton, Jonathan Soros, Van Jones, Marian Wright Edelman, Joseph Stiglitz, Sherrod Brown, Dannel Malloy, Toni Morrison, and Raúl Grijalva.

Calling Trump “Frankenstein with Orange Hair”

During a May 8, 2016 appearance on ABC’s This Week, vanden Heuvel called Donald Trump the Republican Party’s “Frankenstein with orange hair.” She said:

“I think we’re seeing the crack up of a party, because the elites didn’t deliver for the base. They’ve been shafted over the years. And we’re also see, let’s be honest, Donald Trump is like the Republicans Frankenstein with orange hair. I mean, the Republican Party is reaping what it has sowed. There’s all this nostalgia about Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy in Philadelphia, MS, the site of where three civil rights workers were killed by white supremacists. This is a party which has exploited — where Trump has [sic] now exploiting dog whistle racism, grievances, resentments. We need an inclusive populism, not the scapegoating populism, to speak to the real anxieties and fears and frustrations, but with hope, not demonization as Donald Trump is doing.”

Board Member of Brave New Films

As of January 2018, she served on the board of Brave New Films, whose mission is “to champion social justice issues by using a model of media, education, and grassroots volunteer involvement that inspires, empowers, motivates and teaches civic participation and makes a difference.”

Supporting a “Wealth Tax”

In a January 2019 column in The Washington Post, she backed Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed “wealth tax,” which called for the imposition of a 2 percent wealth tax on the holdings of any Americans with assets worth more than $50 million, and a 3 percent wealth tax on anyone whose assets are worth than $1 billion. Wrote vanden Heuvel:

“It seems every day brings a fresh reminder of how the economy is rigged in favor of an out-of-touch financial elite gobbling up more and more of America’s wealth. Yet until recently, our political leaders have, with few exceptions, failed to respond with the kind of bold policies required to make a dent in the problem. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s idea for a new “wealth tax” is the latest reason to believe that may finally be changing.

“Warren’s proposal would levy a modest annual tax on the 75,000 wealthiest households in the country — or roughly the top 0.1 percent. The plan was formulated with the help of University of California at Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two of the world’s leading experts on income and wealth inequality, who estimate that it would raise $2.75 trillion over a decade. Specifically, Warren is calling for a tax of 2 percent on the assets of those with a net worth above $50 million and 3 percent on billionaires. ‘By asking our top 75,000 households to pay their fair share, my proposal will help address runaway wealth concentration and at the same time accelerate badly needed investments in rebuilding our middle class,’ she said.

“A wealth tax is a sensible policy response to the growing concentration of wealth among the super-rich that is fundamentally at odds with a functioning democracy. Today, the top 1 percent of U.S. households own 40 percent of America’s wealth, which is more than the bottom 90 percent combined. And regressive GOP policies, such as President Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax giveaway to corporations and the rich, are making the country even more unequal and less democratic. ‘Just as we have a climate crisis, we have an inequality crisis,’ Saez and Zucman recently wrote, adding, ‘An extreme concentration of wealth means an extreme concentration of economic and political power.’

“Although it has been proposed before, the idea of a wealth tax is now gaining more traction than ever. Indeed, Warren’s proposal is a potential game changer. Her status as top 2020 presidential contender is forcing many in the media to pay attention to a problem they often ignore…. [W]hile inequality has become so extreme that it can sometimes feel paralyzing, a wealth tax is a simple and bold idea that people can mobilize behind.”

The Tax Foundation explains that a seemingly low-percentage wealth tax is actually massive, when we examine exactly how it affects a person’s after-tax return-on-investment:

“Compared to income taxes, wealth tax rates seem much lower, but this rate can be deceptive. The best way to interpret wealth tax rates is to translate them into an equivalent income tax rate. For example, consider an investor who owns a long-term bond with a fixed rate of return at 5 percent each year. A 3 percent annual wealth tax would imply that 60 percent of the capital income from owning the long-term bond would be remitted as tax—the 3 percent wealth tax translates to a 60 percent income tax rate in this example. A 5 percent annual wealth tax would equal a 100 percent income tax rate, because the wealth tax would take all this taxpayer’s capital income. A 10 percent wealth tax, calculated in the same manner, implies that all capital income earned in this year plus part of the stock would have to be turned over as taxes, which means a 200 percent income tax.

“The after-tax rates of return for these scenarios are presented in Table 1. Under the assumption of a fixed pretax return of 5 percent, an annual wealth tax of 10 percent results in a negative rate of return at -5 percent.

Table 1. Wealth Tax Rates vs. Equivalent Income Tax Rates
Pretax return Annual wealth tax rate Implied income tax rate After-tax return
Scenario A              5%                     2%                     40%                3%
Scenario B              5%                     3%                     60%                2%
Scenario C              5%                     5%                     100%                0%
Scenario D              5%                     10%                     200%                -5%

“Seemingly low 2 percent and 3 percent wealth tax rates imply much higher income tax rates; in this example, 40 percent and 60 percent, respectively. For safe investments like bonds or bank deposits, a wealth tax of 2 or 3 percent may confiscate all interest earnings, leaving no increase in savings over time.”

Supporting The Green New Deal

In a February 2019 column in The Washington Post, vanden Heuvel called for the Green New Deal to be brought to a vote in Congress, so as to make clear “who on the Democratic side is prepared to stand up and who is not.”

Supporting the Working Families Party & Its Agendas

In a July 2019 article for The Nation, vanden Heuvel praised the New York state legislature for increasing rent regulations, permitting illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses, and supporting environmental legislation akin to the Green New Deal. Moreover, she specifically heaped praise upon lawmakers aligned with the Working Families Party, describing them as “WFP-backed progressive champions” who, in “historic” fashion, had been “able … to advance progressive legislation and put it on Governor [Andrew] Cuomo’s desk.”

Additional Information on Katrina Vanden Heuvel

Vanden Heuvel has authored, co-authored, or edited a handful of books, including: Voices of Glasnost: Interviews With Gorbachev’s Reformers (1990); A Just Response: The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy, and September 11, 2001 (edited in 2002); Taking Back America: And Taking Down the Radical Right (edited in 2004 with The Nation contributing editor Robert L. Borosage and published by Nation Books); Dictionary of Republicanisms: The Indispensable Guide to What They Really Mean When They Say What They Think You Want to Hear (2005); Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover (2009); and The Change I Believe In: Fighting for Progress in the Age of Obama (2011).

Condemning “Book Bans” by Conservatives

In a September 26, 2023 article in The Nation, vanden Heuvel condemned the “book bans” that she said were part of “the right-wing movement against free expression in schools.” She wrote:

“PEN America just released a new report that illuminates how far-reaching the right-wing movement against free expression in schools has become. Book bans increased by 33 percent during the 2022–23 school year, compared to 2021–22—which was already an exceptional year for literary censorship.

“More than revealing the scale of the bans, the report also offers insight into a few of the organizations behind them: Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom, and Parents’ Rights in Education. According to the report, a staggering 86 percent of book bans last year occurred in school districts with a local chapter of one of these three groups….

“When Moms for Liberty gets a book banned, not only does it deprive one district of that specific text; it can set a dangerous standard. Earlier this year, the group successfully banned a graphic-novel version of The Diary of Anne Frank from a Florida high school—which included passages about puberty that other adaptations omitted. Flash-forward to last week in Texas: a teacher was fired for assigning the same book to her eighth grade reading class.

“Never mind that those eighth graders are the same age Frank was when she wrote her diary, experiencing puberty themselves and asking similar questions about their bodies—including, as Frank wrote, curiosities about ‘the little hole underneath.’ Parents are supposed to pretend that exposure to that level of graphic detail will permanently warp the minds of their 14-year-olds.”

The Heritage Foundation exposed the falsity of vanden Heuvel’s claim that conservatives were banning books in schools for political or ideological reasons:

“[M]any of the books we were unable to find in card catalogues were works that would strike most reasonable people as unlikely to be age-appropriate for school libraries. Works like ‘Gender Queer,’ ‘Flamer,’ ‘Lawn Boy,’ ‘Fun Home,’ and ‘It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health’ either contain images of people engaged in sex acts or graphic descriptions of those acts.

“People who don’t want these books available to children in school libraries aren’t book banners. And people unwilling to defer to the unilateral authority of teachers and librarians to decide what children should have access to without democratic oversight or parental input are not fascists.

“Determining what books are age-appropriate and educationally valuable enough to be purchased and kept in school libraries is inherently contentious even among well-intentioned people. But having a productive process for adjudicating these disputes is rendered impossible by false and hysterical claims from organizations like PEN America that there is ‘widespread censorship in America.’  The vast majority of books allegedly banned from school libraries haven’t been banned at all.”

Denying President Biden’s Mental Incapacity

In March 2024, vanden Heuvel dismissed the concerns of critics who claimed that President Joe Biden was too old and mentally incapacitated to function effectively as U.S. President. She wrote:

“The reductive discourse about whether Biden is too old dismisses the valuable leadership qualities that can come from age: wisdom, experience, and perspective. And it diminishes the invaluable contributions that Americans over 80 are making—to politics, to culture, and to public life.

“We have a stereotypical view of our presidents, and our leaders in general, as spry and strong, Kennedy-in-Camelot types. But the qualities that are actually best suited to leadership are subtler—and often present themselves more frequently in the elderly….

“Yes, he’s [Biden is] old. Anyone can see that…. But he also has empathy for Americans’ struggles, developed over a lifetime of hardship. And while his administration’s foreign policy may reflect an outdated Washington consensus, his domestic policy agenda is (mostly) compassionate and wise. He pushes the wealthy to pay their fair share in order to grow the middle class. He vocally supports organized labor, and became the first president in history to walk a picket line.”

Condemning the “Anti-Trans[gender] Fervor fron the Far Right”

In February 2024, vanden Heuvel denounced state legislature bills that were seeking to: (a) prevent schools from giving young children access to sexually explicit books; (b) prevent schools and libraries from inviting drag queens to read stories to young children; and (c) prevent “trangender” minors from being able to obtain “gender-affirming care” in the form of puberty-blockers, hormones, and surgeries. Such “anti-LGBTQ bills,” she explained, were born of “anti-trans fervor from the far right” which ultimately led to “a spike in transphobic and homophobic hate crimes.” “Whether they become law or not,” vanden Heuvel added, “these bills have a regressive effect on queer life in America: anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech on social media more than quintupled after Florida passed its ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill.”[1]

Portraying the Capitol Riot as a “Right-Wing” Attempt to “Undermine Our Electoral Process”

In November 2022, she wrote that “it has become increasingly clear that the grave threat to American democracy posed” by the January 6, 2021 protest at the U.S. Capitol, was no aberration,” but in fact “was a prelude to a broader right-wing movement to undermine our electoral process.”

 

In October 2022, she lamented that Democrats’ “serious (and popular!) victories for working people haven’t necessarily boosted Democrats’ electoral prospects” in the midterm elections, because “on the campaign trail, Democrats have failed to offer a clear message about what they’ve done while in power to improve Americans’ quality of life.” “Instead, they find themselves playing defense on problems largely beyond their control — gas prices, inflation, crime — which leads to candidates looking for scapegoats for what’s going wrong instead of making an affirmative case for what’s going right.” “Research has also found that even though wages are up and unemployment is down, voters perceive that the economy is poor. A majority of Americans believe we’re in a recession, though we are not. And when people don’t realize that the government is helping them, anti-government conservatives benefit.”  She also said that “Democrats have bolstered people’s bank accounts” and “have made it easier for people to pay bills, care for their kids.”

In July 2008 she wrote that “American representative democracy is in trouble,” as evidenced by:
– “The Supreme Court recently upheld Indiana’s harsh new law requiring voters to present a photo ID or be denied their right to vote, despite its potential to disenfranchise many people. That was a green light for building new barriers to voting.”
-“The United States is the only democracy in the world that strips the right to vote from citizens who have done time in prison. Fourteen states permanently disenfranchise some citizens; in 2004, these laws stripped 5.3 million Americans with felony convictions–disproportionately but by no means solely African-American and Latino–of the right to vote, even after they had paid their debt to society.”
– “Many Americans who are registered to vote don’t make it to the polls. With only a single day on which to cast their ballot, working people often find themselves without the time to participate in the most basic ritual of our democracy.”
– “Turnout is further suppressed by the increasing obstacles voters face when they try to cast their ballots: whether it’s simply the failure to provide enough machines for voting to proceed quickly and efficiently, false notices instructing people to vote on the wrong day or at the wrong place, or bogus robo-calls to voters spreading disinformation and challenges at the polls–primarily targeting African-Americans–we confront a disturbing number of efforts to corrupt our democratic process.”
“The laws allowing voter challenges are the product of historic efforts to disenfranchise African-Americans.”
“In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’sBush v. Gore decision, which decided the election by awarding Florida’s electoral votes to Bush, a Gallup poll summed up fifty years’ worth of polling with the judgment that ‘a majority of Americans have continually expressed support for the notion of an official amendment of the U.S. Constitution that would allow for direct election of the president.'”
“How we wound up with such a convoluted electoral process is a complicated story, but one of the key elements was the desire of the slaveholding states to preserve the influence they had gained through the infamous three-fifths compromise, in which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning Representatives to the House. The Electoral College allowed those states to exert that same influence over the selection of the President.”
“Slavery is long gone, but time has done little to rid the Electoral College of its biases. Whether you live in the District of Columbia (whose citizens are denied voting rights in Congress) or New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago, the Electoral College blatantly privileges the votes of some citizens over others.”
– End the ‘Voter Fraud’ Fraud:    “For too many years, American politics has been divided between two types of people: those who want more people to vote and those who want fewer people to vote. Recently the Bush-packed Supreme Court issued a disturbing ruling in favor of the kind of law we’ve become all too familiar with. This time the offending legislation was from Indiana, which has mandated that voters present an official ID at the polls, putting even more obstacles in the way of people who simply want to cast a ballot….     Talking loosely about ‘voter fraud’ when we really mean election fraud helps reinforce the impression that the former is widespread. It is not. Voter fraud–the impersonation of a voter by another person–is extremely rare in the United States. Proposals to institute forms of voter identification, such as Arizona’s requirement that people present proof of citizenship in order to register, do very little to curtail fraud. They can, however, do an excellent job of disenfranchising the 11 percent of citizens–more than 21 million people–who do not have a government-issued photo ID. The cost of acquiring such identification essentially constitutes an insidious poll tax.”
– Re-enfranchise Citizens: “In the twenty-first century, the other America is behind bars, literally and figuratively: with one of every 100 Americans in prison, we are establishing a perverse parallel America–a predominantly nonwhite one–and making it permanent by stripping those consigned there of the right to vote…. Recognizing the right of ex-felons to vote would grant them the power to contest this status for others and help reintegrate them into society.”
– “There are other second-class citizens in our country. Most egregiously, the mostly African-American population of the District of Columbia is denied representation in Congress.”
– Popularly Elect Our Presidents:   “The President is the only elected official whose office is intended to embody the will of the people as a whole. And yet we still maintain the Electoral College, which can override the people’s will. We may have consigned the three-fifths compromise to history, but the Electoral College means that some people’s votes count less than others’. Reform is long overdue, and the presidential election process has vast potential for transformative change right now.      The transpartisan push for a National Popular Vote for President is gaining traction. It would allow for the nationwide popular election for President to be implemented without amending the Constitution. States would pass identical laws by which they agree to award all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all states and the District of Columbia. This interstate compact would go into effect only when it has been enacted by enough states–that is, those possessing a majority (currently 270) of the electoral votes. …”
– Adopt Election Day Registration: “Many voters are in effect stripped of their right to vote by our voter registration system. They discover only when they arrive at the polls that they’re not on the rolls, or they’re forced by bureaucratic bungling to cast a provisional ballot that isn’t guaranteed to be counted…. Short of abolishing registration entirely, allowing citizens to register up until–and even on–election day is one of the few measures guaranteed to boost turnout.”

 

 

 

In May 2022, she wrote that
“still today, countless Native American young people are being robbed of their chance to live safe and fulfilling lives. Currently, Native American youths are confined in the juvenile justice system at three times the rate of their White peers.
“What has funneled them there? First, poverty. More than 40 percent of Native children live in poverty — a legacy of the federal government’s impoverishing Native Americans as a matter of policy for centuries. Second, inadequate education. While the regime of brutal assimilation may have ended, it has been succeeded by an institutional indifference that has failed young Native Americans all the same. Underfunding, scant accountability and a lack of Native teachers have resulted in Native public school students graduating at the lowest rate of any racial group. In turn, dropping out of high school increases the chances of incarceration.
“Those odds are further compounded by disparities in health care for Native American youths. Combining a population overexposed to violence and trauma with the highest uninsured percentage of any demographic, plus a shortage of therapists and doctors, is a formula for tragedy. Indeed, Native teenagers die by suicide at a rate three times higher than that of White teenagers. Many more are left to self-medicate, often leading to arrests for nonviolent drug offenses.
“In short: The legacy of denying Native young people basic — let alone quality — education, health care and opportunities continues to this day. To end this injustice, our country has an obligation to support Native American youths even more fervently now after oppressing them for centuries.
“That can start with rooting out racism from the juvenile justice system….
“And by heeding the Indian Law and Order Commission’s recommendation that tribes receive full jurisdiction over cases involving Native children, we’d avoid sending Native youths to federal facilities lacking rehabilitative infrastructure. More fundamentally, we would restore tribal sovereignty stolen by the United States.
“When it comes to improving educational outcomes, the National Indian Education Association has advocated for an array of reforms. These include centering educational programs on Native American history and language, establishing common standards for measuring student progress, ending federal mismanagement of Native schooling, and granting tribes rightful oversight of their own classrooms. Of course, as a prerequisite for any reforms, Native schools also need drastic increases in funding.
“Native American health-care systems do too. The Indian Health Service provides health care to 2.2 million Native Americans, but the National Congress of American Indians estimates the IHS would need to double its funding to provide even the base level of care that federal prisoners receive. …
“The debt to the generations of abused Native American children can never be fully repaid. But we can begin to heal — by investing in solutions that free the next generation of Native youths from this painful past.”

Footnotes:

  1. As a Heritage Foundation report explains, the Left’s tactic of characterizing Florida’s Parents’ Rights Bill of 2022 as an allegedly homophobic “Don’t Say Gay” bill, was an egregious and malicious misrepresentation. Said the report: “Under the new law, school leaders must notify parents ‘if there is a change in the student’s services … related
    to the student’s mental, emotional, or physical health,’ and school officials may not ‘withhold from a parent such information.’  With reference to gender ideology, the law says, ‘Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.’  The media and radical gender activists are directly misrepresenting the law, falsely calling it the ‘don’t say gay bill.’ In fact, the law is no more than an effort to restore parents’ roles as the primary decision-makers for critical decisions about a child’s understanding of sexual biology and
    gender identity. The text of the law never uses the words ‘don’t say gay’ or even just ‘gay.’”

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