Our children don’t need to be saved, they need to be educated
Recently, the platform Libs of TikTok, founded and run by Chaya Raichik, engaged in doxxing an Oklahoma principal, sharing their name, information about their drag persona, alongside decades old criminal legal charges that were ultimately dropped and expunged. Doxxing is a regular part of the Libs of TikTok social media strategy, and this is not the first time they’ve targeted Oklahoma educators in ways that threaten the safety of all of the students in the schools where they work. State Superintendent Ryan Walters jumped at the opportunity to again harass a queer person as a manufactured threat. All while simultaneously rolling out the next stage of his platform, announcing Oklahoma is following Florida’s lead, establishing a partnership with PragerU, allowing propaganda videos to be shown in Oklahoma classrooms as if they were fact-checked educational materials.
How do we balance these multiple attacks on multiple fronts? The manufactured outrage around a principal performing drag, the very real threat of harm of a new wave of indoctrination-based materials entering Oklahoma classrooms, the ongoing threats to Tulsa Public Schools accreditation status and resignation of TPS Superintendent Dr. Deborah Gist. We do our best to acknowledge the ways these attacks are designed to overwhelm us, we uplift calls to action happening from communities most impacted, and we note that these tactics are not novel–we’ve fought these fights before. And won.
ID: digital collage featuring text from a history of 2STGNC+ being arrested for existing in Oklahoma City, alongside images from Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children movement, which, among other attacks, targeted queer teachers, attempting to remove them from schools. Text over the top “We have never been able to rely on the law to treat us neutrally. We have always had to make space for ourselves and our community.”
Same Message, Different Decade
Anita Bryant, best known for her hateful anti-gay Save the Children campaign is originally from and retired to Oklahoma. As we watch the #OKleg innovate new and awful ways to target harm at 2SLGBTQ+ Oklahomans, using rhetoric about protecting children, we want to remind you that protecting children is not now and has never been the goal. The policies may be new, but the tactic is rooted in decades old history, and we have defeated these tactics before.
Born in Barnsdall, Oklahoma in 1940, Anita Bryant started her singing career at the age of 4 in her grandparents' Tishomingo church. In 1958 she was Miss Oklahoma, and inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1966. In 1977 while living in Florida, Bryant began using her platform to attack queer folks. Just like politicians attacking us today, her manufactured concern for children was triggered by progress for our communities–in this case a nondiscrimination ordinance adopted in Miami, FL. Her work eventually became Save Our Children and later the Moral Majority, a Christian nationalist platform and the first organized opposition to the gay rights movement that spread across the country from California to Florida and everywhere in between.
These groups attacked queer people, lobbied against the Equal Rights amendment, fought against abortion access, and demonized human sexuality, especially access to pornography. After a divorce lost her much of her zealous base, Bryant moved back to Oklahoma City to continue to peddle her personal brand under a tax exempt Anita Bryant Ministries.
A key part of Bryant’s attacks focused on educators, suggesting that queer folks were recruiting children to be queer, especially by securing faculty positions in schools. And Bryant wasn’t even the first to use these tired tactics–we’ve seen the same arguments rolled out in history targeting alleged communists or the NAACP. This “moral majority” argument, meant to make folks in a Christofascist bloc view anyone as different as a threat to not only their power but their very existence. They attempt this by demonizing people because of their identities or belief, and targeting in the current iteration anyone who might be welcoming or affirming or even acknowledging the historical existence of 2SLGBTQ+ folks, especially transgender, nonbinary, Two Spirit, and other genderqueer folks.
If educators can’t do drag, where does the threat stop?
In the latest assault on public education, State Superintendent Ryan Walters and the legions of extremists he rallies through his car videos are now advocating for policing the social calendars of school staff, suggesting anyone whose hobbies don’t align with their politics deserve to be removed from the public education system. What kind of surveillance state are we moving towards when Oklahoma school staff have their every hobby under scrutiny from state officials? Drag does not pose a threat to youth, or to anyone, except the folks whose brand of bigotry relies on crushing any bit of individuality or performance that doesn’t align with the status quo of cishet patriarchal power. What kind of schools will we have if they can only be filled with administrators and educators whose politics align with State Superintendent Ryan Walters? That doesn’t sound much like a state that values freedom to us.
If Ryan Walters declares that no Oklahoma educators or school faculty can engage in certain activities outside of their time in school, why would we ever imagine the list he’ll enforce begins or ends with drag? We know that attacks on drag have frequently been proxies for attacks on anyone practicing any level of cisgender conformity, and that to threaten a principal because they are also a drag artist, is to threaten all 2SLGBTQ+ educators, school faculty, and staff.
We’ll note that when the attack on drag doesn’t hold, Walters and others have then brought up decades old charges that were dropped by the court against the principal being targeted. While we purport to live in a society where folks are innocent until proven guilty, in this case, while charges were dropped, never leading to a conviction or plea, and expunged, they’re still being used to perpetuate stigma decades later. It’s an issue the district tackled head on with transparency, and still, that information was treated as relevant by a far-right hate page that has made its mark in Oklahoma for doxxing people in school settings and the resulting threats of violence that make our school systems feel increasingly unsafe for students and faculty alike. In this particular case, these old, dropped charges are being pushed alongside extremist rhetoric that targets drag performances and drag performers, and is being used to extend the threat far beyond the walls of the Oklahoma school where this principal works.
The ongoing threat to Tulsa
While we’re seeing educators' hobbies threatened and materials from PragerU making their ways into classrooms, we’re also contending with the ongoing threat of accreditation hanging over Tulsa Public Schools. Though Ryan Walters and the appointed State Board of Education docked TPS’s accreditation last year for suggesting that teacher training materials they used shamed white people, this year, they’re dragging out the threat to continue to have a platform for rhetoric meant to rally Walters base, and govern by inciting fear in anyone whose policies or practices he might view as woke*, or we might view as accepting, accommodating, and basic decency rooted in best practices and the best interest of Oklahoma students.
TPS continues to face the blowback of being targeted by the State Department of Education, losing Dr. Deborah Gist as their Superintendent effective as of their September 11, 2023 meeting, and facing another check in with the State Board of Education at their meeting currently scheduled for Thursday August 24 at 9:30 AM, sometimes streamed on the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s Facebook page.
What’s next
We know these fights will continue to escalate in severity and volume. So, what do we do? We organize. We study queer history, and how we’ve defeated these movements before (because we have defeated these movements many times before). We join together, as a community, to fight for our most vulnerable 2SLGBTQ+ youth, and access to safe, affirming public education spaces. Whether you’re rallying September 11 at Council Grove Elementary for the the Western Heights School Board Meeting or in Tulsa for the ongoing fight at the Tulsa Public Schools Board Meeting, or taking action by contacting decision makers via email, opting your kids out of PragerU materials, or finding another way to show up in this work, we need you. Now is the time for action. Because we keep us safe. Because together, we can build the future where all 2SLGBTQ+ folks have the safety to thrive, in and beyond Oklahoma.
Additional Resources:
ACT UP NY civil disobedience training
Freedom Oklahoma School Board Information Kit
Protect Tulsa Public Schools Coalition
PragerU Parent Opt Out template (based on template from Florida Freedom to Read Project)
An ask from community members in the OKC area district where a principal is being targeted for being a drag artist:
Our Principal, Dr. Murnan is being targeted by Ryan Walters. WE NEED YOUR HELP!
If you could please attend our next board meeting at Council Grove Elementary 7721 Melrose Ln, Oklahoma City, OK 73127 on September 11th at 6pm, we would be grateful.
If you would like to speak on his behalf, please email
Latoya.Johnson@westernheights.k12.ok.us.
Western Heights School Board meeting information can be found, here.
ID: digital collage featuring photos by Stephanie Montelongo, Jessi Chapman, Katrina Ward, Allie Shinn, and Nicole McAfee. Text “We educate. We organize. We disrupt. We take care of us.”
A note on crisis resources
We acknowledge for 2SLGBTQ+ folks, the increasing hate-based rhetoric and violence targeting our communities has measurable impacts on suicidality. We want to amplify affirming crisis mental health resources, while acknowledging there is not enough access to affirming mental health support on the ground in Oklahoma. National hotlines that provide crisis support for 2SLGBTQ+ folks include: Trans Lifeline (877-565-8860), the Trevor Project (call 1-866-488-7386 or text START to 678-678), SAGE Elder Hotline (877-360-5428), and the LGBT Hotline (888-843-4564).
*while woke comes from Black culture and was predominantly used by Black Americans to acknowledge folks who were awake to their social responsibilities and/or privilege, many in the extreme right have co-opted the term as a derogatory descriptor of anyone whose ideology, values, or practices are mindful of anti-racist, 2SLGBTQ+ inclusive, or other inclusion. We use the term here to acknowledge this recent co-opting of the term and its frequency of use by the current Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters in the way he assigns the term to anything that varies from his personal brand of politics.