One afternoon a few weeks ago, Alicea Hotchkiss’s 14-year-old son, Eli, came home from his high school in Tampa with a question about something a classmate had said to him. He’d heard the student use the word “gay” as an insult, so Eli responded the way he always does when this happens. “Hey,” Eli said, “my dad’s gay.” But this time, Eli told his mom, the other kid offered a startling rebuke: You’re not allowed to say that at school.
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When Eli wanted to know why his classmate said he couldn’t talk about his father at school, Hotchkiss, a mom of three boys who shares custody of the older two with her ex-husband, sat her son down and reiterated that there is nothing wrong with saying “gay.” But, she told him, a new law in their state means that if teachers talk about sexual orientation in certain ways, they can get in trouble. She had discussed this with her sons before, she says, but now Eli was experiencing the reverberations of the law for himself, and he stared at her, confounded. “But why?” he kept asking.Good for the Wapo for acknowledging there are real people here and this isn't just some asbtract debate about WOKENESS.