When it comes to weed, abortion. and especially LGBTQ rights, the GOP’s big lies about small government are more brazen and dangerous than ever.

Hating on LGBTQ people is pretty much all New Jersey Republicans stand for these days and right now the entire NJGOP seems determined to portray LGBTQs as a threat to your kids. Their primary beef is with NJ’s public-school curriculum that teaches middle- and high schoolers about the contributions of LGBTQ Americans.

The curriculum teaches kids of all ages, including elementary schoolers, that LGBTQ people exist and that not all families look the same. It’s possible, for example, that one of their classmates might have two moms.

Here’s what a typical LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum looks like.

Remember that the next time a dishonest conservative tells you this curriculum is about sex.

No one in New Jersey tells bigger lies about LGBTQ people than Bill Spadea, NJ1015’s resident right-wing blowhard.

His entire morning talk show is often singularly focused on tossing LGBTQs under the bus to score political points. Bill Spadea. When he calls us predators it’s to dehumanize us to his listeners. When he tweets about “recruitment” of children, he’s lying because you can’t recruit someone to be LGBTQ any more than you can turn a gay person straight. Spadea knows that but it won’t stop him from spreading dangerous lies about gays and especially transgender Americans, a population that’s already heavily stigmatized.

Brielle Winslow-Majette is Garden State Equity’s deputy director.

“One of the greatest fears for transgender youth is not being accepted and having to live their lives in fear or in the shadows,” Ms. Winslow-Majette explained. “One in 5 transgender youth will find themselves homeless and 40% of transgender adults have reported a suicide attempt in their lifetime. A staggering 92% of those individuals have made at least one suicide attempt before the age of 25.”

These troubling stats are predicated on the lies and hostility trans Americans face on a daily basis from people like Bill Spadea and the NJGOP.

LGBTQ History

So what’s the LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum really about?

Did you hear the story about the gay guy who saved the world during WWII?

You might know that the Nazis systematically rounded up queer people (and those perceived as gay) for torture and extermination. And maybe you’ve heard about the Enigma machine, an encryption device used by the Nazis to protect military communications and, in turn, propagate their genocidal madness.

Did you know that a man named Alan Turing, a gay computer scientist (with a PhD from Princeton) ultimately cracked the Enigma code to turn the tide of WWII? Alan Turing’s reward for saving humanity from Hitler’s madness? He was prosecuted for being gay and chemically castrated by the British government in 1952.

He died by suicide two years later at 41 years of age.

In 2013, Alan Turing received a pardon from the Queen which followed an official apology from the British government for the “appalling way he was treated” which honestly sounds like the understatement to the century. Now widely recognized at one of the most consequential figures in modern world history, Alan Turing’s face appears on the British £50 bill, opposite the Queen herself.

That’s a lesson that NJ middle- and high school students can learn in history class nowadays thanks  to a curriculum that includes the contributions of LGBTQ people. This curriculum also gives our students a fuller version of history and teaches them to think critically.

This is not, as some GOP lawmakers want you to believe, some sinister gay plot to teach kindergarteners about sodomy.

Stand for Nothing,  fall for Everything 

So what does the GOP stand for these days?

For starters, they remain committed to Donald Trump, a man who grabs women by the (expletive) and brags about it.

Republicans also want to ban all abortions (all of them) and lock women up who terminate a pregnancy. In Texas there’s an actual bill to execute women who get an abortion. Conservatives want to force every pregnancy in American to term under threat of jail time or death but they still have the nerve to call gays radical?

Projecting much?

The Republican Party also wants to ban something called “Critical Race Theory” in public schools even though not a single public school in America actually teaches CRT, a lesson plan which remains the domain of law schools. So this is just another made up, ginned up controversy to excite rightwing voters by demonizing black people.

There’s nothing in the NJGOP program to materially improve our lives, nothing to lower inflation or help us save for retirement or send our kids to college or god forbid lower property taxes.

The GOP has nothing to offer.

No wonder they spend their time lying about LGBTQ people.

Jay Lassiter is a journalist based in Cherry Hill, NJ. He freelanced at NJ101.5 back in 2017-18, a stint that garnered a Gabe Pressman award for best news video story and the Truth in Media award from the NJ Association of Mental Health and Addictions Agencies, Inc.