During his lecture at Iowa State University on Wednesday night, Ben Shapiro was asked how the Parental Bill of Rights passed in Florida doesn’t restrict the free speech of teachers. Here was his response:
“So, teachers do not have unlimited free speech rights in the classroom. End of story. Period. Teachers do not have the right to say whatever they want in a classroom.
“I’ll give you a perfect example, teachers are not allowed to worship with their students in their classrooms. Right? They’re not. According to the Supreme Court’s bad interpretation of the Constitution — you are not allowed to say a prayer, a public prayer in a classroom in the United States. So there’s lots of things teachers can’t do in classrooms.
“Teaching six-year-olds that boys can be girls and girls can be boys seems to me baseline of stuff you shouldn’t teach kids. By the way, I think they should extend that all the way up to 18 and maybe forever.
“If you want to jabber about this stuff on your own time that’s one thing, if you want to do it on the public dime that seems to me to be quite another. And when it comes to the teaching of minors, we have specific curricula and guidance for teachers. I mean, pretty much everything the teachers do is scripted to that curriculum. And so, the notion that teachers can basically talk about whatever they want in a classroom is crazy to me.
“On a general level, I don’t think that teachers should be talking about sex in the classroom with kids at all at any age. It’s amazing to me. This one drives me up a wall. How is that human beings were able to propagate for literally tens of thousands of years without some shmuck teaching them comprehensive sex ed? Without rolling a condom on a banana in sixth grade? Somehow human beings were able to propagate the species for tens of thousands of years. So this bizarre, weird idea that you need somebody who just got a teaching credential to be lecturing 13-year-old girls about sexual pleasure in a classroom is super weird and creepy. And that becomes even more super weird and creepy when you are talking about 6-year-old girls and then also telling them that they get to pick their gender.
“So, no, they have no right to express their viewpoints on this stuff in the classroom. They are hired to do a particular job. They are not the teachers’ kids, they are my kids and I delegate my kids under limited basis to those teachers. If I send my kids to summer camp and the people who are in charge of the summer camp promptly take my kids to a pornography store, I will immediately sue them and also there might be physical violence involved.
“If I send my kids to a public school and the public school immediately grabs them and starts calling them by a trans name and socially transitioning them and not telling parents about it, which is what was happening in certain schools in the state of Florida and around the country, I mean, to my mind that ought to be prosecutable. You’re not even allowed to give a kid in Advil in school without parental permission.”
