American Civil Liberties Union

Tennessee State Senator Stacey Campfield is well known for such antics as claiming AIDS resulted from “one guy screwing a monkey” and trying to weasel his way into the state’s Black Legislative Caucus.  But perhaps Campfield’s greatest source of notoriety is the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a nasty proposed law he’s introduced and reintroduced every chance he’s gotten during his nine years in the legislature.  In its earlier incarnations, the bill would have banned any discussion of sexuality except for heterosexuality in public schools up through the eighth grade.  This week, Campfield has brought “Don’t Say Gay” back yet again, with a misleading new name (the “Classroom Protection Act”) and a particularly disturbing new addition: The bill now seeks to require school nurses and guidance professionals to notify the parents of any student they work with who identifies as gay or questioning.

Today is Banned Websites Awareness Day – a designated day within Banned Books Week – which is sponsored by our friends at the American Association of School Librarians and designed to raise awareness of the overly restrictive blocking of legitimate, educational websites and academically useful social networking tools in schools and school libraries.  At the ACLU LGBT Project, this is a subject near and dear to our hearts, and today we’re releasing a new report about our work to fight back against banned websites. 

Last February, the ACLU LGBT Project launched the "Don't Filter Me" campaign to take on the problem of public schools censoring LGBT-friendly content on the web. Today — which just happens to also be Banned Websites Awareness Day — we released a report describing the enormous progress we have made in a little over six months. The "Don't Filter Me" campaign has been responsible for instituting major changes in school policy nationwide, and has influenced major web software filtering companies to change their products so that they do not block positive LGBT materials.