April 05, 2022 01:54 PM UTC

Heidi Ganahl Straight Up Lies About Sex Education

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

In case you haven’t been watching Fox News regularly or keeping up with the latest in Republican cancel culture, we need to lay out some context before we get to the meat of a story that includes Rep. Lauren “Q*Bert” Boebert and Republican gubernatorial hopeful Hiedi Heidi Ganahl.

Republicans want to cancel all things Disney because that company spoke out against the controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law recently enacted in Florida. Greg Sargent explains for The Washington Post — in a column featuring Boebert — about what has Republicans so salty these days:

Boebert, Vance and others are angry that Disney has come out against Florida’s new law restricting classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity. They are upset about a leaked video that showed a Disney executive talking about inserting pro-gay material into Disney content. Some have lobbed the vile charge of “grooming” at the Florida law’s critics, Disney included.

In response, the culture warriors want the government to rescind all policies that economically privilege Disney. Laura Ingraham insists that for woke companies such as Disney, “everything will be on the table” if Republicans take power.

In case this argument wasn’t clear enough, Arizona right-wing Republican Rep. Andy Biggs, who is the keynote speaker at the Colorado Republican Party’s big “Centennial Dinner” later this week, recently Tweeted out an image of Disney’s logo with a Soviet Union-style twist.

During a press briefing at the White House on Monday, this issue came up through a question from Fox News reporter Peter Doocy. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded with a question of her own that left Doocy speechless:

DOOCY: So, if you guys oppose this legislation that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in K through 3, does the White House support that kind of classroom instruction BEFORE kindergarten?

PSAKI: Do you have examples of schools in Florida that are teaching kindergarteners about sex education?

Doocy could not answer this question because there aren’t any examples of public schools teaching sex education to kindergarteners. Schools don’t teach kids about sex education in grades K-3, just like they weren’t ever teaching K-3 students about Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl has talked often about how much she was inspired by the 2021 gubernatorial campaign of Republican Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, particularly with how Youngkin used CRT as a bogeyman to scare parents into supporting his platform. The CRT thing isn’t really working here in Colorado, however, so Ganahl was eager to grab onto the next big lie about woke schools.

Listen to what Ganahl said on The Dan Caplis Show late last week when prompted to talk about sex education in Colorado schools and Democratic Gov. Jared Polis:

GANAHL: Oh, geez, Dan, I have a list running of I think about 44 different things that are just disgusting and terrible that he’s led the path for in Colorado, whether it’s the abortion bill or teaching our kids sex ed in kindergarten…

“Teaching our kids sex ed in kindergarten.”

HEIDI GANAHL IS MAKING THIS UP!!!

Polis isn’t responsible for sex education being taught to kindergarteners in Colorado BECAUSE IT DOESN’T HAPPEN. Schools don’t do this for a lot of different reasons, including one that is very obvious: It would be functionally ridiculous to teach kids about sex education (or CRT) when they just learning the alphabet and how to color between the lines on worksheets.

One of the things that made Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law so ridiculous is that students in grades K-3 aren’t being taught sex education anyway:

The Florida Department of Education told PolitiFact that sexual orientation and gender identity are not included in the curriculum taught in the state’s kindergarten through third-grade classrooms.

Similar nonsense claims in Colorado were debunked in 2019 when the state legislature passed a bill that included changes to sex education curriculums. It is up to individual school districts to decide how and when to incorporate sex education into the curriculum, but schools are not required by state law to even discuss the subject. Colorado does require that sex education must be age-appropriate, so what Ganahl is describing couldn’t happen anyway.

There are plenty of real issues that can, and should, be discussed in the 2022 race for Governor, but Heidi Ganahl would rather just make things up instead.