Senate Bill 656, known as the sexual content law, passed on March 2^nd of 2022, mandat­ing parental noti­fi­ca­tion of any sexu­ally explicit content in instruc­tional mate­r­ial and provid­ing alter­na­tive, non explicit mate­r­ial to any student whose parent so requests. Schools across the coun­try have been employ­ing censor­ship of books and content in educa­tional curricu­lums. Florida has recently passed laws like the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill and the “Stop W.O.K.E Act”, provok­ing mass removal of books regard­ing racism, gender and sexual iden­tity to suppos­edly prevent students from feel­ing guilt or anguish. In Virginia,  gover­nor Youngkin campaigned on elim­i­nat­ing divi­sive concepts like race in school educa­tion for the same ratio­nale of shel­ter­ing students from nega­tive trig­gers. Is Virginia begin­ning to follow Florida’s lead? 

Accord­ing to the law, sexu­ally explicit content is defined as “(i) any descrip­tion of or (ii) any picture, photo­graph, draw­ing, motion picture film, digi­tal image or simi­lar visual repre­sen­ta­tion depict­ing sexual bestial­ity, a lewd exhi­bi­tion of nudity, as nudity is defined in § 18.2−390, sexual excite­ment, sexual conduct or sado­masochis­tic abuse, as also defined in § 18.2−390, coprophilia, urophilia, or fetishism.” In accor­dance with the law, teach­ers must converse and deter­mine which parts of their instruc­tional mate­r­ial might have sexu­ally explicit content, flag these areas, and report them to the county. However, “The defi­n­i­tion of ‘sexu­ally explicit’ in Virginia’s law is so broad and vague that it could include books by LGBTQ+ authors and about LGBTQ+ expe­ri­ences.” (ACLUVA) Head of the English Depart­ment at Justice High School, Alison Mili­tano adds to this point saying “it’s not clear as to what [sexu­ally explicit] means…so we had to have many conver­sa­tions as to what counted as so.”

Many have argued that the law infringes on the abil­ity to teach by putting unnec­es­sary labor on teach­ers who have already been trained to teach complex subjects (XTRA). “Fair­fax already has a solid­i­fied system for vetting books: you have to have parent read­ers, you have to provide ratio­nale for why poten­tially prob­lem­atic content is impor­tant to teach…[the recent law] just seems like an extra step,” said Militano. 

The law is also argued to hinder free speech and dialogue, creat­ing a close-minded educa­tion: “This law has the poten­tial of elim­i­nat­ing discus­sions of race, culture, sexual orien­ta­tion, gender iden­tity, and how they inter­sect in the teach­ing of history, liter­a­ture, and health in our schools.” (ACLUVA) Senior Timo­thy Allen feels simi­lar about the policy’s poten­tial, “I don’t think it’s bad to be aware of when there is content that some may find objec­tion­able, but open­ing the door for that to be removed from every­one’s educa­tion is some­thing I whole­heart­edly disagree with,” said Allen. “I don’t believe we should be upend­ing our educa­tion and remov­ing the auton­omy of teach­ers to conform to the will of a few overly concerned parents.”