My teenage son has been watching the show “Ted” lately. A couple of years ago, I watched the first “Ted” movie with him at his request. It was, um, not to my taste. I’m not a huge fan of blue humor, especially when it comes from a sentient teddy bear.
He showed me a clip of the family sitting around the table. Gayness comes up as a subject and the mother character chimes in that the father character always says, “College makes you gay.” My son thought this was very funny. And it honestly was.
It reminded me of one of my favorite movies, “But I’m a Cheerleader,” where the head of a conversion therapy camp, played by Cathy Moriarty, tells the parents of Megan (Natasha Lyonne), a teenage cheerleader suspected of being gay, “You almost lost her to college.”
That movie, with the premise that conversion therapy is stupid and abusive, came out in 1999. Here we are in 2026 and conservatives are still claiming that it’s possible for LGBTQ+ people, especially kids, to “pray the gay away.” And the extremist U.S. Supreme Court is siding with the bigots.
So does college make people gay? No, of course not. But it’s funny to joke about because there are people who actually believe this. Right-wing extremists have been sounding the alarm about higher education for decades, claiming that colleges and universities are too liberal, putting funny ideas in the heads of young people about equality and social justice.
This has accelerated under the Trump administration as exceedingly extremist ideas are being taken mainstream. Because education is a threat to extremist ideology. The more educated a person is, the harder it is to convince them that transgender people are a threat, that racism doesn’t exist, that Donald Trump is a good president, or that vaccines are bad and measles is good, actually.
So it’s not surprising that conservative extremists are going all out to make college less “woke,” going to great lengths to stifle free speech. And, yes, these are the same conservatives who threw a fit over free speech when students protested right-wing extremists holding events on their campuses. Remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter to make it a bastion of free speech? And now it’s a Nazi free-for-all? That’s the kind of free speech they like.
Recently, two different institutions of higher education made news for shutting down free speech, specifically free speech about LGBTQ+ ideas.
The first school is Texas Tech University, which “has implemented a sweeping new policy that blocks discussions of LGBTQ+ issues in classrooms and student assignments,” according to The Advocate.
“Instruction must not endorse fluid gender identity as an empirical biological reality that supersedes the two-sex requirement,” a memo detailing the new policy reads. “Nor may programs compel students to personally affirm gender ideology.”
In other words, teachers need to treat transgender people like UFOs, as if there’s no hard evidence confirming their existence and everyone who believes in them is part of the lunatic fringe.
Now, you might be asking yourself, “This school’s chancellor sounds like some sort of former Republican state senator who led the state’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education or something.”
And you would be right. That is exactly who he is. Living his dream.
Then there’s Pensacola State College preventing student journalists from publishing LGBTQ-related stories “because their LGBTQ+ content could violate Florida’s Stop WOKE Act.”
The stories in question were “a profile of a local drag queen, a piece on a queer bookstore, and a story about a community poetry club,” reports journalist Erin Reed. Downright shocking subject matter.
“The move to censor students from writing about LGBTQ+ people breaks with both recent and longstanding precedent, and the cited justification doesn’t even hold up,” Reed writes. “Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, prohibits public colleges from funding ‘advocacy’ for diversity, equity and inclusion and establishes a sort of Don’t Say Gay protocol that applies to colleges. But a federal judge blocked the law’s provisions, calling them ‘positively dystopian’ [and the] 11th Circuit affirmed that injunction in 2024, describing the law as ‘the latest attempt to control speech by recharacterizing it as conduct’ and calling viewpoint-based restrictions ‘the greatest First Amendment sin.’ The law remains enjoined to this day; PSC is censoring students to comply with a law it is not even legally required to follow.”
In other words, the Stop WOKE Act isn’t even legally enforceable. Which means the stated reason for the censorship is either a lie or comes from a person who doesn’t understand the law.
So, who knows? Maybe it’s part of the ongoing attack on higher education, or maybe it’s all just some silly li’l old misunderstanding.