Farrant blasts LGBTQ+ proclamation before Orange School Board adopts it

The Orange County School Board this week adopted its annual proclamation declaring October as “LGBTQ+ awareness and history” month, but only after its most conservative member leveled fierce criticism at the 4-year-old initiative designed to make gay and transgender students feel welcome and supported at public schools.

Alicia Farrant, a member of the group Moms for Liberty who was elected in November, said she objected to the “+” in the proclamation, calling it an “all-encompassing” symbol that “according to my research” includes “leather pride,” “bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism,” and “many other sexual ideologies and perversions.”

Though couched as an anti-bullying measure, Farrant contended the proclamation was really a “push to normalize sexual promiscuity and sexual ideations at a young age.”

Several of her board colleagues said they were stunned at her comments, which they called “hateful” and misinformed.

“I’m almost speechless,” said Chair Teresa Jacobs when Farrant had finished reading from her written statement condemning the proclamation at Tuesday night’s meeting.

Gay and transgender students are among those most often bullied or mistreated, and the proclamation aims to help change that in Orange County Public Schools, Jacobs and others said.

“We want them to have one safe palace, one place that they can come, one place that they can be accepted, feel normal, feel welcome and, if we get it right, feel loved,” Jacobs said. “If that’s the sin we’re guilty of, I’m willing to wear it with a badge of honor.”

But Farrant said the board should focus on all children, not one “group that sees its sexuality different than the societal norms” and scrap the proclamation. She noted that the board was also adopting a national “bullying prevention” proclamation and said that should be sufficient.

She also complained that the same group got recognition in June, too. Since 2021, the board has recognized June as “LGBTQ+ Pride and Pulse Remembrance,” in honor of the victims of the June 12, 2016, massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

Farrant’s comments earned some cheers from a few audience members. But none of her colleagues supported her request.

Before her election, Farrant worked to get books whose sexual content she found objectionable removed from OCPS schools and in January tried, but failed, to get the board to change rules related to bathroom use by transgender students.

The board first adopted its October proclamation in 2019, with Jacobs as chair, and that year some schools put messages on their marquess that read, “OCPS Accepts Everyone. LGBTQ Awareness Month.”

Board member Maria Salamanca, who like Farrant was newly elected in November, is the board’s first openly LGBT member.

Farrant’s comments on the plus sign were full of “misinformation,” Salamanca said. “The plus is meant to hold space for parts of gender and identity we do not understand yet,” she said, not represent a “long list” pulled from the internet.

“Whatever you’re seeing in the plus is reflective of you, not of our community,” she added.

“I believe in liberty and letting people live the lives they want to live. This is what America is about,” Salamanca said. “Stop imposing your moral beliefs on everyone.”

To the audience, in the board chambers and watching online, Salamanca had a message as well. “I encourage folks out there to continue electing people who believe in freedom,” Salamanca said. “It has real repercussions when you put someone up here on the dais that says this hateful speech.”

An immigrant from Colombia who moved to Florida as a young child, Salamanca has said OCPS teachers taught her English, recognized her academic gifts and propelled her to success, Some also supported her as she wrestled with coming out to her Catholic family, she said at the board’s meeting.

The killings at Pulse make the proclamation all the more important because they happened “because one individual had so much hate for the LGBTQ community,” said board member Karen Castor Dentel. “It’s important that we take a stand.”

The proclamation means the board understands that “everyone has a right to learn” and then when students are bullied, harassed or belittled “for whatever their differences might be” that right is trampled, Castor Dentel said.

“This proclamation is actually less about LGBTQ individuals and more about our expectations for the behavior of everyone else,” she added. “Hopefully we can prevent the hate from taking hold.”