It’s World AIDS Day. Since 1988, the first day of December has been recognized as a day on which to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and remember those who died because of the disease. Around the same time World AIDS Day was first commemorated, Iowa began requiring public schools to provide age-appropriate information about HIV/AIDS to public school students. That changes this year, as Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill into law that eliminated that requirement.
The change was included in SF 496, the education bill that was pushed through the Iowa Legislature with only Republican votes, but was overshadowed by the bill’s other provisions, which include a prohibition on “any program, curriculum, test, survey, questionnaire, promotion or instruction” referencing sexual identity or gender orientation in primary schools, preventing teachers from using a student’s preferred name or pronouns without written permission from parents if they are “different than the name or pronoun assigned to the student in the school district’s registration forms or records” — a provision clearly aimed at trans and nonbinary kids — and the wide-ranging school book ban.
On Tuesday, the ACLU of Iowa and Lambda Legal filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of seven and Iowa Safe Schools challenging the constitutionality of SF 496.
“The suit argues that SF 496 as a whole, and in its ‘Don’t say gay or trans,’ book banning and forced outing provisions, violates Iowa’s students rights under the First Amendment, the 14th Amendment and the Equal Access Act,” ACLU of Iowa staff attorney Thomas Story explained during a news conference on Tuesday.
On Thursday, another civil rights lawsuit against SF 496 was filed in federal court. The plaintiffs are four authors whose works have been removed from Iowa schools because of the bill — Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, Malinda Lo and Jodi Picoult — three Iowa educators and one current high school student, Penguin Random House, which is the largest publishing company in the country, and the Iowa State Education Association, a teachers union. The lawsuit specifically challenges the book banning provision of SF 496.
Neither lawsuit addresses the provision ending the requirement for schools to provide educational materials about HIV/AIDS. That section of the bill also ends the requirement to provide information about human papillomavirus (HPV), and the safe and effective vaccine to prevent it. HPV is spread through sexual contact and can cause cancer. The vaccine became available in 2006, and the next year the Iowa Legislature mandated students receiving information about it. (In 2007, both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office were controlled by Democrats.)
Many conservative activist groups have objected to schools sharing information about safe sex since the 1980s. And preventing people from getting accurate information about the HPV vaccine is a top goal of the anti-vaxxer movement.
Gov. Reynolds has never explained why she believes eliminating the education requirement related to HIV/AID and HPV is necessary, and the Republican leaders in the legislature have deflected questions about it during debates on the bill by pointing out it is still possible for schools to offer such information, it’s just no longer required.
