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Rules committee recommends Senate Bill 1002 on school pronoun use, cites constitutional uncertainties
Summary
The Arizona Senate Rules Committee recommended Senate Bill 1002, which would limit teachers' use of pronouns and names for students under 18 absent parental consent, but the committee record notes unresolved First and Fourteenth Amendment questions.
The Arizona Senate Rules Committee voted to recommend Senate Bill 1002 as constitutional and in proper form after a rules office review found significant unresolved constitutional issues.
Tim Fleming, rules attorney with the Rules Committee staff, told members the bill would prohibit school district employees from addressing students under age 18 by a pronoun that differs from the student’s biological sex or by a name other than the student’s first or middle name in school records unless a parent consents. Fleming said the bill “regulates the teachers use of pronouns when they're referring to students.”
Fleming told the committee the measure raises multiple constitutional questions, including parents’ fundamental rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, student speech and expression protected by the First Amendment, and potential compelled-speech or religious-free-exercise issues for teachers. “The state of the law on the subject of pronouns is very much in flux right now,” Fleming said. “Different courts have been developing case law that leads to different outcomes, based on similar facts.” He added, “This is something that we're gonna learn more about over time, I'm certain.”
Fleming said the office could not confidently predict how courts would resolve those conflicts and that the bill presents “so many issues in a very compact space” that he expected it might be litigated. “We hope that this is the 1 that gets challenged so we'll know the answers,” he said, and otherwise described the bill as “improper form” only if courts found constitutional defects.
After discussion, the committee took a roll call. The clerk recorded five ayes and three nays: Representative Carbone (Aye); Representative Contreras (Nay); Representative Delos Santos (Nay); Representative Mathis (Nay); Speaker Montenegro (Aye); Representative Willoughby (Aye); Vice Chairman Carter (Aye); Chairman Hendricks (Aye). The committee’s action was recorded as a recommendation that the bill is constitutional and in proper form.
The committee record distinguishes staff legal analysis and committee recommendation from judicial outcomes: the committee recommendation does not resolve how a court might rule if the law were challenged.
