Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Austin ISD clash over Pride Week events

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has accused the Austin school district of breaking state law with Pride Week activities that he characterized as attempts to indoctrinate students with liberal attitudes on sexual orientation and gender identity. "Liberal school districts are aggressively pushing LGBTQ+ views on Texas Kids!" Paxton said Tuesday night on Twitter, where he announced his campaign against the district's "immoral and illegal" Pride Week celebration, which began Monday. Austin school officials fired back, accusing Paxton of launching a misguided attack designed to score political points at the expense of students. "I want all our LGBTQIA+ students to know that we are proud of them and that we will protect them against political attacks," Superintendent Stephanie S. Elizalde replied on Twitter.

A social media-fueled backlash to this year's Pride Week also resulted in death threats against Doss Elementary School teachers and prompted the school to move Wednesday's pride parade indoors, with police present, "because we were actually worried that this political controversy could possibly threaten the safety of these kids," district spokesman Jason Stanford said. The Pride Week clash underlines increasingly sharp divisions over issues of sexual identity — a battle that has spilled into the courts over Paxton's opinion that gender-affirming medical care for transgender adolescents constitutes child abuse and into school libraries, where conservatives are pushing to eliminate books that they believe contain obscene sexual content, many of them with LGBTQ themes. The Austin district has celebrated Pride Week for at least 14 years, with 2022 activities to be determined campus by campus along broad themes, such as "Differences are awesome" for Tuesday and "Know your rights" on Wednesday. Paxton and other conservatives have focused much of their ire on Doss Elementary's published Pride Week agenda, which included the use of "community circles" — guided conversations on topics such as family and respecting differences.