With a civic life as corrosive as ours, there are various groups who face undue consequences: immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, women and low-income individuals. Perhaps the greatest victim of our toxic politics, a vulnerable cohort that intersects all those listed, are children — who cannot vote and are unwillingly subjected to a world, for better or worse, of our choosing.
And with our current state of affairs, it is definitively for the worse. Schoolchildren are being caught in Tennessee’s anti-immigrant deportation dragnet, as evidenced by a now-yearlong push from state Sen. Bo Watson, R-North Chattanooga, to target undocumented students.
Building since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the anti-vaccination movement, condoned in Tennessee by none other than Watson and many of his GOP colleagues, also particularly harms children as their parents forgo standard vaccination schedules. Such ignorant negligence has led to the worst measles outbreaks in decades among children around the country.
Tennessee’s GOP supermajority is fixated on indoctrinating the minds of the state’s young people — long an obsession of the political right — whether through voucher subsidies for unregulated private schooling or through the implantation of right-wing Christian ideology in public education.
A poster child nationally for the anti-LGBTQ+ movement, Tennessee has instituted a draconian law to restrict gender-affirming care for trans youth, a life-threatening policy known to increase the likelihood of suicide attempts.