DeMint: If You Have Sex With Your Boyfriend, You Shouldn’t Be a Teacher

When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that my teachers had a personal life outside of the classroom. I'm not sure when exactly it dawned on me that, when three o'clock rolled around, the people who taught me to read and multiply stepped out to do their own thing, or when that recognition evolved into figuring out that this real life might include such activities as going to bars, drinking, dating, and even having sex. In New York City elementary schools, my favorite teachers were almost always unmarried young women who could reasonably be expected to do one or all of those things. Now that I know peers who teach youngsters, while also enjoying life as single young women, I have better insight into the probable lives of those cherished teachers. Reflecting on this as an adult, I'm glad their lives didn't revolve solely around bratty youngsters.

Of course, there's no reason why a kindergartner should know anything about a teacher's sex life. Whatever she did on her own time was certainly not a five-year-old's business. And whether or not my teacher was getting laid outside of marriage didn't impact her ability to teach me how to sound out words. Yet Republican Senator Jim DeMint thinks a woman's sex life has a significant bearing on her ability to teach. At a rally over the weekend, DeMint asserted that an "unmarried woman who's sleeping with her boyfriend ... shouldn't be in the classroom." He holds the same position on LGBTQ teachers: if they're openly homosexual, we can't let them near our children.

This statement by DeMint shouldn't come as a surprise, since he got into hot water over similar comments during his 2004 bid for Senate, when he said that gay individuals single, pregnant women living with their boyfriends should not be allowed in the classroom. When called out for his homophobia and attacks on single moms, he tried to backpedal without really apologizing, pulling the old "I shouldn't have said that" card rather than "what I said was wrong." Obviously, since he just said pretty much the exact same thing, he doesn't think it was wrong.

DeMint might wish that in addition to having a teaching license, women who want to spend their lives working for low pay educating children also have to report on the details of their personal lives and stick to his particular brand of sexual morality. But a woman's sexual choices with other consenting adults don't impact her worth as a teacher, whether that be sex outside of marriage with a man or a woman.

In June, I wrote about a teacher fired for fornication after her private Christian school pried into when exactly she became pregnant: just before or just after her wedding. Jarretta Hamilton, the affected teacher, has a lawsuit against the school for back wages and damages over public embarrassment that cleared its first hurdle when a judge ruled that the school did not have a religious exemption from federal discrimination laws. That event at a private institution was disturbing enough: for a senator to advocate the same treatment for public school teachers who engage in premarital sex is downright alarming.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore