Sacramento, CA—California’s AB 5, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom, mandates that all certificated public-school teachers working with students in grades 7-12 must participate in five one-hour sessions of purported “LGBTQ+ cultural competency” training over a five-year period starting in 2025. Make no mistake, this is no run-of-the-mill vanilla professional development course. PRISM represents an extreme, coercive, and direct ideological assault on Christian biblical beliefs and practices regarding human sexuality. California’s so-called “Safe and Supportive Schools Act” is harmful, not safe, and it does not provide effective support for students experiencing LGBTQ+ confusion at school.
As is a pattern for California legislation, AB 5’s relatively tame statutory teacher training requirements became aggressively weaponized after the California Department of Education (CDE) tasked extreme leftist organizations with developing the uber-woke PRISM training modules. These groups include, but are not limited to, The Trevor Project, the ACLU of Southern California, the Human Rights Campaign, Advocates for Youth, Los Angeles LGBT Center, The LGBTQ+ Community Center of the Desert, Safe Schools Project, GSA Network, The OC LGBTQ Center, The Source LGBTQ+ Center, Alliance for Children’s Rights, and the California Teachers’ Association. Remarkably, no religious leaders or religious groups were consulted regarding how PRISM would impact religious public-school teachers, parents, and students.
This Orwellian PRISM training forces Christian public teachers to affirm and implement ideologies in the classroom that directly conflict with and undermine biblical teaching about human sexuality. This includes the indoctrination that traditional beliefs in the gender binary (male or female only) are discriminatory and bigoted, agreeing to affirm all student sexual identities and use personal pronouns, and lying to parents about their child’s gender social transitioning at school.
Fortunately, teachers do not abandon their First Amendment rights to Freedom of Speech (to be free from government-coerced speech) or religious Free Exercise at the schoolhouse gate as Judge Benitez recently ruled in the Mirabelli case. In addition, teachers who have religious objections to the PRISM training have the right to request a reasonable religious accommodation from their employers (see Title VII and FEHA). In fact, public school districts must reasonably accommodate religious objections to workplace requirements unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on the district, which PRISM exemptions do not.
To that end, the NCLP has developed a powerful and effective demand letter, advocating for teacher workplace rights protected by the First Amendment (Free Speech and religious Free Exercise) and related federal and state statutory reasonable religious accommodation requirements. The NCLP is receiving legal assistance requests and is effectively assisting Christian teachers across the Golden State. All of our clients have been exempted from PRISM training or offered much less coercive training options by their districts.
“The government has no legitimate place marginalizing, shaming, silencing, and demonizing the sincerely held religious beliefs of its good citizens, especially our dedicated teachers,” Dean Broyles stated. “California has been put on notice. State and local LGBTQ+ laws or policies do not supersede well-established federal constitutional rights or a public-school teacher’s right to be free from religious discrimination at work.”
NCLP in the News: Our friends at California Family Council wrote a hard-hitting article about this timely NCLP project (“We Will Not Bow”: Christian Teachers Must Claim Their Right to Refuse CA’s LGBTQ Loyalty Training), and the NCLP’s Dean Broyles was recently interviewed about CA’s PRISM teacher indoctrination on Newsmax.