Under Tennessee bill, students would be taught marriage before kids as one key to success

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee’s public schools could soon be required to teach that the keys to a successful life include following a proper sequence of events: high school, job or higher education, marriage and then children.

It’s a proposal advancing inside the state’s Republican-dominant Legislature and similar to others moving in several states this year.

In Tennessee, the Senate passed the legislation 25-5 on Thursday. It has several steps remaining in the House.

“Some children are not privileged to recognize that or live within that,” said the bill’s sponsor, Republican Sen. Janice Bowling of Tullahoma. “And so in these classes, these children will be given this key to success.”

Republican proponents argued the so-called success sequence could help lift people out of poverty by delaying life events, such as getting married before having children. Democratic opponents raised concerns that the instruction could indoctrinate students about matters that should be personal choices while making students who have a single parent feel bad about themselves.

Republicans have brought forward similar proposals in other states, including Texas, Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio, according to an Associated Press analysis using the bill-tracking software Plural. In Utah, the governor has already signed a bill.

Several advocacy groups are pushing for the policy change, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

The Tennessee proposal would require that a family life curriculum in a public K-12 school include age-appropriate teaching about the “positive personal and societal outcomes” of the sequence. Under state law, parents can opt their children out of the family planning curriculum.

Sen. London Lamar is a Memphis Democrat, a single 34-year-old mother and the daughter of a single mother. She said she knows a lot of people born into two-parent households whom she has far exceeded in life.

“I think this bill is misguided, it’s very offensive, and I’m living proof that this bill has no merit,” Lamar said.

Republican backers of the bill say the sequence is a goal supported by research, but it is not an absolute for everyone’s life situation. Critics of the sequence have said it oversimplifies the various factors that keep people in poverty, relying on correlation without sufficient evidence of causation.