The Montana Senate has already passed this law, and on Monday, a committee in the House of Representatives started hearings on it.
Right-wing lawmakers in Montana want to have all public employees take a course on diversity. In Florida, similar wording was just thrown out.
The “Montana Individual Freedom Act” would ban diversity, equality, and inclusion training that makes state employees think that a certain group of people “must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” for wrongs done in the past.
On Monday, a House committee heard testimony about the issue, and on Tuesday, the Senate voted along party lines.
Monday, the head of the Montana Human Rights Network, Angelina Gonzalez-Aller, spoke out against the measure in front of a House committee. He stated, “I find it strange and interesting that we are trying to make laws about how people feel.”
Gonzalez-Aller said last month, while the bill was being looked at by a Senate committee, “I do not doubt that this is just an attempt to censor based on a national effort to roll back progress on racial and social justice.”
State senator Jeremy Trebas pushed for the bill. He said that federal money for diversity education had turned political. Even so, he argued that his approach would keep party politics from getting in the way of Montana’s educational efforts.
Trebas says that the first stage in any training program is to make sure that everyone knows what the goals are. Once this is done, we can figure out who needs training and what that training should look like.
But a House committee has not yet finished its work.
Chris Young-Greer of the Montana Racial Equality Project said, “This bill is a gross misrepresentation of what is usually called DEI workshops.” DEI stands for the three ideas of diversity, equality, and inclusion, which are all interrelated. Diversity, equality, and inclusion (abbreviated DEI) are three ideals that are all linked to one another.
In a statement published on Monday, she added, “We try to highlight what each of us brings to the table from our very different and important backgrounds.” To embrace variety, all you have to do is accept and appreciate the natural differences among people. Equity is that everyone in the company has the same chance to gain from the way assets are shared. In this case, the word “inclusion” means that people from all walks of life are treated with the highest respect.
Opponents have said that the text of the law is the same as that of the Stop WOKE Act, which was approved in Florida in 2022 and is well-known.
After hearings, Trebas’s original motion was changed to make it clear that critical racial theory can be taught in schools. By doing this, we were able to answer a point that had been made against Florida’s statute, which resulted in it being thrown out in the end. Critical race theory may be used as a lens to look at the history of the United States.
Administrative statutes in Montana say that new hires have 90 days from the day they start to finish training on diversity and inclusion, equal opportunity, and how to stop the harassment. Every employee has to go through training once every three years.
Don Harris, a lawyer with the Department of Justice, said that the bill had the open support of the department.
The effort to control diversity training seems to have been sparked by executive orders made by then-President Donald Trump in September 2020, after protests all summer long over the unfair way police treated people of color.
The initial mandate said that any government diversity training that dealt with racism, sexism, or xenophobia had to be thrown out. He worked on it over time to make sure that no one could train the military, private military contractors, or anybody who got help from the government.
They cautioned that the judgment will make it difficult for corporations to fight racism and discrimination at work.
Trump’s order gave examples of this kind of training, like a presentation from the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History & Culture that said, “If you identify as white, acknowledging your white racial identity and its privileges is a crucial step to help end racism. Not everyone is born knowing that they are white. You could feel embarrassed, unhappy, confused, defensive, or even afraid.
Vice President Biden got rid of Trump’s second Executive Order on his first full day in office. After a court in California issued a preliminary injunction, federal workers no longer had to follow the order.