Leadership Quote by Tom Coburn

Coburn’s line isn’t aimed at describing schools; it’s aimed at manufacturing a crisis. By anchoring “lesbianism” to a bathroom rule, he welds queer identity to contagion and predation in one move, then treats that invented link as self-evident. The phrase “so rampant” does a lot of work: it conjures an epidemic without evidence, inviting listeners to feel besieged rather than informed. “They’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom” reads like folksy intelligence from the rumor mill, the kind of anecdote that can’t be checked quickly but travels fast because it’s vivid and supposedly “common sense.”

The real rhetorical payload lands in the questions. “Now think about it” performs confidence while preemptively dismissing counterarguments; if you disagree, you simply haven’t “thought.” “How is it that that’s happened to us?” shifts from a claim about a handful of schools to a morality tale about collective decline. The “us” is crucial: it draws a boundary around a presumed normal public and casts queer students as an external force invading the community, not members within it.

In context, this is late-20th/early-21st-century culture-war politics: sexuality framed as social breakdown, schools positioned as battlegrounds, and policy debates smuggled in through disgust and fear. Coburn’s intent is less to solve a school-management problem than to launder anti-LGBT sentiment into the language of protection and public order, turning prejudice into a parental reflex.