When ethics fails, the law steps in. In teaching, like a whole range of human endeavors, just a modicum of functioning ethics alarms would make restrictive laws superfluous and even unneeded. But too many people in positions of authority, power, influence and with the opportunity to do harm don’t possess functioning ethics alarms.

And here we are.

Trafalgar Middle School (in Cape Coral, Fla.) art teacher Casey Scott is a proud pansexual. I don’t see why that’s something to be especially proud of, any more than being left-handed or being a Yankee fan, but OK. Casey says her students were curious about her sexual orientation. This was none of their business, and her response should have been along those lines, but no: she felt inspired to explain to them that she was pansexual during a lesson in March, and that she was sexually attracted to pots and pans. Or something. It doesn’t matter what being a pansexual is, she wasn’t hired to teach students about it. (Pansexuals are attracted to all categories of people regardless of their sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.)

“A discussion happened in class and because of that, now I’m fired,” Scott now says bitterly. Oh, a discussion “happened,” did it? Right. The teacher triggered the discussion, allowed it, led it, and then had the students create flags representing their own sexuality and gender identities ranging from transgender and non-binary to gay.

When the first-year teacher posted their creations to her classroom door, the school told her to take them down. She ostentatiously ripped the flags to shreds in front of the class, and then she was fired. Good. Scott was on probation and not yet in the teachers’ union, and could be fired without the otherwise obligatory “investigation.”

Casey has miserable judgment and lacks the sense to keep her sexual issues out of class instruction. Teachers like her, be they narcissists, sexually obsessed, activists for LGTBQ sexual practices or just fools, cannot be trusted to teach children. Res ipsa loquitur.

Kevin Daly of the Teachers Union of Lee County says that the firing may be a wake-up for all teachers when it comes to discussing LGBTQ issues. “There is kind of a heightened state of where is the boundary? And what are employees supposed to do? Or allowed to do, when a topic comes up in discussion,” Daly said.

Well to begin with, unless the class is about sex, the topic of sex shouldn’t come up at all and there is no reason for it to come up. In my entire education career, the topic of a teacher’s sexual orientation, practices, and interests never were raised in class. Why would they be? LGTBQ fanatics keep saying that the Florida law threatens to “make LGTBQ individuals invisible.” Baloney. They can be as visible as anyone else, and like anyone else entrusted with teaching, they must be visible without making studies and instruction about their sexual interests.

Unfortunately, parents can’t trust teachers (and not just in these matters), because there are too many like Casey, intentionally or carelessly inclined to signal in class that they are just itching to explicate their sexual habits, and then feel entitled to make the lessons about them. Thus we end up with laws like Ron Di Santis’s “Parental Rights in Education” legislation, prohibiting teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through 3rd grade and vaguely prohibiting doing so in higher grades in “a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” It’s just an attempt to goose faltering ethics alarms. Ethics aalarms should make the boundaries obvious: sex and gender are not appropriate topics unless they are on the approved curriculum. Sadly, pansexuals (and others) with agendas have proliferated in the world of education.

Meanwhile, if parents want their kids to be introduced to pansexualism, transgender issues, man-boy sex, auto-eroticism, beastiality, the Kama Sutra, “The Joy of Sex” or any other fun stuff, they can handle it.

Why is that hard?