I've been trying to make sense of the antics on display at the Omaha Public School hearing about making changes to their thirty year old sexuality education program.
It had the hallmarks of a moral panic:
A moral panic is a public panic over an issue deemed to be a threat to, or shocking to, the sensibilities of "proper" society. This is often fanned by sensationalistselective reporting in the media and exaggerated accounts offered by "moral entrepreneur," a category that includes politicians on the make and activists in search of a cause. Moral panics can result in what is a real phenomenon being blown way out of proportion, or in what is not a real phenomenon in the first place being widely believed to be real. Moral panics often feature a caricatured or stereotypical "folk devil" on which the anxieties of the community are focused, as described by sociologist Stanley Cohen who coined the term in his study Folk Devils and Moral Panics, which examined media coverage of the mod and rocker riots in the 1960s.[1][2]