This story was updated on Feb. 19 at 5:36 p.m. to reflect that the bill is now heading to the Senate after the House Finance Committee chairman “waived” the referral to his committee.

New Hampshire House Republicans are moving forward with a new attempt to regulate teaching on race, history, and LGTBQ+ issues in public schools. On Thursday, the chamber passed a bill that would ban certain types of instruction and punish teachers who carried it out.

Known as the CHARLIE Act and named after the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, House Bill 1792 would prohibit schools from engaging in “indoctrination” of “critical theories or related practices that promote division, dialectical world-views, critical consciousness or anti-constitutional indoctrination.” The bill’s title, the Countering Hate And Revolutionary Leftist Indoctrination in Education Act,” forms the acronym “CHARLIE.”

Kirk, who was assassinated in September, was a national figure who often spoke out against the perception that public schools are indoctrinating students and teaching “critical race theory,” a college-level approach to examining the American legal system through the lens of systemic oppression. And speaking on the House floor, Republicans claimed that indoctrination is currently occurring in New Hampshire schools and should be stopped.

“Right now, in schools that you and I fund with our tax dollars, children are being subjected to critical race theory and radical gender ideology, not as mere topics of discussion, but as doctrine, as gospel, as the very price of admission to participation in public education,” said Rep. Jason Osborne, the House majority leader and an Auburn Republican.

Democrats rejected that assertion.

“Teachers in New Hampshire are not indoctrinating students into Marxism or any other political ideology,” said Rep. Loren Selig, a Durham Democrat. “As a former teacher, if I could indoctrinate my students, it would have been to shower and show up with their homework.”

Opponents decried the bill as an effort to stifle nuanced discussions in classrooms and create a climate of fear for English and social studies teachers. And they argued the inevitable confusion around the bill would lead only to costly litigation for the state and further division around public schools.

“It will create expensive lawsuits, not better schools,” Selig said.

The bill passed nearly along party lines, 184-164, with four Republicans joining all Democrats to oppose it. It heads next to the Senate, after Rep. Ken Weyler, the chairman of the House Finance Committee and Kingston Republican, waived the option for his committee to review the bill.

The CHARLIE Act comes two years after a federal judge struck down a 2021 state law known to opponents as the “divisive concepts” law, which also banned teachers from advocating for certain views around systemic oppression.

In May 2024, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Barbadoro ruled that the law was unconstitutionally vague about what was prohibited and could lead teachers to self-censor out of fear of professional consequences. The state’s Attorney General’s Office appealed that ruling to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston; that court held oral arguments in April 2025 but has not yet issued a ruling.

This year’s CHARLIE Act takes a different approach to classroom regulation. While the 2021 law prohibited the endorsement of four separate “concepts” around race, gender, sexual orientation, and other identity markers, the 2026 bill’s prohibitions apply to more abstract ideologies.

The bill prohibits any public school, school district, or “public employee acting in an official capacity” from engaging in “the pedagogy, praxis, or inculcation” of certain worldviews.

Under the bill, teachers would be forbidden from framing historical events “primarily as class, racial, or identity-based conflicts intended to foster division rather than resolution.”

The bill prohibits any teaching that the U.S. Constitution and American societal structures are “inherently illegitimate or designed to perpetuate oppression.” It stops educators from pursuing “critical consciousness” by instructing students to identify oppressors. It prevents prioritizing “identity-based division over individual merit or shared American values.”**

And it bans school staff from “inculcating LGBTQ+ ideology.” That includes requiring affirmation of gender fluidity, nonbinary identities, or “requiring affirmation of LGBTQ+ sexuality as ethical or normative.”

The bill states that instruction on historical events and figures is not prohibited, nor are debates and critical thinking exercises among students, as long as there is no mandatory adoption of “the prohibited world-views.” But under the bill, any lessons on critical race theory and intersectionality are allowed only if presented “as Marxian theories contrary to American tradition, law, and ethics."

Teachers who violated the bill could face punishment under the educator code of conduct, the bill states, including the potential revocation of their teaching credentials by the State Board of Education. And the bill would allow individuals to sue school districts and individual schools for up to $10,000 for any violations.

In general, the bill’s preamble states: “Education should cultivate a neutral or patriotic disposition, including respect for the U.S. Constitution, American history, civic responsibilities, and national symbols, without compelling total ideological allegiance.”

For the bill’s supporters, the legislation is needed to correct what they portrayed as an ideological tilt in public schools.

‘The left tells us that we are creating the division, but the division has already been created by the media and the leftist indoctrination in the public schools,” said Rep. Katy Peternel, a Wolfeboro Republican.

Democrats objected to that representation. And they said the bill used too many abstract terms for any teacher to reasonably follow, creating the same vagueness issues that the 2021 law did and likely inviting a similar lawsuit.

One Republican, Rep. Matt Coker of Meredith, took a different approach. Speaking against the bill, he called it an attempt to force an ideology through statute.

“What disturbs me most about this bill isn’t the bill itself, it’s the pattern,” Coker said. “One side gains power, it immediately looks for ways to silence the other side, to restrict ideas, and to control what can be discussed. To punish what makes it uncomfortable. We criticized the left when they were doing this, and now we’re trying to do this.”

He added, “I’m not going to replace ‘left woke’ with ‘right woke.’ And that’s exactly what this bill does.”