All public schools in Maryland will be required to teach about gender identity and sexual orientation under legislation passed Friday by the Maryland House of Delegates.

The bill updates the state’s existing health education framework, requiring local districts to add age-appropriate lessons related to creating a healthy lifestyle; safe internet and social media practices; and gender identity and sexual orientation.

Under existing law, the state’s health education framework already requires additional topics, including “family life and human sexuality,” “substance abuse prevention,” “safety and violence prevention,” and “disease prevention and control.” This bill doesn’t change that.

But in the existing framework, lessons about gender identity and sexual orientation are part of the family life and human sexuality section, which parents can opt their children out of taking, said bill sponsor Vanessa Atterbeary, a Howard County Democrat who serves as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. By making gender identity and sexual orientation a separate topic area, lawmakers prevent parents from opting out of those lessons.

Not being able to opt out of certain lessons was a major point of contention for House Republicans during Friday’s floor debate.

“There are people who say, I'm not sure exactly what the words will be and the lesson will be and the message will be, and I'd like to take a look at it, and if it doesn't work for me and my family as a parent, I'd like to hopefully, respectfully be able to say I'd like to opt my child out of that particular portion of the curriculum,” House Minority Leader Jason Buckel said as he explained why he opposed the bill.

Atterbeary said the bill responds to a decision by Carroll County’s Board of Education to remove lessons about gender and sexuality from its health curriculum, despite state requirements.

“The reason for this bill is to ensure that every jurisdiction in our state is compliant with the framework that the state board created,” she said on the House floor Friday. “Some jurisdictions said, we're not going to follow it. We don't care. We are not going to follow it. We are going to say to certain kids in our schools that we don't care about you.”

Atterbeary also highlighted the bill’s addition of internet safety to schools’ health curricula.

“We are going to talk about safe and appropriate social media and the internet, so when your kids are playing video games, talking to what they think is a 13-year-old girl and it's really some 49-year-old man in Connecticut, we're going to teach kids that,” she said. “We're going to teach kids that not everything that you see online on YouTube is factual, because that is where they're getting their sex education.”

This is the third year the bill has passed the House. It has never passed out of committee in the Senate.