Watch: Playwright David Mamet Says Male Teachers 'Inclined...to Pedophilia'

Playwright David Mamet, speaking on Fox News about Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, opined that male teachers are "predators" who are "inclined...to pedophilia."

"What we have is kids not only being indoctrinated but groomed, in a very real sense, by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators," Mamet declared on Fox News Sunday, according to NBC News.

The New York Post detailed that the 74-year-old playwright stopped short of saying that students were literally being "groomed" for sexual abuse. He said that while teachers are not "abusing kids physically," they are "abusing them mentally and using sex to do so."

Mamet went on to claim that "This has always been the problem with education – teachers are inclined, typically men because men are predators, to pedophilia."

"Mamet, who has been hitting the airwaves to promote his new book, 'Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch,' did not cite any source to back up his claims nor was his assertion challenged by host Mark Levin," NBC News noted.

The accusation that educators are "grooming" children by addressing LGBTQ+ topics in the classroom is a strategy the anti-gay right has adopted to short-circuit debate around measures like "Don't Say Gay," which specifically outlaws classroom discussion of such topics through third grade, but which also criminalizes such discussion in all grades if the subject matter might be deemed unsuitable for the developmental stage of the students – a vague provision that critics fear will lead to teachers sidelining and silencing LGBTQ+ youth and students with queer or transgender family members. The law also places a bounty on schools and teachers by encouraging parents to sue over perceived infractions.

Pushback to Mamet's comments was swift to follow. The Post noted that "The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's hot take has prompted widespread criticism," and the New York Times pointed to reaction on Twitter from theater stars like Colman Domingo, who encouraged "American Theater" to "Do your duty. Take out the trash. Buffalo's, Plows and all" – a reference to two of Mamet's classic plays, 1975's "American Buffalo" and 1988's "Speed-the-Plow."

The Times also noted that "culture writer Mark Harris wrote on Twitter, 'At a time of increasing threats to gay people, David Mamet has chosen to ally himself with the purveyors of a vicious ugly slander that will endanger teachers and LGBT Americans. It's inexcusable.'"

There are already reports of similar language being used in attacks on LGBTQ+ individuals and their families. One such incident took place this week, when a stranger reportedly accosted a 6-year-old child in a restroom aboard an Amtrak train and told the child that his gay fathers were "pedophiles." The man then confronted the child's parents and began shouting that they had "stolen" and "raped" their children – a verbal assault that the children's father, Robbie Pierce, detailed in a Twitter thread. Pierce said it traumatized both the couple's son and their 4-year-old daughter.

"We all know where that comes from," Pierce wrote in his tweets. "So thanks to Fox & Murdoch, JK Rowling & Marjorie Taylor Green, to the senators & priests & everyone else who harms kids & thinks it's politically expedient to project onto gentle families like mine to stir up their lucrative culture war."

Watch a clip of Mamet's comments in the Twitter post embedded below.