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The lack of any meaningful discussion of Florida’s dark and painful LGBTQ history is not surprising, however. “The state has become an unlikely laboratory for right-wing policy, pushed by a governor with presidential ambitions, noted the New York Times.
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Instead, much of the attention has gone to the presidential ambitions of DeSantis, an unabashed culture warrior. In trying to understand why a purple state like Florida finds itself in the current predicament, very little has been said about the state’s long history as America’s breeding ground for toxic anti-gay politics and how this history may have informed the parental rights bill. The controversy in Florida has also gone national with similar bills being considered by the legislatures of Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee. In retaliation, Florida’s legislature, acting on orders from DeSantis, revoked a law that for decades had allowed Disney to operate its businesses in Florida with minimal intervention from local authorities. Disney officials have publicly opposed the new law, arguing that “it could be used to unfairly target gay, lesbian, non-binary and transgender kinds and families,” and called for the courts to invalidate it. When parents can sue schools over any LGBTQ-related content they find objectionable, what exactly the bill bans is up to them.Since becoming law, the controversy over Florida’s parental rights bill has metastasized by pitting DeSantis against the Walt Disney Corporation, one of Florida’s largest private employers.
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It doesn’t change the facts of the legislation. Republicans can shout all they want that the bill doesn’t really ban teachers from mentioning gay people. If Republicans had actually wanted to ban sexually explicit material from the classroom, the bill would prohibit that, instead of instruction on “sexual orientation or gender identity”-which, as conservatives well know, encompasses not just sex but love, self-image, legal issues, relationships, community, culture, and history.Īnd if Republicans were only worried about very young children-the ones they consistently invoke in their dismissals of critics’ concerns-they would not have included language that prohibits any student, including older teenagers, from being taught about the forbidden topics “in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” This part of the legislation is intentionally vague, so as to create a chilling effect among teachers who know it will be nearly impossible to prove to an angry, lawsuit-wielding, DeSantis-voting parent that acknowledging the existence of trans people is “age-appropriate” for a high-schooler. Smearing LGBTQ people and allies as pedophiles (“groomers”) who become educators as part of an agenda to recruit young children into a particular sexual lifestyle is a demagogic tactic as old as homophobia itself. The Supreme Court Just Forced Maine to Fund Religious Education. It’s Time to Start Worrying About North Korea Again (Sorry) The Aftermath Was Absurd-and All Too Typical. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal ran an essay arguing that “the reaction to Florida’s law on parents and schools is overwrought” because the bill does not explicitly contain the phrase “don’t say gay.”
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Joe Harding, proclaimed that the media is lying by saying “that we were banning the word, that we were banning people.” The National Review has published several pieces accusing media outlets of “intentionally misleading” Floridians and “deliberately distorting” the bill’s mandate. Fox News called claims that the bill will prevent teachers from discussing gay people a “ media ‘disinformation’ narrative.” The bill’s sponsor, State Rep. But he’s in good company among conservatives falling all over themselves to declare that the bill will not do exactly what it was written to do. In fact, the very first page of the bill’s text states as its purpose: “prohibiting classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels or in a specified manner.”Ĭarney has since deleted the tweet.