Ron’s LGBTQ Obsession

Ron’s LGBTQ Obsession

-- Equality Florida Travel Advisory

On May 17, 2023, in front of a cheering crowd at Tampa’s Cambridge Christian School, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantissigned a slewof bigoted bills that target the LGBTQ community for discrimination.

One new law prohibits gender-affirming care for minors, with the governor referring to it as children being “mutilated.” Despite the governor’s distortion of the practice, gender-affirming care is supported by key medical associations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The governor also banned discussion of personal pronouns in schools with DeSantis’ snidely saying, “We’re not doing the pronoun Olympics in Florida.” Another law bullying trans students demands they use the bathroom of their birth sex.

DeSantis also targeted drag shows, preventing children from attending by deliberately mislabeling them “adult live performances.” The DeSantis regime intends to enforce the law by threatening to pull liquor licenses from businesses that don’t comply with his edicts. The initial result was Tampa Pride making the unwise decision to cancel LGBTQ Pride.

Additionally, DeSantis signed a bill defunding diversity and equity programs at public colleges and universities, drawing a robust round of news coverage

This was not the first attack by DeSantis on the LGBTQ Community. Not by far

On April 12, 2023, the statewide LGBTQ rights organization Equality Florida took the extraordinary step of issuing an advisory urging caution before traveling or relocating to DeSantistan.

Perhaps, the most alarming assault on LGBTQ Floridians is a new DeSantis law that lets medical providers deny service to patients based on their religious beliefs. Metro Weekly reports:

Instead of addressing Florida’s multitude of serious problems, Little Dic Ron spends a disproportionate amount of his time harassing and scapegoating LGBTQ youth and drag queens.

DeSantis piously frames his anti-LGBTQ attacks as efforts to protect Florida’s children. However, the governor’s reprehensible record on children’s safety tells a radically different story.

The Department of Children and Families, which was created to help youth who have suffered abuse, abandonment or neglect, reports “unacceptably high vacancy rates” and surging numbers of investigators leaving their jobs.

Between June 2019 and June 2022, the vacancy rate for child protective investigators (CPIs) jumped from 6.6% to 21%. During the same time-period, the turnover rate for CPIs swelled to a whopping 71% from 45%. And at the end of the 2022 fiscal year, more than half of CPI workers had less than two years of experience The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports:

DeSantis seems to have unlimited state funds to fight culture war lawsuits, but he habitually shortchanges the investigators charged with helping youth in crisis. The mind-blowing hypocrisy of DeSantis’ “protect the children” racket was laid bare by a Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald review of state financial transactions:

Additionally, the GOP’s “lemming legislature” is poised to spend an outrageous sum of $107 million in public funds to hand DeSantis his own private army that only answers to him. Plus, DeSantis has squandered$1.5 million on a digital driver’s license app that virtually no one is using or even knows exists

Instead of saving children’s lives, Little Dic Ron is funneling taxpayer money to rich lawyers and worthless vanity projects to boost his standing with social conservatives. His selfish desire to become president has taken precedence over keeping Florida’s mistreated youth safe and secure. That’s all one needs to know about the broken moral compass of an ethically-challenged governor who has cynically elevated his career over Florida’s children.

The governor’s homophobic efforts began in earnest with Florida’s odious Don’t Say Gay law (aka Parental Rights in Education Act). His staff falsely accused those opposed to his state-sponsored persecution of “grooming” children, a disgusting blood-libel designed to smear LGBTQ people and stir up hatred by insinuating that LGBTQ adults recruit youth.

The original Don’t Say Gay law prohibited instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten to third grade, although no such instruction existed. The real goal was to keep LGBTQ teachers in the closet, as well as humiliate schoolchildren with gay parents, by intimidating them into not to discussing their own families in class.

DeSantis deliberately conflates “sexualizing” with mere inclusion, to purge LGBTQ people from appearing in textbooks. That’s the case even though including gay parents in classroom instruction is no more inherently sexual than including heterosexual parents.

DeSantis lied when he said his law was designed to protect young children from being prematurely sexualized. If this were the case, DeSantis would no have expanded his “Don’t Say Gay” law to cover all grades, which includes students who are at an age where they are mature enough to handle conversations about sexual orientation and gender identity.

Clearly, this isn’t about protecting kids, but it has everything to do with encouraging bullying in schools, portraying LGBTQ identity as dirty, promoting stigma and erasing the existence of LGBTQ people from public life.

In doing so, Little Dic Ron is illegally indoctrinating students by imposing his fundamentalist religious worldview in taxpayer-funded schools. At the same time, he accuses opponents of indoctrinating rather than education. Other than backdoor proselyting and imposing his religious views on all Floridians, there is no justifiable or coherent reason for these bigoted laws. They do nothing to further learning, enhance education or create better citizens.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemned the revised “Don’t Say Gay” law. “It’s wrong. It’s completely, utterly wrong”, she said. Jean-Pierre called it “part of a disturbing and dangerous trend that we’re seeing across the nation” of targeting LGBTQ people. President Joe Biden called DeSantis’ actions “hateful.”

The New Republic wrote, that term “adult live performance,” is so vague even Republican lawmakers have admitted it could prevent a high school student from watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show or even the musical Hair.

To protest the “Don’t Say Gay” expansion, Equality Florida and the Social Equity through Education Alliance supported a coordinated student-led walkout at more than 300 high schools and colleges across the state.

While DeSantis likes to portray his law as promoting morality, a key Republican sponsor of the “Don’t Say Gay” law, former state Rep. Joseph Harding, pleaded guilty y to wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements in connection with COVID relief fraud. He faces 35 years in prison.

Maybe Little Dic Ron should spend more time overseeing Republican con artists than attacking LGBTQ students and teachers? His creepy fixation on LGBTQ youth has clearly affected his job performance and caused him to miss endemic corruption occurring right under his nose amongst his closest legislative allies.

DeSantis has also spent a great deal of time working to ban drag shows, an innocuous art form long enjoyed by the American people, including conservatives such as Donald Trump, George Santos and Rudy Giuliani.

It’s hypocritical and politically opportunistic for Republicans, who regularly take their children to Hooters after church services and have their kids order wings off the children’s menu, to suddenly mischaracterize drag shows as sexually provocative. It’s peculiar that while most Floridians are laughing at drag shows, DeSantis and his prurient supporters are lusting. Their depraved minds conjure imaginary sexual acts where none exist. We suggest they find qualified psychiatrists who can help them overcome their issues.

Of course, what they really object to, and find so threatening, is that drag queens teach tolerance at a time when DeSantis is preaching hate and division. Their lessons of kindness, inclusion and love vividly contrast with the nastiness and prejudice that Republicans are spreading throughout Florida.

While Little Dic Ron is taking autocratic actions to silence drag queens, the governor is allowing actual Nazis to run wild in Florida. That tells one all they need to know about the real values of Ron DeSantis.

But that’s not all. DeSantis is waging an especially heinous war against transgender Floridians. Like Soviet Stalin, the governor demanded a trove oof private information from 12 state universities about their students who receive gender-affirming treatments.

Devoid of science to back their lies about transgender Floridians, DeSantis and his puppets have turned to blatantly distorting the work of legitimate researchers and twisting their findings to fit their agenda. According to Equality Florida:

It is an outrageous abuse of power for the unqualified DeSantis to unilaterally override the best advice on treatment from medical associations to fulfill his political ambitions. This issue is about individual liberty and whether grandstanding politicians can be constrained from intruding upon our lives with the invasive stick of Big Government

If Little Dic Ron can arrogantly deny medical treatments for transgender people today, what’s to stop him from choosing your medication and access to medical services tomorrow?

The changing political climate is beginning to have an impact. While driving to work one morning in May, drivers on a palm tree-lined street in an Orlando suburb noticed something was amiss with a traffic sign. In bright orange letters, it read: “KILL ALL GAYS.” The authorities immediately took down the message, but the larger signal sent by Ron DeSantis to haters throughout the state is loud and clear.

The overreaching of Florida’s intolerant government caused Miami Heat basketball legend Dwyane Wade to move out of Florida to protect his transgender daughter, Zaya. In an interview with Rachel Nichols on her show "Headliners," Wade said:

When Florida is no longer welcoming to a beloved hero like Dwyane Wade and his family, Floridians should take pause and ask if DeSantis’ hostility is going to cause long-term harm to the cultural and economic vitality of Florida.