To All My Florida Friends… Watch Out!

We know two things; first, Republicans hate our guts and second, the Republican controlled legislatures will try to pass draconian laws against us.

Almost 600,000 LGBTQ Floridians Will Lose Civil Rights Protections if This Bill Becomes Law
Advocates say House Bill 3's passage into law could have "devastating" consequences.
NewNowNext
By Nico Lang
March 14, 2019

If a new bill in Florida becomes law, 598,000 LGBTQ people could lose employment and housing protections overnight.

This Thursday, March 14, the Florida House State Affairs Committee will debate House Bill 3, which would preempt local laws banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. After it was filed by State Rep. Michael Grant (R-Port Charlotte), HB 3 moved quickly through the House. It was approved 9 to 5 by the Business and Professions Subcommittee on February 21 in a vote that fell along party lines.

Should the State Affairs Committee give its thumbs up, HB 3 will have just one committee—the House Commerce Committee—left to clear before it receives a full vote on the floor of the Florida House.

LGBTQ groups say they’re worried about the bill’s chances.
[…]
While Florida is one of the 30 states in the U.S. without inclusive statewide protections for LGBTQ people, it leads the nation in nondiscrimination laws passed at the local level. Twenty counties and 11 cities in Florida offer civil rights protections on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity.

The Republicans claim that this law is not about LGBTQ+ people, that the bill is aimed at “sun tan lotion.”

But what’s curious about HB 3 is that it never mentions LGBTQ people. Its sponsor believes the legislation is necessary to prevent cities from passing local laws against suntan lotion.

“That is a concern across the state,” Grant told the News Service of Florida. “You cannot sell a particular best-named brand of sunscreen lotion in Key West because of a concern they have for an environmental issue, whether that’s real or not. Somebody told me today you’d need a half-a-billion people to jump in the ocean, all slathered in sunscreen lotion, to have an impact on the reef.”

It seems to me that they could word the law just to cover products and not people and not use the law as a smoke screen for discrimination.