Question: What Party Says That They Are Business Friendly?

Question: What Party is telling business what they can and cannot say?

New GOP bill targets gender identity in the workplace
By Kimberly Leonard
November 22, 2023

A new bill targeting how people can use pronouns and identify in the workplace is stirring up backlash ahead of Florida’s legislative session.

The bill (HB 599), sponsored by freshman Rep. Ryan Chamberlin (R-Belleview), would block state and local governments — as well as nonprofits and contractors who get money from the state — from forcing employees to use preferred pronouns for transgender and nonbinary colleagues. Workplaces also wouldn’t be allowed to retaliate against workers who misgender others, including for religious or “biology-based beliefs,” a term the bill doesn’t define.

It’s not clear whether local governments have any of these policies in place now, but under the legislation if workers were to be penalized then they could complain to the Florida Commission on Human Relations.

Similar to another measure the Legislature has passed on racial relations in the workplace, the bill would block employers from requiring training on gender identity and sexual orientation as a condition of employment. It also says employees “may not” provide employers their personal titles or pronouns if they don’t match their sex assigned at birth.

“It is the policy of the state that a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex,” the bill says.

The last sentence says it all… this is based on politics and not science.

A New Florida Bill Proposes Expanding “Don’t Say Gay” to the Workplace
If passed, the law would prohibit trans employees from sharing their pronouns, among other stipulations.
Them
By Samantha Riedel
November 22, 2023

Not content to only target transgender students and staff during school hours, a Florida Republican introduced a state bill this week that would effectively expand Gov. Ron DeSantis’ infamous “Don’t Say Gay” rules to include government workplaces and nonprofits.

Now does Florida sound like they are business friendly, that just put businesses between a rock and a hard place. Title VII bans workplace discrimination and the Supreme Court (Trumps Court), Find Law wrote about the Bostock v. Clayton County Case,

In a 6-3 decision penned by Justice Neal Gorsuch, the Supreme Court held that Title VII protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination. It did so on a plain language reading of the statute, a judicial philosophy known as textualism. Justice Gorsuch was joined by one other Republican-appointed justice, John Roberts, and the four Democratic-appointed justices. Justices Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh dissented.

Secondly, the law probably violates the First Amendment rights on speech.

Advocates say the bill, if passed, could have dramatic consequences for LGBTQ+ organizations and individuals across Florida. Writing on Truthout, independent trans journalist Erin Reed speculated that the bill could effectively torpedo LGBTQ+ nonprofits and activist programs, comparable to Russian laws that outlaw gay and trans “propaganda.”

“Virtually every LGBTQ+ organization would be radically affected by [H.B. 599] and would likely have to shut down,” Reed argued, as it would be “nearly impossible” to continue even basic operations legally. “It would be a blatant power grab by the state targeting organizations critical to the government and would further drive LGBTQ+ activism and organizing underground in the state.”

The Republicans don’t care about the Constitution, they don’t care the laws, they only care about the annihilation of trans people, lesbians, and gays.

Last year the website The 19*TH* wrote…

How did trans people become a GOP target? Experts say it’s all about keeping evangelicals voting
The recent blitz of anti-trans bills may not align with what many Republicans believe, but party lawmakers pursue them on behalf of their most important interest group.
By Kate Sosin

“They have an interest in keeping the base riled up about one thing or another, and when one issue fades, as with same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage, they’ve got to find something else,” Balmer said. “It’s almost frantic.”

While many people believe that abortion was the issue that first galvanized evangelicals to the polls in the 1980s, Balmer points to a different issue. Paul Weyrich, an evangelical Christian who helped initially organize the “religious right,” had been testing out issues that would drive other evangelicals to the polls in the 1970s, Balmer says. Weyrich found it in Bob Jones University, a religious institution that was facing the loss of its tax-exempt status for refusing to racially integrate.

They are killing us for politics!

Survey: Anti-LGBTQ legislation takes alarming mental-health toll on queer youth
Stat
By Theresa Gaffney
May 1, 2023

Across the U.S., anti-LGBTQ legislation — and especially anti-trans legislation — is limiting queer youth’s access to everything from bathrooms to gender-affirming surgery. A new national survey from the Trevor Project paints a stark picture of the mental-health toll of these forces: LGBTQ youth consider and attempt suicide at alarmingly high rates, and nearly one-third say their mental health was poor “most of the time or always” due to anti-LGBTQ policies and legislation.

“LGBTQ young people are not inherently prone to increased suicide risk because of their sexual orientation or their gender identity, but rather they are placed at higher risk because of the mistreatment and stigmatization that they experience in society,” said Ronita Rath, the Trevor Project’s vice president of research.

Now businesses will have to decide if they will get the best and the brightest college graduates if they move to Florida. But one thing is certain, the Republicans are no longer business friendly. With the politicization of social issues, such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and climate change, some businesses are shying away from the party.