Yeah, Right! I Don't Think So.

I think they are dreaming, Florida is not getting soft on us, if anything they have doubled down.

No more targeting LGBTQ folks: Florida settlement illuminates MAGA strategy

By NEW YORK DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL BOARD

March 15, 2024

In a federal court settlement this week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ signature “don’t say gay” law — which cost the state millions in business and led to the governor attempting to subjugate a noncompliant Disney — was dealt a significant blow. This comes as the legislature abandoned more than 20 other anti-LGBTQ bills in a sign of a changing tide.

DeSantis’ sleight of hand here was to represent the law as a very narrow targeting of certain kinds of specific speech at particular ages — the boogeyman of a pre-K teacher telling a 3-year-old that maybe they were a different gender, which is much easier to argue is improper.

In practice, that was a pretextual rationale for a much broader crackdown on speech; its vagueness was not a bug but a feature, allowing the background fear of running afoul of the law to push schools and teachers to take wide-ranging measures like hollowing out school libraries altogether.

This has become a facet of GOP policymaking on issues from speech and schools to voting to abortion — make the boundaries so hazy that compliance becomes untenable and people have no choice but to overcorrect, massively expanding the scope of what are supposed to be targeted restrictions.

The settlement does not completely overturn the law, but it takes direct aim at this fuzziness, ordering the state to clarify the exact delimitations of its restriction and ensuring that, at minimum, it cannot be used to ax references to LGBTQ themes or people altogether.

I don’t think that this is a victory for us, you can read about it on my post about the ruling. The judge totally ignored the First and the Fourteenth Amendments.

Conservatives have argued that their targeting of speech and rights are aimed at specific circumstances of concern and are not general displays of bigotry or use state power to advance socially conservative preferences. Setting aside the actual incidence of these supposed ills — voter fraud, for example, is vanishingly rare — more such settlements or rulings coming down will make this cover harder to hold.

The LGBTQ+ organization Equality Florida says this is a victory but I don’t think so, the only victory will be when the entire law is struck down!

Yet this relatively narrow band of largely academic, sociological and medical debate has been exploited to make LGBTQ people, particularly young people, a political punching bag. We should have long moved past discussions over whether categories of people are deserving of basic rights in the public sphere.

Until the children are able to talk about themselves with the fear of violence and discrimination we are still under the Republican thumb.

Until the stigma of being trans or LGBQ is wiped out we are sill being persecuted and second class citizens.