Florida Republicans are breaking their own laws to silence teenagers
Florida Republicans are breaking their own laws to silence teenagers
Donuts are just too explicit, it seems
Welcome to a Wednesday evening edition of Progress Report.
We’ve got very different motivations, of course, and in this case, it is deeply untrue that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But if you read Donald Trump’s latest statement about Ron DeSantis, some of the facts and statistics (and not the racist stuff!) that he cites could have been pulled straight from some of the coverage here at Progress Report, my work at More Perfect Union, and SWORD.
Nothing makes me more frustrated than seeing the media helping to manufacture the nascent Trump-DeSantis feud, but I’ll allow it when it actually draws attention to DeSantis’s performance as governor, which has been horrible by all metrics, even if you put aside the seething bigotry (which you shouldn’t). We’ll continue to chronicle his failures and the everyday transgressions of his small cabal of unhinged weirdos — starting with tonight’s story.
Note: On Friday, we’ll also have a story about housing politics on, and this weekend, you can expect a bigger piece on the war between state and local governments and the outsized impact it’s having on tens of millions of Americans.
by Jen Cousins & Jordan Zakarin
Just as the banning of gender-affirming care for all children and adults on Medicaid proved that Republicans were never simply concerned with “protecting girls sports,” the hysterics of one prominent conservative activist on Wednesday made it clear that the GOP’s attacks on drag shows isn’t just about censoring explicit content.
Now, they don’t even let drag performers eat snacks and talk with kids.
Pressure from a conservative local board of education member and Ron DeSantis’s state board forced the Boone High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance to cancel a “Drag and Donuts” event that had been planned for Thursday evening after school. In doing so, the board likely made threats that exceeded its legal power, underscoring the fear that has been instilled in communities across Florida.
An Abuse of Power
There was no reason for the students that run the Boone County High GSA to think that there’d be any public reaction at all to the “Drag and Donuts” event that it slotted in for after its regularly scheduled meeting Thursday. The event was to feature popular Central Florida drag performer Mama Ashley Rose, who would appear in drag and talk with students about their experiences as a queer person over doughnuts and other refreshments.
The details were arranged so as to avoid all possible conflicts: The event had been previously been held at the school, was not scheduled during instructional hours, and was to be led by students, not teachers. No taxpayer money was going to go into financing the event, and parents had even given their kids approval to participate.
But none of that seemed to matter to Alicia Farrant, a violently bigoted member of the Orange County Board of Education who has been relentless in her denigration of the LGBTQ+ community and very willing to abuse new laws designed to cripple local public school systems.
Though it remains a blue bastion in increasingly red Florida, Orange County has not been able to fully avoid the growing GOP stranglehold on the state’s elected offices. Farrant exemplifies the shift and the impact it’s had already. She has promoted lies about trans students and referred to books with LGBTQ+ themes and characters as pornography, which she uses as justification to challenge their place in school libraries and classrooms. A member of Moms for Liberty and a close ally of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys, she has grown close with Ron DeSantis and has the ear of statewide conservative organizations.
Made aware of the planned event on Wednesday morning, Farrant immediately sprung into action. She took to her Facebook and Instagram accounts to proclaim that she did "NOT condone this type of event" and that "our schools should not be inviting drag queens to eat donuts with our kids.” There was nothing illegal about the event, but that did not deter state Board of Education member and DeSantis appointee Ryan Petty — a guy who often engages in Twitter feuds with high school students — from jumping into the fray. He tweeted the Orange County Public School system’s school board asking how such an event would be allowed, an inquiry that carried serious potential consequences.
By lunchtime, the state education regulator had called the school board with more explicit threats. While the district initially fought back, explaining all the ways that the event did not violate any law or honor any regulation, the Department of Education was relentless.
The district was told that if the event wasn’t cancelled, every educator and administrator who had anything to do with it would be investigated and face a third-degree felony charge for exposing students to something that was not age-appropriate, even if the state’s own secret agents could not find anything in a recent full-on drag show that could be categorized as obscene.
The Department of Education also demanded the name of the club’s sponsor, while the principal of the school was then forced to email parents announcing the cancellation of the event.
In doing so, the Department of Education operated outside of the scope of even last year’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which explicitly indicated that clubs and after-school activities were not beheld to the anti-LGBTQ+ law. In effect, the DoeE is breaking the law its current commissioner, Manny Diaz, helped to crack in the state Senate.
This brouhaha came on the same day that state Rep. Randy Fine, he of self-loathing anti-semitic metaphors and nasty Twitter fights, filed an amendment to HB1421, the bill that bans gender-affirming healthcare for minors.
The bill would require that ALL trans minors medically de-tranistion by December 30, 2023, overriding the state Board of Medicine’s rule that grandfathered in all minors who were receiving gender-affirming at the time of its passing. Fine’s amendment also sought to ban insurance companies from covering gender affirming health care for adults.
As expected, Fine’s amendment passed, and now Florida is about to be an entirely unsafe state for trans children and their families to live in. But at least they’ll be protected from having to eat donuts with a drag performer.
Jen Cousins is the co-founder and executive director of the Florida Freedom to Read project, which continues to fight these laws in court and in the community.
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Thank you for continuing to shine a light on the appalling abuses of power in Florida. This is in equal measure terrifying, infuriating and profoundly sad.