Buttigieg celebrates teen fighting Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law – Los Angeles Blade

LOS ANGELES – On May 10, 1933, students under the Nazi regime burned tens of thousands of books across Germany. These book burnings marked the beginning of a period of extensive censorship and control of culture in Adolf Hitler’s escalating reign of terror.

A writer, essayist, poet, novelist and one time professor of philosophy George Santayana, postulated in the twentieth century that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Yet, there are events unfolding and shockingly enough in the United States- specifically in the Sunshine State, in a parade of unceasing attacks on the LGBTQ+ community sponsored by its Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, while not burning books-yet, ban them and are working towards what appears to observers to be dedicated efforts to completely erase LGBTQ+ people from American society and culture.

Is the Nazi book burning too harsh of a comparison? Not exactly say some as illustrated by the example of far right conservative, Rabih Abuismail, a member of the Spotsylvania County, Virginia School Board who said “I think we should throw those books in a fire,” in November of 2021 referring to LGBTQ+ books.

Granted there is a significant amount of real estate between the Commonwealth of Virginia and the State of Florida, but those sentiments around book burning one source in Flagler County, Florida told the Blade were privately expressed as the local school board there banned LGBTQ+ books from the school system’s libraries.

Those actions however, motivated LGBTQ+ activist and Flagler-Palm Coast High School Senior, (then a year 11 student) Jack Petocz to fight back and organize other students across Florida to fight bans in their counties. “I just want to inspire other students to fight these book bans,” he said.

A Flagler County school board member is seeking criminal charges against school officials for allowing copies of the LGBTQ+ themed book “All Boys Aren’t Blue” to remain in two of the county high school’s libraries.

Board member Jill Woolbright filed a report with the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office claiming that book violates state obscenity laws. She is also demanding that three other books be pulled from the district schools libraries, “The Hate You Give,” “Speak”  and “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You.” Three of the four are written by Black authors.

“My concern is for the children of Flagler County. This book needs to be investigated as a crime in our media center. This is pretty heavy stuff, violating our own policies. That’s why I felt the need to file the report, so I know it will be investigated,” Flagler County School Board member Jill Woolbright said to local media.

Recently as a direct result of the infamous and controversial Parental Rights in Education bill, that forbids classroom discussion and materials relating to LGBTQ+ people, history, or even culture, which critics have labeled the “Don’t Say Gay” law that DeSantis signed in April of this year and took effect officially July 1st, educational resources in Florida were immediately throttled.

The Collier County Public Schools District in Southwestern Florida which includes the city of Naples, has placed labels that read “Advisory notice to parents” in capital letters on books available to students dealing with race-related and LGBTQ+ themes.

 As Duval County Public School’s K-12 students begin their first day of school Monday, they are returning to classrooms that have been stripped bare of visible support for LGBTQ students.

Last week, Duval County Public School’s leadership held an emergency meeting with all of the school district’s principals in which they were directed to remove all posters, wall decorations, and stickers that support and affirm LGBTQ students, the latest in a wave of what LGBTQ+ advocates say are censorship efforts in the wake of the Don’t Say LGBTQ Law (HB 1557) taking effect across the state.

The Washington Post noted that sex education has already been banned in Florida (as in many states) until the fifth grade. So critics say the law tries to solve a problem that doesn’t exist for the state’s youngest students. Because it limits even discussions about LGBTQ issues, it could stifle conversations for children who need to work through their own gender or sexual-identity questions, they say.

“It begs the question of whether a teacher having a picture of a partner on their desk, or being asked to be referred to as Mr. or Mrs., if that counts as classroom instruction on gender identity,” said Brandon Wolf, Press Secretary for Equality Florida.

Beyond the infamous ‘Don’t Say Gay’ measure, DeSantis and his legislative allies declared war on what the Governor derisively refers to as ‘woke culture’ and socialism passing a series of other laws which included one that restricts instruction about African American history, another forbidding teaching of ‘unapproved’ materials to include so-called instruction in ‘Critical Race Theory’ which has never been taught in any secondary or grammar schools.

 A career special education teacher in Escambia County, Florida resigned this past week just as classes were scheduled to start after a Escambia County Public School District staffer removed posters and pictures of historically significant Black Americans from his classroom.

Michael James, 61, who has taught special ed classes for the past fifteen years told Pensacola News Journal reporter Colin Warren-Hicks in an interview this week that he had emailed a letter to Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and Escambia County Superintendent Tim Smith in which he wrote that a district employee removed the pictures citing the images as being “age inappropriate.”

Images that were removed from the bulletin board at O.J. Semmes Elementary School included depictions of Martin Luther King Jr., Harriett Tubman, Colin Powell and George Washington Carver, James said.

NBC News Out reported on a case in Palm Beach County where Michael Woods, a special education teacher at a high school in Palm Beach County, Florida, said he used to have a classroom library with shelves of dozens of books that students could take home and read for fun. 

The library included the “Twilight” and “Harry Potter” series and a book called “Meg,” which is a thriller about a shark.

But when school started this week, the classroom library was empty. The books now sit in a school closet, in part because of new laws that restrict classroom instruction.

This past week the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported ahead of the 2022-23 school year, the Sarasota County School District stopped all donations and purchases of books for school libraries while it waits for additional guidance from the Florida Department of Education about how to navigate the effects of new education laws.

This included hundreds of dictionaries earmarked for donation from a Venice Rotary Club sit collecting dust, precluded from being given to Sarasota County students. Even dictionaries aren’t safe from the Sarasota Schools book freeze.

Hundreds of dictionaries that the Venice Rotary Club has donated to the Sarasota school system for years, have been held up so they can be properly screened under Desantis’s new law to ensure they don’t contain any improper material. https://t.co/qasphO2h7Z

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) August 19, 2022

Book bans and stilling the discourse in the state’s public schools is not the only part of a target rich environment for the governor. Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, an elected Florida prosecutor removed from office by DeSantis for signing a national pledge to not prosecute women and doctors for violating Florida abortion statues or families seeking treatments for transgender minors, filed suit Wednesday in United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida.

DeSantis’ office issued a statement two weeks ago saying: “We are suspending Soros-backed 13th circuit state attorney Andrew Warren for neglecting his duties as he pledges not to uphold the laws of the state.”

The lawsuit noted: “DeSantis’s Order does not identify any other conduct by Warren or other reason sufficient to justify a suspension.”

“What’s happening here is, he’s trying to throw out a free and fair election,” Warren said on CNN early Wednesday. “Even my 8-year-old understands this.”

The governor targeted trans youth in a series of actions bolstered by assistance from state lawmakers. Equality Florida, the state’s largest advocacy group for LGBTQ+ Floridians has consistently called DeSantis out for his seemingly authoritarian/autocratic governance.

A case in point says the organization as this weekend, the state Agency for Health Care Administration’s (AHCA) rule stripping Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care goes into effect, officially ripping life-saving care from thousands of vulnerable Floridians.

The rule, which denies Medicaid coverage for transgender healthcare, is part of a broader assault on health care for transgender Floridians that has engulfed state agencies and the legislature. 

“As it has been with these attacks across the board, the cruelty is the point,” said Nikole Parker, Equality Florida Director of Transgender Equality. “Gender-affirming care is lifesaving care. That care is now being shut off by a state agency that has been corrupted, weaponized, and stacked with extremists by a governor desperate to fuel his own political ambitions. For many, that will mean losing access to health care they have been relying upon for decades. The transgender community, like all people, shouldn’t have necessary care stripped away by extremist politicians working overtime to stoke right-wing fervor. This cynical attack is dangerous and puts the health of thousands at risk.”

The DeSantis Administration has also wielded the Department of Education against LGBTQ young people, with Education Commissioner Manny Diaz penning a memo informing school districts in Florida that they may disregard Title IX nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ students, issuing erroneous legal threats to districts who publicly affirm those protections. And last month, the Governor weaponized the Department of Business and Professional Regulation against an LGBTQ-owned small business in Miami, threatening to strip the restaurant of its liquor license after they hosted a drag performance at their weekly Sunday Brunch.

Assaults on gender-affirming care, while motivated by the Governor’s desperate desire for unchecked power, are taking a toll on Florida’s transgender community, with many expressing fear about how they will access the care they have been receiving for years. As AHCA’s rule goes into effect, it is critical to stress Equality Florida’s Brandon Wolf says that gender-affirming care, including hormone and surgical treatments, continues to be legal and available in Florida and that Medicaid coverage for regular office visits or mental health services are not impacted by this new rulemaking.

There are efforts to mitigate the damages being inflicted by DeSantis and his allies. The Don’t Say Gay law is now a federal court case, although no immediate actions such as an injunction has been taken.

In an interview published by The Hill in July when the law took effect, Equality Florida’s Wolf told The Hill that he worries that measures like this one will stoke division and worsen anti-LGBTQ+ violence, which has increased nationwide over the last year.

The law is also personal for Wolf, a queer man who survived the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016. His two best friends, Drew and Juan, were among the 49 people killed that night.

Wolf worries that measures like this one will stoke division and worsen anti-LGBTQ+ violence, which has increased nationwide over the last year. “It feels very ominous that in a state that saw the deadliest attack on LGBTQ people in this nation’s history … that we would be having conversations about erasing our history, our lives, our lived experiences from classrooms,” he said.

The world’s worst Veep episode never ends. https://t.co/YRiIG5oT9p

— Brandon Wolf (@bjoewolf) August 21, 2022

In the wake of the passage of Florida’s discriminatory “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” bill, extremist politicians and their allies engineered an unprecedented and dangerous anti-LGBTQ+ misinformation campaign that saw discriminatory and inflammatory “grooming” content surge by over 400% across social media platforms, according to a new report released by the Human Rights Campaign and the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

DeSantis continues to ratchet up the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric including remarks made in his press conferences and out on the campaign trail including other states.

This past weekend he was in Pennsylvania boosting the effort of the GOP nominee, Republican State Senator Doug Mastriano who has a document public record of anti-LGBTQ comments as well as expressing belief in QAnon conspiracy theories and has made Islamophobic remarks.

Politico reported that the rally at the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh was part of DeSantis’ national tour to bolster key Republican Senate and gubernatorial candidates who also have the backing of Trump. Last week, DeSantis spoke at rallies in Arizona for GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters and Kari Lake, the state’s Republican gubernatorial nominee. He is also stumping for GOP Senate hopeful J.D. Vance in Ohio.

Many feel that DeSantis himself though is an indicator of the just how far right the Republicans and more so conservatives are willing to go to cement the type of culture and society they envision, one that does not include LGBTQ+ people and limits truthful education of school children on the dark history of American racism and persecution against Blacks and other minorities.

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