Soon Florida Parents Can Sue The Lunch Lady For Making Their Kids Gay With Veggie Burgers – Above the Law
(Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images)
Pity poor Ron DeSantis. He’s just trying to position himself for a presidential run by mashing that culture war button, but then his dumb friends had to take it a little bit too far, and now the whole country is laughing at him.
Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which purports to give parents more control over their children’s education, is a hot mess. The “problem” it purports to “solve” is that teachers and counselors are giving students space to discuss their sexuality without immediately outing them to their parents.
“We’ve seen instances of students being told by different folks in school, ‘Oh, don’t worry, don’t pick your gender yet,’” Governor DeSantis said Monday. “They won’t tell the parents about these discussions that are happening. That is entirely inappropriate. Schools need to be teaching kids to read, to write.”
And it would be bad enough if the law just said that schools had to refuse to speak to LGBTQ+ students about their challenges without outing them to their parents. As Transportation Secretary Buttigieg’s husband Chasten pointed out, this is a population of kids who already deal with catastrophically high rates of suicide and abuse, often because they are rejected by their families.
But the bill goes farther, making it illegal for teachers to acknowledge the existence of homosexuality at all.
A school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.
What is “age-appropriate?” What is “developmentally appropriate?” Who decides?
The bill answers none of these questions. But the penalty for getting it wrong is high, since the law authorizes parents to bring lawsuits for injunctive relief and attorney’s fees.
There’s similar confusion baked into the forced outing language:
A school district may not adopt procedures or student support forms that require school district personnel to withhold from a parent information about his or her student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being, or a change in related services or monitoring, or that encourage or have the effect of encouraging a student to withhold from a parent such information, unless a reasonably prudent person would believe that such disclosure would result in abuse, abandonment, or neglect, as those terms are defined in s. 39.01. School district personnel may not discourage or prohibit parental notification of and involvement in critical decisions affecting a student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.
Who is this mythical “reasonably prudent person?” What’s a “critical decision affecting a student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being?” S. 39.01 defines abuse, abandonment, and neglect, but gives no rubric for a school counselor to determine when and what she has to disclose. And if she gets it wrong, the parents can sue.
DeSantis, a graduate of Harvard Law, appears to have slept through the day where they explained “void for vagueness.” (Also the First Amendment.) But state Sen. Dennis Baxley is bravely driving a mack truck into the fog. Here’s a recap of yesterday’s Education Committee hearing on the bill by Equality Florida, which opposes the measure.
“Am I right to read that this bill would allow a parent to sue a school if their child requests a vegetarian meal for lunch and they are not consulted?” asked Delray Beach Democrat Lori Berman?
Apparently so, agreed Baxley. The proper place for discussions of alternative plant-based lifestyles is in the home. If little Johnny is coming to his teacher and saying that he thinks he might be a vegetarian, parents have a right to know! One day your kid is asking about soy pepperoni, and the next he’s mainlining tempeh behind the gym. Clearly the only solution to this problem is to authorize parents to sue the lunch lady for dealing Boca burgers to their impressionable offspring.
Do it for the children!
Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ bills, explained [Tampa Bay Times]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.