Culture wars don’t move many votes in Florida, but Gov. Ron DeSantis amply demonstrated last week how far he’ll go to please social conservatives in his re-election campaign over the coming year.
He’s been having news conferences all across the state for weeks, getting what campaign advisers call “earned media” by signing legislation sent to him by the House and Senate in the 2021 session. The ordinary stuff gets signed quietly in the Capitol, but the big issues that sparked the most debate — the new laws sure to draw challenges in court — get signed with maximum attention.
Vetoes:Florida Gov. DeSantis criticized for LGBTQ-related budget vetoes
Budget:Leon County money spared and vetoed in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ state budget
DeSantis goes somewhere and assembles a backdrop of smiling Republican legislators, some city and county officers and local activists, then records live campaign video as they all commend him for doing what everybody expected him to do anyway.
Last week, it was an education package that contains a provision forbidding trans-sexual women — that is, girls who were born boys — to compete in women’s sports. Then, a day later, DeSantis signed the $101-billion state budget with a relatively small number of vetoes, including one that axed $150,000 intended for mental-health counseling of survivors of the Pulse nightclub murders in Orlando.
He also red-pencilled $750,000 legislators had appropriated for the Zebra Coalition, an Orlando-based organization working to find housing for gay and trans-gender young people.
Considering the state’s multibillion-dollar surplus, those actions were a deliberate insult to gay voters and those who support LGBTQ Floridians. There’s nothing to be done about the vetoes but the trans-athlete provision will be challenged in court. Equality Florida, the state’s best known activist organization, started raising money for the lawyers and lawsuits as soon as the governor signed the law.
It’s hard to imagine any pressing need for these decisions. Vetoing the money for Pulse survivor counseling was as mean as it is petty; the trivial amount of money was intended for a good public purpose. And the state isn’t exactly overrun by guys becoming girls to play sports.
There was a time when conservatives thought it OK to just leave people alone. We even have language in Florida’s Constitution to that effect. But it’s not the prevailing philosophy among the heavy thinkers of the Trump-era Republican Party. Rather, there’s a belief that vulnerable people can be kicked around if it pleases the MAGA-hatted base, a segment of the electorate DeSantis shares with Trump.
Democrats, shut out of power in the Capitol for going on 25 years, howled that the sports bill was not just a solution for a non-problem, but a needless affront. To which DeSantis and the Republicans collectively replied, “Yeah, so…?”
Reaction to the bill-signing provided an interesting look at priorities of the Democratic Party and the news media, which largely coincide. Almost every headline, or the lead paragraph of every news story, echoed the Democrats’ outrage that DeSantis signed the legislation on the first day of Pride Month.
There are two possible explanations for this:
(a) DeSantis didn’t know it was Pride Month.
(b) He knew and meant to send a message.
Personally, I think it’s (a) but some politically smart friends around Tallahassee insist it’s (b) — that no symbolism escapes political planners, ever.
Tallahassee Mayor John Dailey proclaimed Pride Month last week. Across the street, you won’t see any rainbow flags above the Capitol cupola — certainly not while DeSantis is governor.
Gay concerns have made slight progress in Florida. There are a few gay lawmakers and several cities and counties have passed anti-discrimination ordinances.
But year after year, the Competitive Workforce Act, forbidding job discrimination on the basis of sexuality, is introduced without so much as a committee hearing. In 2008, Florida voters approved a petition campaign for a “marriage protection amendment,” which got nullified by the 2015 Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality.
From President Biden to the local level, Democrats side with the gay activists. Republican attitudes generally range from opposition to indifference.
The trans legislation passed the House but looked dead in the Senate, until it was revived in the final three days of the session and hastened to DeSantis. He could have surprised everybody and vetoed it, but that would have meant spiking several education features of the bill supported by the GOP leadership.
And, obviously, approving the competition ban offended only those who would never vote for him anyway.
Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat capitol reporter who writes a twice-weekly column. He can be reached at bcotterell@tallahassee.com
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