The year was 1977. Dade County had just passed a groundbreaking ordinance that protected basic human rights for residents of the Miami-Dade area, regardless of sexual orientation. Anita Bryant, well known for her singing and promotion of Florida orange juice, spearheaded a brutal, fearmongering campaign against it, under an organization named “Save Our Children.” She relentlessly brandished the baseless notion that non-straight people wanted to have sex with children or recruit them into homosexuality and compared them to pedophiles and perverts.
It worked — Miami-Dade voters repealed the ordinance. Across the nation, self-described “Christian conservatives took note, realizing that railing against the so-called “gay agenda” was a great way to energize their own political base. The cruelly successful campaign is credited with starting a wave of political persecutions across the nation that particularly targeted LGBTQ-plus Floridians.
Flash forward to 1986. The DeSoto County School Board banned three brothers, all under the age of 8, from attending public school after learning that they were infected with the virus that causes AIDS. The three boys — Ricky, Robert and Randy Ray — were hemophiliacs who contracted the virus through blood transfusions. The family launched a legal challenge and won. But someone burned down the Ray’s home, and the Rays finally gave up and left town. Throughout the entire, shameful ordeal, anti-gay crusaders ruthlessly linked the Ray family’s ordeal to their homophobic agenda — blind to the repulsion most Americans felt at the persecution of three little boys.
In 1998 the first of several lawsuits challenged an Anita-Bryant-era law banning any gay people from adopting. The plaintiffs: two nurses who wanted to adopt HIV-positive children placed under their care as foster children. As that case moved through the legal process, other gay people who wanted to adopt came forward. And as Florida officials fought to defend the nation’s only remaining ban on gay adoption, Americans watched yet another official, state-government endorsement of homophobia.
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In 2008, as other states were moving to recognize same-sex partnerships and marriages, Florida voters approved a comprehensive ban on both. It was a statewide referendum on cruelty, and shamefully, cruelty won. It’s worth noting that many business and industry groups came out against the amendment to the Florida Constitution, suggesting the state was gaining a reputation for hate so virulent it could damage Florida’s economy. There’s no way of telling how true that prediction became, partly because the amendment evaporated seven years after it passed, when the U.S. Supreme Court found that same-sex marriage was legal everywhere.
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Put this week’s events against that wretched historic backdrop, and they might seem too petty to notice. Tuesday — the second day of Pride Month — DeSantis signed a bill forbidding transgender girls from competing in girls’ sports. Then on Thursday, even as he spared more lavish projects, DeSantis killed funding for an Orlando project targeted at gay and lesbian homeless youth. He also erased funding that helped pay for counseling for families and survivors of the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub — just a few days before the commemoration of the shootings’ fifth anniversary.
Some Floridians may not see this as a big deal — but it is. Because the governor and (in the case of the transgender athlete bill) the Legislature took the time to specifically target and hurt people — not because they did something wrong but because of their sexual identity, or because they were family or friend to others who were LGBTQ+, or merely chose to go dancing one night in a place where the queer community was welcome.
Just because they were homeless, young and struggling with their sexuality.
Just because they wanted to play sports.
It may be petty but it is not insignificant. It shows that Florida’s leaders are still — after all these years — willing to go out of their way to reject and hurt their own constituents, though they have done nothing wrong. It’s ugly and it’s shameful, and it’s past time for it to stop.
Hear Pride resolution
Thursday, the St. Johns County Commission was hit with a lawsuit that claims Chairman Jeremiah Blocker broke civil-rights and open-government laws by refusing to put a request for a Price Month resolution on the agenda.
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The county could spend several months in court wrangling over the murky law surrounding this issue. Or Blocker could simply reverse the decision and allow the resolution to be heard.
This isn’t a political issue. It’s a human one and personal prejudice should not get in the way. St. Augustine and St. Augustine Beach have already adopted the resolution with little fanfare. The county should follow suit.
