3/29/22, 9:22 PM Florida's 'don't say gay' bill is just the beginning: Republicans want to claw back all

back all gay rights - Raw Story - Celebrating 18 Years of Independen…

Florida's 'don't say gay' bill is just the beginning:

Republicans want to claw back all gay rights
By Amanda Marcotte, Salon - Commentary
Published March 29, 2022

Florida governor Ron DeSantis. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Despite national outrage and threats from powerful companies like Disney, on
Monday, Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the infamous "don't say gay"
bill.

Proponents of the law continue to pretend that its limitations are narrow and only
prohibit "teaching" young kids about sexuality. In reality, however, the bill is so broad
and vague that it will likely be used to bully teachers and students from being out or
acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people. Contrary to claims that the law "only"
impacts the lower elementary grades, as Mark Joseph Stern at Slate points out, it's
worded in such a way as to allow parents to sue high school teachers for, say,
allowing students to form a Gay-Straight Alliance. Indeed, the impetus of the law
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was a case where parents wanted to sue the school for accepting a teenager's gender
identity.

Meanwhile, the mainstream press is still hamstrung by this fantasy that the courts
will swoop in and stop this.

In an opinion piece for NBC News, NYU law professor Daniel Putnam responded to
the law's passage with a piece confidently asserting that the law is unconstitutional
because "courts have consistently recognized that LGBTQ students and teachers have
a basic First Amendment right to express who they are."

It's a nice idea in theory. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has been captured by far-
right ideologues who have no respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, or
precedent.

There's currently a sitting justice whose wife was involved in a fascist coup attempt
— and that's just the tip of the corruption iceberg. The Republican-appointed
majority routinely ignores the plain letter of the law when imposing their right-wing
ideology, such as in recent cases throwing out vaccine mandates and tearing up basic
voting rights protections. The court recently signed off on a Texas law that bans
abortion in direct violation of Roe v. Wade by pretending that they had no authority
to block the "bounty hunter" provision that is being used to enforce the ban. Guess
what? The Florida law uses the same provision to enforce the "don't say gay" bill by
empowering parents to sue schools that allow LGBTQ staff and students to be out.

The right-wing court's total power and utter impunity is, in fact, empowering
Republicans to expand their war on LGBTQ rights. And the "don't say gay" bill is
likely just the beginning.

Recent events show that, in addition to the ongoing war on trans people,
Republicans are deeply interested in rolling back hard-won gay rights victories from
recent years, including same-sex marriage.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia tipped her hand to this at a recent Donald
Trump rally in Georgia, in which she bellowed that Transportation Secretary Pete
Buttigieg "and his husband can stay out of our girls' bathrooms." This statement led
observers to wonder if she was confused about which unhinged right-wing
conspiracy theory is which. The "predators in women's rooms" accusation is typically
used these days to demonize trans women. But of course, Greene doesn't actually
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Florida's 'don't say gay' bill is just the beginning: Republicans want to claw back all gay rights - Raw Story - Celebrating 18 Years of Independen…

believe gay men are scheming for ways to rape women. As Aaron Rupar of Public
Notice wrote, by mixing up her conspiracy theories, Greene was signaling that "all
the GOP talk about bathrooms was really just euphemized bigotry" that doesn't need
to make sense, even in their own lurid fantasies. Bathroom talk is just a new way of
calling someone the F-word.

It also, importantly, functions as a signal that it's not just trans rights that they're
coming for, but gay rights as well.

Greene has previously expressed a belief that violence is an appropriate response to

feeling threatened by the existence of LGBTQ people. In light of that, her recent
speech should be understood as a winking endorsement of gay-bashing. Nor is she
an outlier.

Republicans successfully distracted the mainstream media from it with the bizarre
QAnon antics, but a huge focus of GOP rhetoric during the Supreme Court
confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson last week were focused on
overturning Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized
same-sex marriage. Multiple Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, but
especially Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, asked Jackson a series of leading questions that
were about signaling to their religious right base that they are exploring legal
avenues to overturn that decision and invalidate same-sex marriages. That Cornyn
took the lead is no surprise, as he's the same senator whose prepared remarks before
the Heritage Foundation in 2004 compared same-sex marriage to marrying a "box
turtle." He and his staff has spent the past 18 years trying to intimidate reporters out
of recounting that fact, by noting that he dropped the line when he read the speech
out loud. There can be little doubt he meant it, however, as he also supported bills
meant to ban same-sex marriage. And, of course, he just used Jackson's hearing to
compare Obergefell to the infamous 1857 Supreme Court decision that upheld
chattel slavery. So, no, he hasn't evolved on his homophobic opinion, even if he tries
to be coy about it.

Obergefell was a 5-4 decision in favor of gay rights. Since then, two of the justices
who supported it have been replaced by Federalist Society-linked justices, who were
picked in no small part to issue anti-LGBTQ decisions. For those who are counting,
that means that if Republicans can find some way to relitigate the question, they
likely have a 5-4 majority to overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage, or at
least gut it significantly
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least gut it significantly.

In Texas, meanwhile, Republicans like Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken
Paxton have been waging an all-out war to block trans rights, by banning kids from
getting gender-affirming health care and even sending Child Protective Services
against parents who accept trans children's identities. They're also sending signals
that they feel confident they can expand this war to the LG and B folks, as well. In
response to the Austin Independent School District holding a Pride Week, Paxton
sent a threatening letter accusing the school of "cynically pushing a week-long
indoctrination of your students" and breaking the law with an "instructional effort in
human sexuality without parental consent."

Needless to say, none of the events in question constitute sex education, especially
of the how-to instruction that Paxton is implying is going on. (And let's face it,
teenagers already know the how-to part.) Events are based around themes like
"Differences are Awesome" and "Creative Expression." Paxton's letter is riffing on the
Republican fallacy that behaviors most people see as banal with regards to straight
people — such as having a prom date or attending a wedding — become "sexual"
when it involves LGBTQ people. By sending this letter, Paxton is attempting to
achieve the same ends as the "don't say gay" law in Florida: bullying schools from
allowing LGBTQ students to be out. He just isn't even bothering to go through the
legislature first.

So while there has been, rightfully, a great deal of attention paid in recent years to
how Republicans have "turned to" attacks on trans people, having lost the gay rights
battle, these moves by Republicans show that they don't, in fact, feel that their loss
on gay rights is permanent. On the contrary, there's a new escalation of attacks
against gay rights that most Americans assume are inviolable The right to be out, the
right to get married, the right to live your life safe from violence and discrimination
are now all at risk. Florida's bill is just the beginning.

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