Mickey roared, and Governor Ron DeSantis roared back. Florida’s most notorious rodents have drawn the battle lines. DeSantis, who virtually sprays ambition, relishes the fight against the other mouse.
This epic battle of the mus musculi was inspired by Florida House Bill 1557, “An act relating to parental rights in education.” Don’t let the name fool ya. Under that anodyne title lies a bill laced with sinister intent.
The bill’s critics refer to it as the “don’t say gay bill.” They argue the legislature’s intent is not to protect parents’ rights, but to discourage any discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. DeSantis argues the phrase “don’t say gay” does not appear in the text of the legislation, which is true. But the bill contains the phrases “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” and the context is questionable.
While the bill does not explicitly prohibit school-based discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, it hardly encourages it. The only language addressing sexual orientation and gender identity is prohibitive. That’s a pretty clear message.
When coupled with provisions in other parts of the bill, the legislation’s dark consequences come into focus.
The first part of the legislation addresses parental disclosure. Paragraph 1 requires parental notification “if there is a change in the student’s services or monitoring related to the student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being and the school’s ability to provide a safe and supportive learning environment for the student.” Well, duh. But consider the language that follows, requiring that schools “encourage a student to discuss issues relating to his or her well-being with his or her parent or to facilitate discussion of the issue with the parent.”
Every experienced educator has a met a student who needed a trusted adult in whom to confide what the student was not ready to tell the parents. The appropriate response in most cases is not to perpetuate the concealment, but to support and comfort the students until they are ready to confront their parents. HB 1557 discourages that.
The next paragraph elaborates on this theme: “A school district may not adopt procedures or student support forms that prohibit school district personnel from notifying a parent about his or her student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being…” The bill’s authors know there may be risk involved (not unlikely if the disclosure relates to sexual orientation or gender identity). School personnel can withhold such information “if a reasonably prudent person would believe that disclosure would result in abuse, abandonment, or neglect.”
How many teachers know parents well enough to make that determination? You don’t get that perspective from parents’ night. More troubling, the “abuse, abandonment, or neglect” language is too narrow. It fails to address one of the greatest dangers facing students grappling with issues of sexual orientation and gender identity: self-harm.
The Trevor Project notes that “Suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people … with LGBTQ youth being four times more likely to seriously consider suicide, to make a plan for suicide, and to attempt suicide than their peers.” The bill ignores this danger.
The third paragraph forbids classroom instruction on “sexual orientation or gender identity” in grades K – 3. No school in Florida provides that. The same paragraph prohibits discussion of these topics in older grades “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” Since this is new legislation, the “state standards” that clarify this provision do not yet exist.
Here comes the punchline: Any parent who has “concerns” relating to the subject matter of the legislation can act on it. “Concern” is not a common term of art in the law and the bill does not define it. Parents can take their “concern” to a special magistrate that the school district has to pay for, win or lose. Or parents can take the district to court. If they win, the district must pay their legal fees and costs. Courts can also award monetary damages.
Nobody asked for this mess. Why is it happening? Back to the mice.
DeSantis, in flagrant disregard of the Peter Principle, wants to be president. A dim fellow with little fluency in actual issues, the Governor believes the White House can be won by scaring white suburbanites into fearing LGBTQ people and monetizing the fear into donations and votes. How else do you explain why right-wing talkers accuse opponents of the Florida bill as either being “groomers” or making life easy for groomers? HB 1557 was written in the ink of DeSantis’ ugly and divisive political aspirations.
When the bill passed, the Disney Company reacted like Sleeping Beauty: it kept sleeping. But Disney employees warned about the hidden dangers of the legislation. The company’s benign response, said the employees, “failed to match the magnitude of the threat to LGBTQIA+ safety represented by this legislation.” The employees demanded the bill be repealed, and the Disney company endorsed that. Employees also demanded Disney stop contributing to several politicians, including DeSantis.
That got his attention. On April 1, a date for which he is rapidly becoming the patron saint, DeSantis threatened to repeal legislation that grants the Mouse autonomy. Thanks to a bill passed in 1967, “the park oversees its own land use, regulates its own buildings, roads, and essentially provides the services a municipal or county government typically would.”
“Nice Kingdom you have there,” De Santis told Mickey. “What a shame if something happened to the Magic!”
© 2022 by Mike Tully
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The Wildfires of Earth Day
Earth Day brought a vibrant sapphire of a day. The sky was electric in its blueness and a light breeze massaged the foothills. I walked outside with my toddler grandson where a buoyant cardinal serenaded us from high up in the Aleppo pine. The neighborhood Palo Verde trees glowed with yellow spring flowers.
But this was not an idyllic Earth Day. The golden brittle bushes that transform our street into something out of a dream are missing this year. It’s been too dry. Last year at this time our front island was covered in Texas Bluebells. None of them appeared this year. The majestic Santa Catalina Mountains rule our northern view. The upper reaches are still bleached from the Bighorn Fire of 2020. That horrific blaze ignited in the far western point of the Pusch Ridge Wilderness, then burned its way to the east like a ravaging army. It took 48 days to burn nearly 120,000 acres.
We take wildfires personally. The Aspen Fire, which burned nearly 85,000 acres in the Catalinas in 2003, claimed our family cabin. The fire was so hot the cabin literally vaporized. We found nails lined up on the ground where they had fallen; the walls that held them dissolved in the inferno. I have a collection of melted glass in a vase in my home office, all that’s left of the cabin. On Loma Linda Road, street lights melted in the fire and looked like Dali’s clocks, silent stalactites presiding over death.
We never rebuilt the cabin. The forest is gone and may not return for centuries.
That’s what fire does; it burns the land back into the past. Some of the soil burned so hot it formed a crust that will resist new vegetation for decades. The Forest Service planted hundreds of trees to replace the ones that were lost, but they will take years to mature. The forest’s natural healer is the Aspen. They grow faster than pines and frequently become a replacement forest for lost Ponderosa and others. But even they cannot survive if there is no rain.
In the desert southwest we are in what climate scientists refer to as a 1,200-year drought. When drought attacks, trees and shrubs die. So do civilizations. Arizona and other states are home to ancient ruins, left to wither in the sun as their inhabitants left in search of nature’s most precious resource: water.
I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled! (Luke 12:49)
On Earth Day, wildfires burned throughout the west. Fires took homes and lives in Colorado and New Mexico. The annual fire season is starting earlier and ending later; soon, it will never end. Snowpacks in the Colorado Rockies and California’s Sierra Nevada are dwindling. In Arizona, Lake Mead and Lake Powell are threatened by drought. Both are falling dangerously close to “dead pool” status, when runoff no longer replenishes them. When that happens, electrical generators and agricultural canals will fall silent.
The drought in the desert southwest, like increasingly powerful hurricanes and more frequent and deadly tornadoes, results from human-caused global warming. The growing instability of the climate forecasts a Malthusian disaster. Many immigrants at our southern border flee the Northern Triangle countries, where children starved to death because the arid land could no longer nurse them. No immigration policy will reverse the migration. Congress can’t control the weather; it’s the other way around.
We have met the enemy and he is us. (Walt Kelly Earth Day Poster, 1970)
Human-caused global climate change is an existential threat to the human race. Civilizations will die and migration will expand. The need to curtail and reverse global warming is the most urgent issue in human history. It requires courageous, inspiring leadership. It requires giants – and we are blessed with Lilliputians. A twisted little man with a nuclear arsenal and an aptitude for genocide dominates the world’s attention. One of America’s major political parties values cultural warfare more than the planet our kids will inherit.
Our grandson was born during a pandemic, in the midst of a drought. What have we bequeathed him and his contemporaries? Most of us share the same aspiration, to leave our children and grandchildren a better world. How miserably we have failed.
I want Joey to grow up in a world fueled by love and understanding. May it be a world that brings him happiness and prosperity. But, more than anything, I want it to be a world where a cardinal still sings happily in the boughs of a pine tree.
© 2022 by Mike Tully
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