President Joe Biden criticized the Don’t Say Gay bill as “hateful.” After the Walt Disney Company vowed to fight the bill, DeSantis triggered a legal fight by dissolving the board running Disney World’s special taxing district and filling it with his own appointees. The Washington Post wrote:
Opponents of the law said it was vaguely written, which led to most school districts in the state interpreting it to mean that discussion and symbols of LGBTQ+ subjects — such as rainbow flags — were forbidden. Teachers were advised to remove photos of family members if they reflected a same-sex relationship, and student groups such as gay-straight alliances were canceled. At least one school district dropped its anti-bullying lessons because some of the scenarios involved gay students.
The Associated Press reported that since 2022, at least six other Republican-controlled states—Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, and North Carolina—have used Florida’s law as a model to pass prohibitions on classroom instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation.
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal lawsuit challenging Indiana’s law that is pending before the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In December, a federal judge temporarily put on hold enforcement of an Iowa law that bans some books from school libraries and forbids teachers from raising gender identity and sexual orientation issues with students through the sixth grade.
A Washington Post analysis of FBI data found that school hate crimes targeting LGBTQ+ people have sharply risen in recent years, climbing fastest in states that have passed laws restricting LGBTQ+ rights in schools. The settlement of the Florida lawsuit is a welcome development in this regard because it cancels some of the adverse impacts of the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation signed by DeSantis.
For the plaintiffs the settlement establishes guidelines that make it possible to “go ahead and say gay” in public school classrooms, the Tampa Bay Times wrote.
“What this settlement does, is, it re-establishes the fundamental principal, that I hope all Americans agree with, which is every kid in this country is entitled to an education at a public school where they feel safe, their dignity is respected and where their families and parents are welcomed,” Roberta Kaplan, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, told The Associated Press in an interview. “This shouldn’t be a controversial thing.”
Kaplan said that continuing the lawsuit would have delayed any resolution for several years. “The last thing we wanted for the kids in Florida was more delay,” Kaplan told the AP.
(If Kaplan’s name sounds familiar it’s because she led the legal team representing writer E. Jean Carroll in her sexual battery and defamation lawsuits against former President Donald Trump, securing nearly $90 million in jury verdicts.)
Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, said in a statement:
“Florida has already endured nearly two years of book banning, educators leaving the profession, and safe space stickers being ripped off of classroom windows in the wake of this law cynically targeting the LGBTQ+ community. This settlement is a giant step toward repairing the immense damage these laws and the dangerous political rhetoric has inflicted on our families, our schools, and our state.”
The AP described the terms of the settlement, which was filed Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta:
Under the terms of the settlement, the Florida Board of Education will send instructions to every school district saying the Florida law doesn’t prohibit discussing LGBTQ+ people, nor prevent anti-bullying rules on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or disallow Gay-Straight Alliance groups. The settlement also spells out that the law is neutral—meaning what applies to LGBTQ+ people also applies to heterosexual people—and that it doesn’t apply to library books not being used for instruction in the classroom.
The law also doesn’t apply to books with incidental references to LGBTQ+ characters or same-sex couples, “as they are not instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity any more than a math problem asking students to add bushels of apples is instruction on apple farming,” according to the settlement.
The free-expression organization PEN America—along with publishers, students, parents, and authors—has filed a separate federal lawsuit claiming that the Escambia County school district had violated their constitutional rights by banning books about race, racism, and LGBTQ+ identities.
“This is a step in the right direction, but the fight against this dangerous law continues—learning about diverse families should not be off-limits in Florida schools,” said Katie Blankenship, director of PEN America’s Florida office. “Thankfully, this settlement will bring books back to the shelves and restore open discourse on LGBTQ+ identity in our classrooms.”
Blankenship said the lawsuit would continue and PEN America Florida will observe what happens to classroom books that had been removed.
Even DeSantis admitted last month that some school districts had gone too far in accepting challenges to remove titles from school library shelves. The governor said he supported legislation to limit “bad-faith objections made by those who don’t have children learning in Florida.”
DeSantis’ office put a positive spin on the settlement in a press release, calling it “a major win” against “activists and extremists” because the law remains in effect and continues to prohibit instruction on sexual ideology in public school classrooms.
“We fought hard to ensure this law couldn’t be maligned in court, as it was in the public arena by the media and large corporate actors,” General Counsel Ryan Newman said in the release. “We are victorious, and Florida’s classrooms will remain a safe place under the Parental Rights in Education Act.”
The settlement is welcome because there is a link between school hate crimes targeting LGBTQ+ people and states with laws restricting their rights in schools. And there’s also the virulently anti-LGBTQ+ social media account Libs of TikTok. Vice News reported that in September at least 11 schools or school districts that were targeted by Libs of TikTok over anti-LGBTQ+ grooming conspiracies received bomb threats just days later.
The Washington Post wrote:
