Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed the state’s Parental Rights in Education legislation, a bill banning classroom discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation for little children.
The governor promised Monday that parents have a “fundamental” role in the education, upbringing, and healthcare of their children, insisting that he will never cave to pressure from outside groups like Disney on this matter.
DeSantis noted that there has been much talk about HB 1557, pointing to “sloganeering and fake narratives by leftist politicians, by activists, by corporate media.”
While some critics have not read the legislation and are merely guessing what it says through their fake narratives, DeSantis said, “leftist politicians, corporate media outlets, some of these activist groups, they actually have read the bill.”
“And they are sloganeering because they don’t want to admit that they support a lot of the things we are providing protections against,” he said.
“For example, they support sexualizing kids in kindergarten. They support injecting woke gender ideology into second grade classrooms. They support enabling schools to ‘transition students’ to a ‘different gender’ without the knowledge of the parent much less without the parents consent.What they are doing with these slogans and these narratives, they are trying to camoflauge their true intentions.”
Leftist activists know that Americans overwhelmingly oppose indoctrinating children with sexual or gender ideology, DeSantis said, pointing to polling, like that done by outlets like the The Daily Wire and POLITICO, that showed most Americans don’t want gender identity being taught in schools
“Someone told me that there’s even people in Hollywood that are opposed to providing protections for parents and enforcing parents rights,” he added. “The one thing I’ll say about that: the people who held up degenerates like Harvey Weinstein as exemplars, if those are the types of people opposing us on parents rights, I wear that like a badge of honor.”
The bill has been wildly misrepresented as “Don’t Say Gay” legislation by critics who most notably taken issue with HB 1557’s statement that “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
Students in kindergarten are typically five years old, while third graders generally are eight or nine years old.
Nowhere in the legislation is the word “gay” mentioned, though the word “parent” is mentioned 32 times and the word “parental” is mentioned eight times. The legislation heavily focuses on parental notification and parental awareness of what children are being taught or exposed to in school.