A federal judge in Florida ruled against Disney in its battle with Governor DeSantis. The Disney Corporation sued Florida Governor DeSantis for violating its right to free speech. Disney spoke out against the governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. DeSantis urged the legislature to dissolve Disney’s governing board and replace it with a board appointed by DeSantis.
Disney sued, claiming it was punished for exercising free speech. Disney says it will appeal.
Now that DeSantis is out of the presidential race, America’s businesses will breathe a sigh of relief. Only in Florida will businesses be punished for disagreeing with the governor.
The federal judge in the case—Alan Winsor– was appointed by Donald Trump.
The Houston Chronicle reported on a study that showed one of the consequences of a state law that does not permit women who are the victims of rape or incest to obtain an abortion. In addition, teen births rose for the first time in 15 years.
That’s the highest figure among the 14 states with total abortion bans, with Texas having the largest population, according to the study.
“Survivors who need abortion care should not have their reproductive autonomy further undermined by state policy,” said one of the authors, Dr. Kari White, of the Texas-based Resound Research for Reproductive Health…
Following the June 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, the researchers estimated there were 519,981 rapes associated with 64,565 pregnancies during the four to 18 months after states implemented total abortion bans. Of those pregnancies, an estimated 5,586 occurred in states with exceptions for rape and 58,979 in states with no exceptions.
Of the five states with rape exceptions, strict gestational limits and requirements to report the rape to law enforcement make it harder for most survivors to qualify, the study said. There were 10 or fewer legal abortions per month in the five states with rape exceptions, the study said, indicating that survivors with access to abortion care still cannot receive it in their home state…
Behind Texas, the states with the highest totals were Missouri (5,825), Tennessee (4,990), Arkansas (4,660), Oklahoma (4,530), Louisiana (4,290) and Alabama (4,130).
As a woman and a mother, I cannot understand a law requiring a woman to bear her rapist’s baby. The child would be a daily reminder of a terrible act of violence. I know what my decision would be. Other women may feel differently. Each woman in that situation should be allowed to decide what to do.
This is a fascinating story about the woman known as “Jane Roe,” the named figure in the case that established abortion rights, but for only half a century.
The woman’s real name was Norma McCorvey. She wanted an abortion, did not get it, gave birth to a third daughter, worked for an abortion clinic, eventually was recruited by an anti-abortion group Operation Rescue and joined forces with them. Ultimately, she was used by both sides.
Although she changed sides, she never changed her belief that abortion should be legal in the first trimester.
For the latest installment of the NPR Politics Podcast Book Club, we interviewed Joshua Prager, author of The Family Roe. The book traces the history of American abortion politics through McCorvey’s life story. That story is one of both genuine conviction and opportunism, of sex and drugs and politics and class and fame and religion — all of which combine to create, as Prager puts it, a “uniquely American” tale.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Danielle Kurtzleben: While a lot of people have heard the name Jane Roe, I would imagine far fewer know the name Norma McCorvey or know much about her. How would you describe her to someone who is not well acquainted?
Joshua Prager: Norma was sort of the perfect person for me to tell the larger story of abortion in America through, because her life really was defined by a lot of the very same things that I think make abortion particularly fraught in America, particularly sex and religion and what she saw as the incompatibility or irreconcilability of those two things.
When she comes out to her church [and] her parents, that is driven home in very dramatic fashion when first of all, her mother beats her. But also, Norma goes across state lines with a friend of hers from school, a young girl. They’re about 12 years old, they check into a motel, the police are called. The girl alleges, as Norma said to me, that Norma tried inappropriate things with her, and Norma’s then sent away to a school for “delinquent children.” She bounces through these schools, and she decides she’s going to have a regular life with the white picket fence and all that. She gets married at 16 and gets pregnant right away. She later alleges that her husband beat her; that’s maybe the first of many, many lies.
She often re-imagined herself as not a sinner, but a victim. And she often was telling about these sort of horrible things she suffered, which she didn’t suffer. She begs her mother to take the child and later says her mother kidnapped the child — so it’s, again, another lie — and places that child for adoption.
Then, even though she’s gay and is having affairs with women, she’s also a prostitute at this time [and] is occasionally sleeping with men. She’s selling drugs. She gets pregnant again, places that child for adoption. Then she gets pregnant a third time, and that is the child that that becomes the Roe baby…
DK: I want to wrap up to ask you quite a big question. What do you think the story of Norma McCorvey and her daughters, especially the Roe baby, who is an adult now — what does that story illuminate about the fight over abortion today? Why is this relevant, beyond the obvious historical connections?
JP: Two things. The first is very sort of pointedly, dramatically in black and white terms. It’s often it’s a story about class. Right now we are such a divided country. We already were, but now literally, I step on this side of this of this state line, I’m allowed to have an abortion. I step on that side of the state line, I’m not to have an abortion. And often it is class that is determining who can and cannot have an abortion. And that is one very important thing that I think Norma’s story and the stories of her daughters bring to light.
The other is that, man, abortion is complicated. All four of these women [McCorvey and her three daughters] in their own ways had very nuanced and sort of ambiguous feelings about abortion. All four of them, by the way, were pro-choice and are pro-choice — the daughters, even.
Even the Roe baby, whose very existence owed to the unavailability of abortion at that time, feels that abortion ought to be legal. And so I do think our country would be better served if people recognized that and did not sort of just take the approach that “if you disagree with me, you are a horrible human being.”
After the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, some 16 Republican-dominated states have imposed near-total bans on abortion. In response, access to abortion pills has grown.
In this article in VOX, veteran journalist Rachel M. Cohen describes the numerous organizations that provide telehealth sessions with doctors who provide prescriptions, as well as supplying abortion pills. In addition, several Democrat-dominated states have passed shield laws to protect doctors in their state who advise women in red states.
A network of like-minded groups have filled the gap created by the Dobbs decision, making these pills easily available and inexpensive.
Taking a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol within the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy was already the most common method for abortion in the United States before the Dobbs decision, partly due to its safety record, itslower cost, diminished access to in-person care, and greater opportunities for privacy. The popularity of medication abortion has only grown since then:A poll released in March found majorities of Americans support keeping medication abortion legal and allowing women to use it at home to end an early-stage pregnancy. Another survey found 59 percent of voters disapprove of overturning the FDA’s approval of abortion medication, including 72 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of independents, and 40 percent of Republicans.
Immediately after Dobbs, the only way to obtain the pills by mail was through international sources, which took weeks to arrive. Now, however, the pills are available by mail in the U.S. and will arrive in days.
The e-commerce marketplace for abortion medication has expanded, and the cost for pills has fallen dramatically
Outside of telemedicine options, there are over two dozen e-commerce websites that sell and ship medication abortion to the US. This international supply chain has grown significantly since Dobbs and most of these sites do not require prescriptions and do not require people to upload their IDs or have medical consultations. Plan C has vetted 26 of these sites, including testing their pills to ensure they’re “real products of acceptable quality.”
The cost of the pills has dropped significantly, some for as little as $42-47.
Volunteer groups have sprung up, with some offering the pills for free.
Community support groups, also known as “companion networks,” have grown since the overturn of Roe v. Wade and now actively provide free abortion pills to people living in states with bans on reproductive health care. These groups, some of which can be found on sites like Plan C and Red State Access, mail medication abortion and offer doula support.
But what happens if the Supreme Court limits access to mail-order abortion pills?
While abortion advocates doubt the justices will go so far as to pull mifepristone off the market, as a federal judge in Texas attempted to do earlier in 2023, they are bracing for the possibility that the court might reimpose medically unnecessary restrictionson access, like bans on prescribing mifepristone via telemedicine.
Even if that happens, though, most of the aforementioned options for accessing medication abortion would remain intact. It’s not clear if the FDA would even abide by such a Supreme Court ruling, but if it did, providers using shield laws could still legally ship misoprostol to patients in banned states.
“A Supreme Court ruling wouldn’t affect the community-based networks, ProgressiveRx, or the e-commerce websites that sell pills at all, and so there would still be ways of getting mifepristone and misoprostol in the mail,” Wells said. “The Supreme Court could affect services like Aid Access and Abuzz, but they could also switch to misoprostol-only abortions and that’s what they’re planning to do.”
The rapid growth in the number of ways to access abortion pills and the planning to protect access in the future demonstrate that Dobbs will prove to be like prohibiting the sale or consumption of liquor. When the population has grown accustomed to consuming alcohol or getting an abortion legally, it will be impossible to ban it.
In 1986, Congress enacted a law that requires hospitals that receive Medicare reimbursements to provide medical care to patients having a medical emergency without regard to their ability to pay. The law is called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 (EMTALA).
Two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision reversing Roe v. Wade, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid released “guidance” reminding hospitals that they were obliged to perform abortions under the EMTALA Act, if the pregnant woman’s life was put at risk by her pregnancy. EMTALA, the guidance said, pre-empted state laws banning abortions.
Both the District Court in Texas and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that doctors and hospitals were not required to perform abortions by EMTALA and that federal law and guidance do no supercede Texas’s rigid ban on abortion. It further ruled that the pregnant woman and her unborn fetus had equal rights and that the woman “does not have an unqualified right…to abort her child.”
Thus, even if the mother’s life is in danger and even if an abortion is necessary to save her life, the doctor decides—not the woman—whether to perform an abortion. Doctors who perform abortions in Texas are subject to harsh penalties, including loss of their medical license and steep fines.
To hell with the women, they essentially said: we have to do everything possible to rescue those innocent, virginal fetuses who are as-yet uncontaminated by sin.
The Republican judges even refused to refer to a fetus as a fetus, instead calling it a “child” and claimed that, as a “child,” it’s entitled to an equal level of life-saving care as is provided to the woman carrying it.
In other words, do everything possible to stabilize and thus save the fetus, even if that further endangers the life of the mother.
Their rationale was that fetuses aren’t mentioned in EMTALA, so therefore they must be children, and “children” are just as worthy saving as mom.
This decision will cause the deaths of women whose pregnancies endanger their lives. Yrs, women do die in childbirth, but not so often in civilized societies. These women may have other children who love them and depend on them, but the white guys in judicial robes concluded: Save the fetus above all.
You may recall Katie Cox, the 31-year-old pregnant mother in Dallas who sought court permission to have an abortion when she learned that her fetus had a rare condition called trisomy 18. Her doctors told her that the fetus might die in her womb or within minutes, hours or days after it was born. She might not be able to give birth in the future. The court gave her permission to obtain an abortion but State Attorney General Ken Paxton said any doctor who performed an abortion for Mrs. Cox would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Paxton didn’t need to act, however, because the Texas Supreme Court ruled that she was eligible to have an abortion. Katie Cox left Texas and had an abortion in New Mexico.
What’s clear from all this is that the provision in the Texas law that allows an abortion in dire circumstances , such as the danger to a woman’s life, is inactive, meaningless, moot.
Thanks to blogger Billy Townsend, I learned about the Florida Center for Government Accountability and its publication, The Florida Trident. This organization shines a bright light on government corruption. I am sending a donation to encourage their great work.
Just when Florida’s forces of gross grift seem to enjoy total impunity, the Florida Center for Government Accountability takes down the Zieglers, beats DeSantis in court, and becomes a new sheriff.
FCGA uncovered the scandalous Ziegler family threesome, which led to Christian Ziegler being forced out as state chair of the GOP and caused some embarrassing moments for his wife Bridget, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and an outspoken critic of gays.
FCGA recently posted about the state’s deceptive marketing to women who search for abortion providers on the Internet. If they choose an “abortion center” funded by the state, they will fall into the clutches of anti-abortion zealots, likely evangelicals, who will try to persuade them not to have an abortion.
An image from a state-funded anti-abortion center website.
When Abby learned she was pregnant, the first thing she did was look online for support. As a college student in a small town in northwest Florida, she thought the Internet was her best hope to find help for her unplanned pregnancy with a boyfriend who had become abusive.
Sifting through Google’s search results, she stumbled on an online-chat providing support for people in need of abortion care. The chat operator stressed the importance of a pregnancy test and referred her to a nearby pregnancy center in Deland called the Grace House.
The center’s website welcomed people like Abby who didn’t have insurance and asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns. She scheduled a visit for the following day – a day she said she’ll never forget.
The horrific visit ended with Abby sobbing as center employees systematically pressured her to continue her pregnancy, prayed over her belly, and promised her free baby care products if she would come back for more “counseling.”
“I deserved legitimate medical care and compassion,” said Abby. “But I know in that room, they didn’t see me or my future. They just saw a positive pregnancy test.”
The staffers at Grace House were not there to help her receive abortion care, but instead to convince her and all others who enter the center for care to complete their pregnancy and be saved by Christianity in the process.
“I was fooled by this facility in a moment of vulnerability and desperation and trusting the wrong people,” Abby said.
The same “wrong people” are funded by the state’s Florida Pregnancy Support Services Program, which provides taxpayers’ money to more than 100 anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs)” around the state. The stated goal of the program is to convince clients to carry their pregnancies to term rather than having abortions.
As previously reported in an ongoing Florida Trident investigative series, the centers, including Grace House, are Christian-based organizations and often identify themselves as “ministries” and “missions.” Several legal experts have said the program runs afoul of the U.S. and Florida constitutions, the latter of which expressly forbids the state from aiding religious organizations.
Despite its inherent problems, the program is now bursting at the seams in Florida. Its annual budget has ballooned from $4 million to $25 million a year, an increase written into the controversial six-week abortion ban legislation signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in April.
Kurt Filla is leading the state’s anti-abortion ad campaign.
Included in that funding explosion is a quadrupling of the program’s advertising budget to nearly $1 million a year, according to state records, paid out via the Florida Pregnancy Care Network, the non-profit tasked with administering the program for the state.
Kurt Filla, owner of the Michigan-based company, Filla Life Media, snared the state-funded advertising contract. Filla, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, is an outspoken conspiracy theorist who has backed false QAnon and vaccine tropes on the Internet and has written that the 2020 election was stolen, that God sends him angels and he’s heard the devil talk in his head, and that “global elites” are secretly trying to make people “impotent and immobile.”
Jenifer McKenna, an activist with the Reproductive Health Accountability Fund at Hopewell, said the steep funding hike and hiring of ideologically radical companies like Filla Life are part of a trend in “abortion-hostile” states like Florida to divert tax dollars to CPCs and “ramp up targeted digital marketing to track down pregnant people, talk them out of abortion, and collect their sensitive data.”
“Researchers are calling the post-Roe landscape an ‘abortion infodemic’ with CPCs playing a leading role,” said McKenna, adding that the centers use “extensive digital strategies to intercept pregnant people seeking care, sow confusion, spread disinformation and obstruct access.”
After an initial visit, which at some clinics includes an ultrasound where individual center staffers pray for the fetus, clients are urged to return for “counseling” and parenting classes. In fact, while the state bills the centers as health care providers, a whopping 87.5% of program reimbursements go for counseling and classes, a Trident analysis of state records found. A significant portion of the new $20 million in annual spending will fund a doubling of the amount the state reimburses the centers for counseling from $75 an hour to $150 an hour, state records show.
To put the $150 hourly rate in perspective, the state reimburses registered nurses – who actually have formalized education and training for the critical work they do – only $32.07 per home health care visit, according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. Home health aides, who lack the RN’s credentials, are reimbursed a scant $18.04 per visit by the state.
When told of that increase, Amy Weintraub, who serves as reproductive rights director for the non-profit Progress Florida, called it “atrocious.” She noted that the “counselors” at the centers have no training or education requirements and are often hired based largely on their Christian faith.
“The fact that [state-funded pregnancy centers] are even allowed to use the word ‘counselor’ is such an affront because … they are not trained counselors,” said Weintraub.
That’s something Abby said she found out the hard way.
“Oh, She’s Abortion-Minded”
A random online search for abortion in Fort Lauderdale turns up a website for the Hope Women’s Centers, which received $100,000 in state funding last year. Its website promises “free abortion information” and “consultations on abortion pills, surgical abortion procedures, and emergency contraceptives.”
Yet like all other state-funded pregnancy crisis centers, Hope, which is strongly aligned with the Rio Vista Church, has two goals: to dissuade clients from having an abortion and to try to save their souls. None of that is mentioned in the online material.
It was the same in Abby’s case when she went to Grace House, which recently changed its name to Coastal Choices Women’s Clinic, a moniker that belies the fact that it vehemently opposes choice and isn’t a bona fide health clinic. The Trident left a detailed message for comment with a receptionist at Coastal; a promised return call was not received prior to publication.
“There is no Planned Parenthood in my county, so I thought it was a smaller version of it,” said Abby. “And they said if you were considering abortion to come on in, so I felt that was an invitation.”
Once inside, she was given a form to fill out with questions about her faith, her intimate relationships, even what her college grades looked like. It was the first clue she was inside a Christian ministry instead of a bona fide health clinic.
“That gave me a little bit of a pause,” Abby said. “But it wasn’t until the actual counseling session that I deeply regretted walking in the doors.”
She’d written in the form that she wanted an abortion.
“I watched a group of maybe three staff or volunteers crowd around my paper,” she said. “And I hear them say something to the effect of, ‘Oh, she’s abortion-minded, I’ll take her.’”
In the counseling session that followed, which she attended with her partner, Abby took a pregnancy test that was kept hidden while staff pressed her for 40 minutes about her personal life. She said the staffers told her she was in no position to make the decision about an abortion for herself.
When her partner was out of the room, Abby confided that she was in an abusive relationship. She said the counselor advised her to stay with her partner because the baby would give her purpose and help him step up as a man, and urged him, when Abby was outside the room, to stop her from getting an abortion because the procedure could kill her.
After the test came back positive, Abby was handed her due date and a small replica of a fetus. A staffer asked her what she might name the baby. Distraught, Abby began sobbing.
“There was so much talking over me when I was clearly having a breakdown,” Abby recalled. “[One staffer] starts praying over my stomach, she’s touching my stomach the whole time, and saying that I can start right away taking their parenting classes to earn baby bucks for their boutique to get baby clothes. And all the while I’m just so terrified.”
The experience was a far cry from the online promises, a contrast Weintraub said is common. The most fundamental deception in the advertising is the centers’ posing as health clinics when they don’t actually offer comprehensive reproductive health care services, she said.
“They strip their web sites of anti-abortion lingo so that the intended victims will not realize that the place they are visiting is an anti-abortion center,” said Weintraub. “All kinds of tricky language is used to cloak their true intention.”
Now Filla Life Media, under the leadership of its extremist owner, is set to receive $1 million a year from Florida taxpayers for its marketing prowess.
Tax-Payer Funded Anti-Abortion Marketing Agencies
Filla Life Media is a member of a national network called the Pro-Life Marketing Ethics Council made up of “unified Christ-centered and holistically pro-life” companies dedicated to promoting marketing strategies “grounded in biblical principles and informed by cutting-edge best practices.”
A key strategy of the Florida program is to boost its anti-abortion clinics in Google search results and place ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. State documents show the aim of the campaign is to “generate leads and inquiries” from pregnant people and that it uses “marketing strategies … with the goal of enabling her to carry the pregnancy to term and choose parenting or adoption.”
The new Filla Life marketing campaign is set to be the most aggressive to date, targeting women aged between 18 and 44 years old across Florida. Many of the ads specifically target teens and the uninsured.
The campaign will employ the latest in tracking technology and will leverage behavioral data—like what people are or are not doing in an app, on a website, or how they interact with campaigns—to personalize the message.
FPCN ads that appear at the top of Google searches for “unplanned pregnancy” or “pregnancy test” promise “Compassionate Counseling,” “Judgement-Free Pregnancy Support” and ”Pregnancy Pill Help.” Of 134 Google ads purchased this year by marketing companies on behalf of the state program reviewed by the Trident, only three explicitly warned the centers don’t provide abortions.
While the new ad campaign is super-charged, it’s nothing new. For years, Floridians’ tax dollars have gone to anti-abortion marketing agencies with little to no transparency. Before Filla Life, an Illinois-based company called Caledon, and its subdivision Choose Life Marketing, held the advertising contract.
The digital tactics promoted by Choose Life, alongside other anti-abortion marketing agencies, sparked a congressional investigation in 2022 that cited a number of the company’s tactics, including geofencing strategies, which use sensitive data from abortion seekers to facilitate government surveillance, harassment, intimidation and even violence. The company also featured prominently in a report issued by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which exposed the deceptive tactics of several anti-abortion marketing agencies.
Those marketing strategies also involved so-called “right-brain research” peddled by the Vitae Foundation, an anti-abortion research organization. Vitae uses extensive interviews with previously pregnant people involving repetition and relaxation techniques to “access the emotional mind and uncover deeply seated emotional needs and barriers,” according to its promotional materials.
“By studying the right side of the brain, which controls the emotional, intuitive and creative aspects of the person, Vitae was able to focus on women’s hidden, emotional response to pregnancy, abortion and motherhood,” the foundation explained in a report.
A key finding of the foundation is that “women carry an unwanted pregnancy to term when guilt wins out over shame,” a concept used by pro-life marketing agencies to craft their messaging to “abortion-minded women.”
To continue reading the article, open the link. It’s shameful that the state of Florida spends millions to tell women that they should not get an abortion, no matter how much they want one.
Ron DeSantis likes to boast about “freedom” in Florida, but apparently you are not free unless you agree with him.
Teachers of Black history are not free to teach the truth. Librarians are not free to use their professional judgment about books. Gays and trans kids are not free to live their lives. Drag queens are not free to perform their acts.
Women in Florida are not free to make major decisions about their own lives.
Pro-choice groups in Florida have gathered enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot in November. But the hyper-conservative state Supreme Court must give its approval before the referendum can go forward. There have already been suggestions that the measure may be stricken because it says abortion should be legal until the fetus reaches “viability,” and critics say that the term is vague. Keep watching.
Fabiola Santiago is a columnist for the Miami Herald who is expert at skewering Ron DeSantis and his hateful policies. When he tried to take a victory lap during the Republican debates, she called him out. Kids are not better off in Florida, she writes, but racists and homophobes are. It turns out that DeSantis’s war against gays, Black history, and drag queens was not enough to sustain his campaign.
Santiago wrote:
Only in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ version of Fantasyland are kids in Florida “better off” under his watch.
The presidential job-seeker’s assertion, during Wednesday’s Iowa debate with Nikki Haley, that such is the state of childhood in Florida would be laughable — Exhibit No. 1, the man is trying to ruin happy-for-all Disney World — if his anti-science children’s healthcare policiesweren’t dangerous.
Or, his lie might have played out as the self-deprecating joke of a desperate, losing candidate — if DeSantis had kept his homophobia, transphobia, and discomfort with the legacy of racism in American history, where those sordid feelings belong, in the privacy of his home and wooden heart.
But DeSantis made his fears and prejudices against people who aren’t white, straight and ultra Christian-conservative the public’s business in Florida. And what he has unleashed isn’t child-friendly at all.
He used his power to get bills passed through the lily-livered Florida Legislature, signing into law medical practices that go against the advice of respected child healthcare experts like the American Academy of Pediatrics.
This means doctors and psychiatrists in Florida are limited by law on what they can do to address our children’s gender issues, and subject to felony penalties if they deviate from GOP wishes. Doctors also have their hands tied treating mothers facing an unwanted pregnancy discovered after six weeks, which also adversely affects entire families.
And, because the anti-vaxxer governor is a friend of debunked science and quack medical opinions, he has not only campaigned against children (and adults) getting the COVID vaccine, but he’s made it difficult for Florida parents to access boosters.
Under his mandate, schools are no longer safe zones for gay and trans children.
Before DeSantis, the intersection of healthcare, identity and lifestyle was a matter between parents and their doctors. Decisions about approach and care were based on individual cases and made as a family unit.
Now, healthcare and education are in the hands of Republican ideologues — social engineers who constantly feed voters misinformation and outright lies, feeding people’s lowest human instincts to shun the reality and preferences of others.
In schools, children unable to speak to their parents about conflicting identity issues, often were able to confide in a teacher, who in consultation with supervisors, would decide if it warranted parental intervention, or if the disclosure might put the child’s life in danger from family.
No more.
Teachers can be sued, fined, and fired if they allow gender identity discussions, pushing some excellent teachers to leave Florida or the profession, worsening a teacher shortage. This isn’t good for anyone, but least of all for children.
Adults have the power of choice — and many Floridians are exercising it by moving with their trans or gay children out of state, driven by the anti-LGBTQ laws, like former Heat star Dwayne Wade, whose teenage daughter Zaya came out as transgender in 2020.
Parents aren’t going to run the risk of the state taking transgender minors away from their families for receiving gender-affirming care. Nor will they stand for the atmosphere of hate and disrespect DeSantis’ constant harangues and policies have generated.
Unfortunately, not all children have parents with the financial wherewithal to move them to a more sane and accepting state — and remain stuck in DeSantis World suffering his pathology, especially in schools, where they’re no longer free to be themselves.
Nor to read literature that reflects their reality. Nor to play sports in the team where they feel they belong.
No, children are definitely not better off in Florida, where the education system is under-performing, according to national assessments. DeSantis’ solution: Get rid of the tests and dissuade kids from going to college.
With no accountability and ways to measure, he can claim success. With kids skipping higher education, his wealthy donors can access cheaper labor.
The governor’s culture wars and their harmful effect, however, are catching up to him.
In the process of trying to convince Republican voters that he and his “Florida Blueprint” are the alternative to disgraced Donald Trump, DeSantis recast his record — the vengeful attack on Disney World and his ruthless approach to LGBTQ and transgender children — to paint a pretty picture depicting major successes.
Oh, and what a macho man he was to take on Disney!
“We took on Disney and we defeated that and we won that fight and our kids kids are better off now,” DeSantis said.
A big lie that he kept repeating. Disney continues to celebrate Pride Month with “Gay Days,” and in 2023 released its Disney Pride Collection of clothing and accessories….
His neatly-packaged arguments, an attempt to camouflage what’s clearly discrimination, fear of difference and assaults on free speech, are coming undone.
Voters do have the last word — and, apparently, no matter how much the governor travels the nation, or perhaps because they’re getting to know him — polls show voters just don’t pick him.
Even in Florida, where DeSantis thinks he’s king, voters prefer 91-count, criminally-charged Donald Trump.
Turns out the people better off in Florida are possibly a minority: homophobic, racist adults.
You might well wonder, as I did, why Republicans in Congress were conducting hearings about anti-Semitism in our nation’s elite private universities. That is normally the job of the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. Historically and recently, Republicans have not been known as a party that worries overmuch about anti-Semitism or other forms of bigotry.
As a matter of fact, as this article in The Hill shows, the Republicans’ real concern is to stamp out DEI programs (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in higher education. Two of the three elite university presidents who were grilled by Rep. Elise Stefanik resigned, and she crowed about her victory. The conservative media treated Harvard University President Claudine Gay as an unqualified diversity hire. Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania also resigned after the hearing.
From the article:
Republicans say their departures are just the beginning of needed reforms at the schools.
“This is only among the very first steps on a very long road to recovering or returning to higher education its true and original purposes, which is truth-seeking,” said Jay Greene, senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
Conservatives cheered the departures, which came after the two, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sally Kornbluth, faced questions on campus antisemitism before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Neither Elise Stefanik nor Jay Greene has shown interest in anti-Semitism in the past, to my knowledge. Neither issued statements to denounce the young fascists who marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville and chanted “The Jews will not replace us.” If they reacted to the slaughter of Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, I am not aware of it.
An even bigger joke is for anyone at the Heritage Foundation to celebrate “truth-seeking,” when Heritage oversaw planning for the next term of Donald Trump, who has a well-documented record of telling thousands of lies. Heritage Foundation, clean your own house. Before you lecture others about “truth-seeking,” look in the mirror.
“Two down. One to go,” tweeted committee member Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). “Accountability is coming.”
“The long overdue forced resignations of former Presidents Claudine Gay and Liz Magill are just the beginning of the tectonic consequences from their historic morally bankrupt testimony to my questions,” Stefanik added in a statement to The Hill, mentioning an official probe into the schools that the panel has announced.
“The investigation will address all aspects of a fundamentally broken and corrupt higher education system — antisemitism on campus, taxpayer funded aid, foreign aid, DEI, accreditation, academic integrity, and governance,” she said, using an acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion programs…
But their biggest target recently has been DEI programs, making the case that they have been more harmful than helpful to students…
Greene said he is hopeful “additional people are going to have to be removed, both leaders of universities and their underlings, because they’re also significant actors in this. It’s not just at the top, but it’s kind of throughout these institutions.”
He also specifically called for the dismantling of DEI efforts on campus and disciplines such as gender studies, another popular GOP target.
Such efforts have been in motion long before the shake-ups at UPenn and Harvard.
In Texas, a law banning diversity programs at public universities took effect in the new year. And last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) also signed a bill to defund DEI programs at public universities. …
A tracker by the Chronicle of Higher Education last year found 40 bills had been introduced in states across the country to try to restrict DEI programs, diversity statements and mandatory diversity training at schools.
It’s disgusting to see a feigned concern about anti-Semitism used as a stalking horse to dismantle DEI programs and as a pretext for inserting Big government into the policy making process in private higher education.
As long as Republicans control either House of Congress, we can anticipate the rise of a new McCarthyism, purging the curriculum and professors.
Chris Rufo, far-right provocateur, proclaimed his pride in toppling the President of Harvard. Is he happier with this victory than with his success in turning “critical race theory” into a national scare? Hard to say. This was a big one for Chris, not least because he found a way to incite the liberal media and to walk away with Dr. Gay’s scalp.
In recent weeks, Rufo has been at the forefront of a sprawling campaign to force Gay to resign, which began after she delivered controversial testimony before Congress in early December about Harvard’s handling of alleged instances of antisemitism stemming from the war in Gaza. On Dec. 10, Rufo and the conservative journalist Christopher Brunet publicized accusations that Gay — the first Black woman to serve as Harvard’s president and a political scientist held in high regard by her peers — had plagiarized other scholars’ work. Together with pressure from donors about Gay’s response to the war in Gaza, those accusations ultimately led to Gay losing her job this week.
None of that happened by accident. As Rufo acknowledged to me, Gay’s resignation was the result of a coordinated and highly organized conservative campaign. “It shows a successful strategy for the political right,” he told me. “How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaigns in order to be successful.”
While the extent of Gay’s alleged plagiarism is being disputed in the academic community, Rufo’s campaign worked because instances in which Gay apparently borrowed language from other scholars were frequent and credible enough that the allegations stuck.
For an operative who works mostly behind the scenes of Republican politics, Rufo isn’t shy about revealing the true motives behind his influence operations. Last month, he told me that his efforts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s legacy are part of broader ploy to exonerate former President Donald Trump. When I spoke to him on Tuesday afternoon, he was equally frank about what motivated his efforts to get Gay fired.
As Rufo makes clear, his real target was diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he successfully painted Dr. Gay as the embodiment of DEI, meaning that she was a diversity hire and didn’t deserve her position.
He explained his strategy:
It’s really a textbook example of successful conservative activism, and the strategy is quite simple. Christopher Brunet and I broke the story of Claudine’s plagiarism on December 10. It drove more than 100 million impressions on Twitter, and then it was the top story for a number of weeks in conservative media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objective, we had to get the narrative into the left-wing media. But the left-wing uniformly ignored the story for 10 days and tried to bury it, so I engaged in a kind of a thoughtful and substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left to take seriously the story of the most significant academic corruption scandal in Harvard’s history.
Finally, the narrative broke through within 24 hours of my announcement about smuggling the narrative into the left-wing media. You see this domino effect: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications started to do the actual work of exposing Gay’s plagiarism, and then you see this beautiful kind of flowering of op-eds from all of those publications calling on Gay to resign. Once my position — which began on the right — became the dominant position across the center-left, I knew that it was just a matter of time before we were going to be successful.
Why is it so important to get the story into the center-left media?
It gives permission for center-left political figures and intellectual figures to comment on the story and then to editorialize on it. Once we crossed that threshold, we saw this cascade of publications calling on her to resign.
He makes clear that the issues are not important: what matters is winning and shaming the left.
I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy. For the time being, given the structure of our institutions, this is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demonstrated that it can be successful….
What is your broader objective here, beyond forcing the president of Harvard to resign?
My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.
It is just the most recent demonstration of the Rufo technique, which is to announce the bad faith argument he’s about to launch and how he plans to use it to pwn his chosen liberal target. And then various main stream media and other well-intentioned folks proceed to amplify and engage with that bad faith argument. Even now, social media features a bunch of folks arguing about the plagiarism piece of the Harvard take down (“Well, you know the president of Rufo’s New College won’t get caught plagiarizing because he’s never published anything! Ha! Gotcha!!”) as if the plagiarism is actually the point. And media outlets keep publishing their “Harvard president taken down by plagiarism” takes as if that’s the real story here.
The New Republic took pleasure in revealing that Rufo claimed a master’s degree from Harvard, but he fudged by not admitting that the degree was not from the highly selective Harvard programs but from the Harvard Extension School, which I confess I never heard of.
It’s very hard to gain admission to Harvard College or graduate schools. But Harvard Extension School says this in its website:
Readers may recall that I supported Dr. Gay and urged the Harvard Corporation to resist the pressure from Rufo. I did so because I knew that the campaign to force her out was not conducted in good faith. Rufo doesn’t care about anti-Semitism, nor does Elise Stefanik. I don’t recall either of them expressing outrage when anti-Semites chanted “The Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville nor did they speak out when Trump said that there were “good people” on both sides. Neither of them appears to care about anti-Semitism when it’s right in front of them.
Ten minutes later, Polly Strong, an anthropology professor and the president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Rufo that she believed in intellectual diversity but that a commitment to the concept wasn’t what she heard from him. She said her personal hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom, due process, and neutrality in higher learning and asked if Rufo supported those values.
Rufo thanked Strong for her question but his words came faster and more insistent than before. He derided Dewey, saying it would have been better if he’d never been born, and dismissed his values. “Academic freedom, due process, neutrality – those are means, not ends,” Rufo said. “If you have an erasure of ends, what you get is sheer power politics, you get everything reducible to will and domination, and then you get an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” Rufo concluded by saying that academics who continue to adhere to Dewey’s principles, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”
Strong was completely unawed by the implied threat. “The ‘ends’ of academic freedom, due process, and shared governance is education for a democratic society,” she said simply. “That is the basis of John Dewey’s vision and many, many university professors believe that today.”
The audience was silent after Strong’s remark. It had become clear that Rufo wasn’t dominating his opponents. It got worse for him when Samuel Baker, a UT English professor, came to the mic. Baker reiterated that Rufo’s veneration of beauty and truth was meaningless if he provided no idea of what the concepts mean to him, and he criticized Rufo’s use of violent imagery like “laying siege” and deserving “what’s coming.”
“I just want to be honest with you,” Baker said, “your rhetoric in relation to barbarism and the way you smugly say that the university is not going to like what’s coming – I think that in the context of the world right now, where there is a lot of really tragic violence, that we ought to be careful to remove ourselves from that and from groups with white supremacist associations. I really think you should rethink the glibness.”
Rufo was exposed as a phony and called out for his connections to white supremacists. He beat a hasty retreat.
Freedom of expression and academic freedom are wonderful in action.
Governor Mike DeWine vetoed a bill to ban medical treatment for transgender minors, an unusual move for a Republican governor. The legislature has the power to override his veto. The governor said that the decision about such care should be made by the people who love the child most: parents.
In addition to banning transition care for minors, the bill says medical professionals who provide the care could lose their licenses and be sued. It also prohibits transgender girls and women from playing on high school and college sports teams that correspond with their gender identity.
On Friday, Mr. DeWine said that if the bill were to become law, “Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most, the parents.”
The governor reached his decision after visiting hospitals and meeting with families “both positively and negatively affected” by gender-affirming care last week, a spokesperson said…
In addition to banning transition care for minors, the bill says medical professionals who provide the care could lose their licenses and be sued. It also prohibits transgender girls and women from playing on high school and college sports teams that correspond with their gender identity…
“The most harrowing part of my job is informing parents that their child died, especially when their death was from a preventable suicide,’’ Dr. Steve Davis, chief executive of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told Ohio senators at a hearing on the bill. “You trust us on every other condition. Please, trust us on this one.’’
Diane Ravitch's blog 