Florida “Governor” Ron DeSantis (R)’s temper tantrum at Disney for expressing their opposition to the homophobic “Don’t Say Gay” bill HB1557 that was signed into law earlier this week continues, as he threatens to strip Disney World in Orlando, FL of its special statusgranted in a 1967 law called the Reedy Creek Improvement Act in retaliation for taking a stand against the anti-LGBTQ+ pro-censorship HB1557 that stifles basically any pro-LGBTQ+ expressions among students and staff in schools due to how vague the definitions are.
Disney initially had a tepid at best response to the atrociously bigoted “Don’t Say Gay” bill that led to worker walkouts, but has since come out firing with criticism of the anti-LGBTQ+ law that has infuriated right-wing anti-LGBTQ+ bigots who are hurling false accusations that the company supports “grooming children” for standing up for LGBTQ+ equality.
DeSantis, Christina Pushaw, and their allies have justified support for the heinously bigoted law on the basis of a homophobic trope kvetching about “child grooming” activities in schools by deceitfully rebranding it as an “anti-grooming law”, such as affirming the identities of trans and gender non-conforming peoples (or even non-hetero peoples), have Gay-Straight Alliances or other LGBTQ+-affirming clubs, and LGBTQ+ pride flags in classrooms, among other things. The “grooming” rhetoric very closely echoes with the QAnon conspiracy cult’s obsession with pedophilia.
Jill Goldsmith and Tom Tapp at Deadline:
Florida State GOP Representative Spencer Roach said legislators have met twice to discuss repealing a statute that impacts how Disney can invest in its theme parks there. The move is retaliatory after the company and CEO Bob Chapek came out strongly against the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill just signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been lobbing criticism Disney’s way this week.
“Yesterday was the 2nd meeting in a week w/fellow legislators to discuss a repeal of the 1967 Reedy Creek Improvement Act, which allows Disney to act as its own government,” including oversight of land use and environmental protections within the District, and [providing] essential public services such as regulation of the EPCOT building code and maintenance of roads. Roach continued, “If Disney wants to embrace woke ideology, it seems fitting that they should be regulated by Orange County.”
The Parental Rights in Education (aka Don’t Say Gay) law — forbids classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K-3. Chapek created a firestorm and walkouts among employees by not speaking out against it until it had already passed the legislature, then responding tepidly before voicing full throated opposition and committing to help overturn it. That provoked a counter-storm from DeSantis about how proud he is to be drawing a line in the sand against “woke” Disney.
Fabiola Santiago at Miami Herald:
Looks like Mickey Mouse is too gay-accepting for the political tastes of Gov. DeSantis and Florida’s GOP leaders. And what do fascists do when they don’t like someone’s politics? They throw the book at them.
That’s exactly what the governor and his minions in the Florida Legislature are shamelessly threatening to do to Disney World in Orlando: punish The Happiest Place on Earth for its support of gay and transgender children’s right to be themselves, including in schools. In my-way-or-the-highway DeSantis World, The Walt Disney Company is a “woke” corporation, a no-no for him, DeSantis complains, and Fox News echos mini-Trump’s inflammatory words like gospel across the land.
All of a sudden, popular Disney World becomes the enemy, the latest target of the right, and DeSantis the knight in shining armor battling a “transgenderism in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms” that has never existed. But disinformation is the fuel on which Sunshine State Republicans run for office. DeSantis just won’t stand for corporations that don’t operate on his convenient political terms — and like the wound-up bully that he is, DeSantis has boots on the ground already working on a plan of attack.
Ari Drennen at MMFA on the resurgence of Anita Bryant-era tactics to harm LGBTQ+ rights:
While accusations that the public existence of LGBTQ people somehow poses a sexual threat to minors have a long and ugly history, the recent wave of attacks reached a fever pitch with the passage of HB 1557, the “Don’t Say Gay” or trans bill in Florida. The bill bans discussion of sexuality or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, though its vague wording could be used to prevent such discussions at any grade level. DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw tweeted on March 4 that “the bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill,” going on to accuse opponents of grooming 4- to 8-year-olds:
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And after a leaked video surfaced in which a Disney executive talked about having more LGBTQ storylines in the company’s material, right-wing media figures on Fox and elsewhere all jumped on the argument that this represented the grooming of children for sexual activity; Carlson even claimed that Disney was acting like a “sex offender.”
The language these media figures and outlets are using to attack LGBTQ people and conflate them with dangerous pedophiles matches the rhetoric used nearly five decades ago in Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, a six-month tour of hate that led voters in Dade County to repeal one of the first ordinances in the country that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. Bryant claimed, falsely, that gays and lesbians were “trying to recruit our children into homosexuality.” As Zack Ford wrote in Xtra, “The nefarious tropes of the 1970s and ’80s never actually went away.”
Sam Sachs at Nexstar Media Wire, via KTLA:
In the days since DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education bill into law, which opponents call the “Don’t Say Gay” law, opposition to the legislation by Disney has provoked talk of using state legislation to take away the company’s ability to self-govern its lands. Disney first got the right of legal self-control in 1967, with passage of the Reedy Creek Improvement Act.
According to historical documents from the Reedy Creek Improvement District, then-Florida Gov. Claude Kirk signed the RCID Act into law in May 1967, creating two municipalities: Bay Lake and Reedy Creek, which was later renamed Lake Buena Vista. The location, nestled between Orange and Osceola counties, would later become the site where Walt Disney World was built.
The RCID Charter created a 25,000-acre of land as a special taxing district. At the time, it was considered remote and uninhabitable, but now is the site of one of the busiest theme parks in the United States.
To make Disney’s plan happen, the area had to get special privileges from the state of Florida to essentially run itself.
Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times on the right-wing war on Disney:
Rufo obtained video of the all-hands meeting, and he presented clips of Raveneau’s remarks, along with those of several other Disney executives, as evidence that Disney is sexualizing children. The story has blown up on the right, where Raveneau’s arch reference to a gay agenda is being treated as an admission that she has a plan to corrupt kids.
“This isn’t programming, this is propaganda for grooming,” hissed Fox’s Laura Ingraham on Wednesday. “Disney isn’t just grooming children with radical sexual propaganda — now they’re bragging about it,” said a writer for The Federalist. Raveneau has landed in the middle of a renascent moral panic, one that combines elements of QAnon with old tropes about gay predators.
When I spoke to Rufo on Thursday, he was frank about wanting to punish Disney for giving in to employee pressure to oppose the Florida law. “Perhaps the lesson that they’re learning — and certainly the lesson that they should be learning — is that they should stay out of politics,” he said.
Until recently, Rufo was best known for his work mobilizing the right against critical race theory. But in recent months, both he and the movement he helped catalyze have turned their attention to gender and sexual identity. He believes there’s a lot of latent alarm among parents over changing ideas about gender, and he intends to tap into it. “I think there’s an opportunity to do the reporting, to build the narrative, much in the same way as critical race theory,” he said.
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To justify the law, the right has taken to accusing anyone who opposes it of wanting to expose young kids to explicit material in order to prime them for abuse. On Twitter, DeSantis’s press secretary wrote, “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” The QAnon idea that the right’s political opposition is a cabal of pedophiles has gone mainstream.
As that case illustrates, at the core of this new law is the toxic belief that there is no such thing as a gay or transgender minor, only adults who “recruit” a child to the gay or transgender “lifestyle.” According to this belief, the agenda behind that encouragement can be ideological (e.g., the liberal destruction of American family values) or personal (e.g., “grooming” the child to be sexually violated.)
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But the rise of the QAnon conspiracy theory has brought latent fears of pedophilic pederasts back to the forefront of the GOP base’s concerns. Teaching the very existence of LGTBQ people to children is now being framed as step one on the road to child abuse, assault and molestation — and that framing is receiving either minimum pushback from GOP leaders or its active embrace from the party’s demagogues. We saw as much last week in the appalling performance from GOP senators falsely accusing Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson of not being sufficiently tough in child pornography cases.
DeSantis knows that despite the backlash from LGBTQ advocates and companies including Disney, the bill polls well among former President Donald Trump’s voters. It doesn’t matter to him that it spreads the dangerous idea that being gay or being transgender is something that is taught, and, conversely, that if it isn’t taught, it can be stamped out. It doesn’t matter to him that it promotes a debunked lie that gay men rely on actively recruiting children for future predations.