Closed-door ceremony

Your otherwise excellent editorial on Florida’s six-week abortion restriction (“Making Florida relevant again, immediately,” April 3) was marred by a logical absurdity regarding the “closed-door ceremony” in which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the law.

You wrote that such “weird late-night secrecy signaled that he knew he was on shaky ground.”

Considering that the Florida Supreme Court, made up mostly of DeSantis appointees, had just supported the horrible new law in a 6-1 decision, it’s hard to imagine that he felt he was on shaky ground.

But your description of the “closed-door ceremony” is a gleaming red herring.

You realize that, except for a few news conferences in various cities, hundreds of bills are signed routinely in the governor’s office. In this case, DeSantis signed the bill on a Thursday night and immediately put out a press release and color photo of the event, attended by about two dozen legislators and anti-abortion activists.

That was about as stealthy as those big white boots he wore to a hurricane cleanup, in another crisis the media just can’t seem to get over.

Maybe DeSantis thought he could sign the hottest law of 2023 and nobody would notice. Or maybe he knew the Legislature doesn’t meet on Fridays in the first half of sessions, and everybody had flights home for the weekend, and the misguided supporters of the six-week bill wanted a signing ceremony.

So it was either do a bill signing when he flew in from Iowa that night, or make everybody stay over Friday and sign it at a decent hour. In this contentious election year, please stop letting your intense dislike of DeSantis and all things Republican cloud your thinking on these big issues.

Bill Cotterell,