Florida now under travel advisory
Personally, I’ve never been charmed by the alleged attractions of Florida.
Once you get past year-round sunshine and warm temperatures — saunalike at the moment — the Alligator State, for all its sandy beaches and preserved wetlands, is just strip mall America writ monotonously large, amidst an endless tangle of highways.
To say nothing of the one billion tons of phosphogypsum — construction aggregate material, toxic mining waste, fertilizer by-product — that is under approval consideration by the governor for reuse in paving projects. Hence, what aghast environmentalists have dubbed “radioactive roads.” (See tangle of highways, above.)
But clearly, many would disagree with my uncharitable take. Florida’s cup runneth over with migration, legal and illegal, ranked first in population growth last year, welcoming 1,218 new residents each day.
According to driver’s licence data, more than 583,000 people traded in their out-of-state licences at Florida’s DMV in 2022, indicating a whole lot of domestic relocation to the peninsula. Although this no longer applies to undocumented immigrants, estimated at 772,000 who’ve landed in Florida. The poor souls are now forbidden from using drivers’ licences issued by other states — 19 states and the District of Columbia allow this. Gov. Ron DeSantis’s idea of helping undocumented immigrants — who fill all the jobs native-born Americans eschew, in agriculture, construction and hospitality — is dumping them on Martha’s Vineyard. About one million Canadian snowbirds spend up to six months a year wintering in Florida, injecting an estimated $6.5 billion into the state economy. You’re welcome.
So it’s unlikely many Floridabound visitors or transplanted Americans and Canadians will pay much mind to the travel advisory — basically a don’t-go recommendation — recently issued by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (That would be “coloured” in Canada, but we’d never use the word in the context of Black people.)
The NAACP, which still has powerful activism chops at well over a century old, doesn’t like where DeSantis has yanked Florida, politically and culturally. While not expressly urging against travel to the state, the organization makes a sound argument that Florida, under DeSantis, has become “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ + individuals.” That warning came on top of other censures from the League of United Latin American Citizens and Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group and, on Tuesday, joined by Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ rights organization in the U.S.
The NAACP added, in its statement, that their advisory was in “direct response to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity and inclusion programs in Florida schools.”
This accusation is indisputable. Among a clutch of new laws the governor signed last week, at the conclusion of Florida’s congressional session, was legislation that defunds diversity programs at the state’s public universities and colleges.
I understand the exhaustion with diversity-centric credo, the crackyour-head-open mantra of “intersectionalism” — overlapping and interdependent social categorizations (race, class, gender) that should never have escaped the pinhead orbit of academia, and the ridiculous overreach of woke vigilance. But DeSantis is no rational avatar of collaboration, co-operation and consent. He’s laying down fire, in advance of a bid for the Republican presidential nomination — which he formally announced Wednesday evening on Twitter.
While scorching the social landscape to a crisp, this far the governor’s reverse social engineer hasn’t brought him any closer to supplanting Donald Trump — the state’s most infamous resident — in the polls, even as the DeSantis presents him a simultaneously both the anti-Trump and uber-Trump candidate, a saner alternative for the GOP.
There isn’t much sanity, however, to the slew of legislation DeSantis has imposed on Floridians — simply cruelty and a staggering absence of empathy.
It’s hardly only the undocumented migrants who are being hounded — up to and including anyone who employs them or transports them. When the law comes into effect in July, any company with more than 25 workers on staff must confirm the immigration status of every employee through the E-Verify system or face an array of penalties.
Included in his furious signing of bills last week was the “Stop WOKE Act,” aimed particularly at reversing what he’s called “the progressive indoctrination” of students by a heavily left-tilted education system. The legislation prohibits instruction which allows that a person’s race or sex makes them inherently biased or, as descendants, in any way response for the actions of their race or sex down through history.
More broadly, critical race theory — which posits that racial bias is baked into western society, especially legal and social institutions — has been banned at all public schools. A separate bill restricts how race and gender an be taught on university campuses, banning state funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public universities.
As well, diversity, equity and inclusion measures outlaw consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring processes at the institutions. Further, students and faculty no longer have to pledge commitment to diversity, equity, blah-blah-blah in any campus program.
Book bans, DeSantis loves those. A law requiring all books available to children to be approved by a “district employee holding a valid education specialist certificate” — whatever that means, other than a DeSantis bot — has already cleared entire library shelves. Many schools did it presumptively, cleaving to an explicit warning against “the use of any unsolicited theories or strategies that may lead to student indoctrination.”
The “Don’t Say Gay” bill, of course, forbids teachers from discussing sex and gender identity with their students. Originally aimed at K-through-Grade 3, it’s now been extended to Grade 12. The expansion also prohibits teachers from using pronouns for students that do not correspond to their sex at birth.
DeSantis has also trained his sights on teacher unions, levying tough new requirements (actually on all public sector unions, including health care workers), but specifically prohibits paycheck deductions for union fees and up employee membership to 60 per cent.
Earlier this year, DeSantis banned a pilot course on African American studies, claiming it violated state law, while claiming he wasn’t opposed per se; rather, he didn’t like the specific content of the course. “We want education, not indoctrination.”
Oh, and DeSantis has also barred the use of cellphones during class time. Yay. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Then we have the Protections of Medical Conscience Act, which permits medical professionals and health insurance companies to deny patients care based on religious, moral or ethical beliefs. So if a doctor doesn’t like the cut of your transgender jib, say, no complaint against the discrimination can be lodged.
If none of that bothers you, as a potential Florida incomer, come on down. As for those already in situ, well, there doesn’t seem to be exodus an out of state.
DeSantis vs. Trump. My sister, my daughter. Slap-slap-slap.
It’s only GOP-town.