Mock those crazy bills — unless they pass

For us opinion wranglers, the weeks preceding the legislative session make for easy pickings, a time when columns roll out of Tallahassee readymade, already roiling with controversy, howling with indignation.

Opinion pieces, as we cliché artists like to write this time of year, virtually write themselves. Hear that clickety-clickety-click-click. That’s my computer keyboard howling with indignation. Over this crazy bill, or maybe that crazy bill, some yahoo legislator has filed up in Tallahassee.

Suddenly, as if a legislator’s wild predilections might actually become Florida law, we find ourselves debating the moral implications of dwarf tossing. Or society’s urgent need to regulate hard cider containers. We wonder whether Florida should outlaw the metal replicas of bull testicles often seen dangling from bumper hitches. Whether public school classrooms should be outfitted with banners declaring “In God We Trust.” Whether advertisers can use public school buses as rolling billboards.

Just last week, Dennis Baxley, a longtime provider of fish in the proverbial barrel, once again rescued columnists from our winter slumber. The senator from Ocala, where folks don’t appreciate pointy-headed scientists messing with their worldview, introduced a bill that would allow school districts to teach “different worldviews” about such lefty myths as evolution and climate change.

Hear that distant sound? That’s us opinion slingers, howling like indignant banshees, invoking the Scopes monkey trial. Much like we did back when Sen. Stephen Wise of Jacksonville introduced his own anti-evolution measure, asking the question that left biologist cringing: “Why do we still have apes if we came from them?”

This year, Evers offered his own antiDarwinian quote, not quite as pithy as Wise’s wisecrack, but absurd enough to bail me out on a slow news day. “Nothing is ever settled if it’s science, because people are always questioning science,” Baxley told the Tampa Bay Times. “If you look at the history of human learning, for a long time the official worldview was that the world was flat.”

This is where I get to write that Baxley is the flat-earther in this equation. Gotta love that Baxley, who almost every session introduces something outlandish. Mostly, of the gunslinger ilk. He and his fellow NRA minions provide opinion columnists steady work with bills that would encourage Floridians to pack heat in bars, on college campuses, at airports, at seaports, at police stations, at polling places, at sporting events, at city commission meetings.

Bills designed to keep Yankee sensibilities from interfering with the display of Confederate flags, memorials, statues are as dependable in Tallahassee as the swallows of Capistrano. This year’s version would also prohibit local governments from altering the names of streets and schools named for Confederate soldiers. (We’re talking to you, Hollywood). Once again, old columns are reprised, noting that it was the slave states that lost the war.

Each piece of whacky legislation demands 800 words of outrage from your local newspaper hack. Besides, who wants to write about issues of actual importance. Like health care policy. Or millage rates.

This year, Florida columnists will be paying inordinate attention to the “Prohibited Acts in Connection with Obscene or Lewd Materials” bill. Which would ban the “selling, lending, giving away, distributing, transmitting, showing, or transmuting” or committing certain unseemly acts with an “obscene, child-like sex doll.”

Who knew? But you can depend on us opinion writers to crank up the outrage.

But much of our shock and fury are feigned. We know, in our disingenuous hearts, that’s it’s mostly fluff. Because wiser heads in key Senate or House committees will quietly table off-the-wall legislation. We know, secretly, that the wild stuff will just disappear.

Except, sometimes it doesn’t. Baxley and his buddies managed to pass the notorious 2005 Stand Your Ground Act. In 2017, the flat-earthers enacted a law allowing any Florida resident to challenge textbooks or other teaching materials that offend their sensibilities. Which translates into a war on evolution and global warming.

Crazies managed to sneak through laws that won’t allow cities and counties to prohibit smoking in parks and beaches. Or demand that restaurants disclose the nutritional content. Locals can’t ban plastic bags or Styrofoam containers. Can’t regulate drones. Can’t enact limits on beekeeping. Cities and counties can’t prohibit homeowners from keeping jungle cats around the house. Or keep guns out of their parks. Or enact a living wage ordinance.

All those laws started out as absurdities, good for a laugh before the session began. Yet, they passed. It could be a bad year for evolution and sex dolls.

Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976.