GOP bills that allow discrimination are an attack on Florida’s LGBTQ community | Opinion
The same Trump-worshiping posse that has it in for immigrants in the Florida Legislature has found another target: gays.
On the last day of filing, seven Republicans submitted four bills that would repeal local LGBTQ anti-discrimination ordinances, send to prison doctors providing transgender healthcare to minors, and allow conversion therapy where it has been banned.
One of the Republican bill sponsors is none other than Florida GOP chairman and Sarasota Sen. Joe Gruters, who should know better than to target a group of people but never learns.
He’s the same lawmaker who, after the El Paso mass killing aimed at Latinos, wanted to go on a tour of Florida peddling his anti-immigrant script. He’s the same lawmaker pushing again this session a bill requiring public employers to use an E-Verify system to confirm the eligibility of new hires.
And now, Gruters has filed SB 1126, companion bill to HB 305, which seeks to preempt city and county governments from passing laws that protect people from discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
The other six legislators sponsoring anti-gay legislation are Reps. Anthony Sabatini, Bob Rommel, Michael Grant and Byron Donalds, and Sens. Dennis Baxley and Keith Perry.
“This marks this session as one of the most hostile to LGBTQ Floridians in recent memory,” Equality Florida said in a press release. Although these last-minute bills have garnered attention because of their draconian nature, the organization identified eight bills that adversely affect gays.
What is this?
A throwback to 1977, when orange juice queen Anita Bryant wanted to make sure Florida’s gays felt as unwanted as possible — and the community had no rights?
Or, 2008, when Florida passed with 62% of the vote Amendment 2, which defined marriage as only a union between one man and one woman before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled gay marriage legal in 2015?
“It’s hard to believe that this is a legislature where three LGBTQ members are proudly and openly serving, but it is,” tweeted one of them, Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, an Orlando Democrat. “This is what it feels like to be kicked in the gut by your colleagues. I am so utterly offended and disappointed.”
Rep. Jennifer Webb, a St. Petersburg Democract, echoed his feelings. “I’m still processing seeing these attacks come from people I considered friends and colleagues,” she said.
The leadership of Log Cabin Republicans of Miami, an organization representing LGBT conservatives and allies, wouldn’t comment.
Besides being an open affront to the state’s upstanding gay community — the fourth largest in the nation — these bills seek to force down the throats of more liberal counties like Miami-Dade and Broward the discriminatory practices the religious right and rural conservatives want to live by.
“These bills show a dangerous intersection between intentional discrimination and a poor calculation on a strategy of preempting local government,” House Democratic Leader Kionne L. McGhee, a Cutler Bay Democrat, said in a statement. “Florida is not improved by any of these bills. These proposals are dangerously reaching into the lives of hardworking and honest Floridians.”
This anti-gay agenda is an effort by the state GOP in an election year to galvanize the party base, ultra-conservative Florida — the gay members of the party be damned. The rights of the LGBTQ community is just another hate-bait issue like undocumented immigrants (or any kind of immigrant whose skin color or language they may not like).
Anti-gay agenda
The attempt is particularly ridiculous in a year when one of the Democratic presidential candidates commanding attention and rising in popularity is the openly gay former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg.
To run roughshod over the atmosphere of acceptance and inclusiveness that rights groups have fought hard to obtain for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (or queer) people is bad news for everyone.
It’s particularly dangerous to stoke hatred at a time of deep national division and high-stakes elections. The predictable consequence of hate speech is violence, and in some expected parts and unexpected parts of Florida (like Miami Beach, home to one of the most prominent gay communities in the world), anti-gay violence is all too real.
The Florida Legislature should know better and defeat these bills.
Yet, they banned sanctuary for immigrants with the help of aptly-dubbed “hate groups.”
Now, they want to repeal protections that Florida’s gays still need at local and state levels.
No matter how innocently the GOP casts its antics, these bills are an attack on Florida’s LGBTQ community — and this powerful voting block should remember it.
This story was originally published January 17, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
