The David isn’t pornographic, though Italy’s offer to Florida is about exposure — to education | Opinion

The museum in Florence, Italy, that houses Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpiece the David issued a remarkable invitation last week to parents and students of a school in Tallahassee.

Come visit, the Galleria dell’Accademia said. See the statue for yourself.

The invite came after the forced resignation of the Florida charter school’s principal after a parent complained that sixth-graders had been exposed to pornography during a lesson on Renaissance art that included the sculpture. It was yet another eruption in the state’s ongoing culture wars, and it left Florida open to international ridicule.

Florence Mayor Dario Nardella even tweeted an invitation for the principal to visit so she can be recognized there, saying, “Art is civilization and whoever teaches it deserves respect.”

Of course, the parents and kids probably aren’t hopping on a flight to Europe to take the museum up on the offer any time soon. But the invitation wasn’t about international travel anyway.

Keep an open mind

At its heart, it was an invitation to education. An invitation to open-mindedness. An invitation to remember that the 17-foot nude marble statue from 1504, carved by Michelangelo Buonarroti and representing the height of the Italian Renaissance, is considered a masterpiece around the world and maybe, just maybe, no one intended to harm your kids by letting them see it.

And what makes the invitation from Florence remarkable is that it is, well, constructive. It’s a level-headed response to a moment of social friction. That shouldn’t be particularly striking. But in Florida, where politicians are ceaselessly pushing anger and fear to stay in power, it is.

Here in the Sunshine State, we are increasingly braced for attack for being woke or sensitive or not sensitive or snowflakes or rewriting history or talking about diversity or saying “gay.” We are quick to feel offense, amped up over everything and ready to assume the worst of others.

Why think about anything for more than a moment when you can just pop off? Why listen to other viewpoints when you can stew in your own anger and fear? It’s satisfying and feeds our frustrated inner child — in the short term. It’s also destructive to democracy and to a civil society in the longer term.

Fanning the flames

And the ever-widening river of fuel for all of this is coming from our elected leaders, who are identifying our vague fears and fanning them into fury. It’s cynicism of the highest order, this exploitation of voters’ concerns. Sadly, Gov. Ron DeSantis is leading the charge, following in the footsteps of his mentor, Donald Trump. The left isn’t immune, but the right has perfected this dreadful form of politics that has left us all feeling more miserable and alienated by the day.

This fight in Tallahassee isn’t about a naked statue, though if parents want to keep their 11- and 12-year-olds away from seeing a famous statue’s genitalia in art class, that should be their prerogative. (Good luck keeping them off the internet, though.)

Nor is it about the school itself, which follows a curriculum designed by Hillsdale College — a conservative Christian school in Michigan — that has become a lightning rod for the woke wars.

It’s about fear and the overreaction that comes with it. It’s about the demand for parental choice that comes out of that fear — but only extends one way.

One or even two or three parents calling the David porn shouldn’t be allowed to dictate what every other parent chooses for their child. By the way, if parents want to control the entire curriculum, there’s a route to do that: home schooling.

The invitation from Italy is a reminder that we weren’t always this way. And we don’t have to be this way now. We can choose — we have the power — to deal with our differences in a rational, and even optimistic, way rather than reflexively turning to the anger that politicians are gleefully stoking. We can try education before condemnation.

DeSantis is wrong. Florida is not where woke goes to die. It’s where civility and thoughtfulness and reasonableness and kindness go to die.

But only if we let it.

This story was originally published March 27, 2023 at 3:52 PM.