Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis this week ripped left-wing activists who used a law designed to remove pornographic books from school libraries to after the Bible, dictionaries, and other benign texts.
“The idea that someone can use the parents’ rights and the curriculum transparency to start objecting to every single book to try to make a mockery of this is just wrong,” DeSantis said before he signed a bill that reins in the way to challenge controversial books, according to the Associated Press.
“That’s performative. That’s political.”
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At an event on Monday, DeSantis called out “activists” from “all ends of the political spectrum” who are using the law to protest “everything under the sun,” reported Politico.
“Schools are there to serve the community,” DeSantis added. “Schools are not there for you to try to go on some ideological joyride at the expense of our kids.”
“The idea that a parent sending their kid to school should have to worry about some of the garbage that we’ve seen out there put into their school system, no you shouldn’t have to worry about that as a parent,” DeSantis added.
“You should rest assured, send your kid to first grade — they are not going to be told they are born in the wrong body. In Florida, that is not going to happen.”
The bill DeSantis endorsed Tuesday narrows a 2023 law that permitted any person to challenge books as often as they wanted. The challenges could be filed even if the protester lived outside the school district or had no children in the school system.
The law also called for challenged books to be yanked from library shelves until the school district resolves the complaint.
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While liberals howled with false claims of “book bans,” the state Department of Education has reported that most counties in Florida have not fielded a single challenge.
Under the new law, people who don’t have a student in a school district are restricted to one challenge a month.
Politico, the AP, and other liberal media used DeSantis’ move to mock him for ignoring leftists’ arguments about the original law.
“It’s just a big mess that DeSantis created and now he’s trying to disown it, but I don’t know if he’ll be able to distance himself from this because he campaigned on it so hard,” House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell told the AP.
“We told him so. The Florida House Democrats on the floor – in our debate, in our questioning – pointed out the vagueness in the original law and how it could be subject to abuse.”
Neither the AP, Politico or other media seemed interested in having Democrats or liberal groups defined why elementary school children should have access to books that promote gay sex, trans ideology, or the tenets of Critical Race Theory.
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Yet, ironically, Pen America, a left-wing group that has criticized DeSantis and spread the phony book-ban claims, helped make the governor’s point.
Kasey Meehan, Pen America’s Freedom to Read program director, told the AP, “The majority of books that we see being removed are books that talk about LBTQ+ identities, that include characters of color, that talk about race and racism, that include depictions of sexual experiences in the most broadest interpretation of that understanding.”
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