Is this a change from Republican orthodoxy, where big corporations get whatever they ask for regardless of public opinion. Yes.
Please provide a source for this claim.
The question is: "To what extent do you support or oppose the following items in the bill? Banning the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade?" Respondents supported it 50-34.
If you scroll down in the same poll a few questions you will see:
“To what extent do you support or oppose the following items in the bill? Allowing parents to sue school districts over alleged violations of sexual orientation and gender identity discussions in schools”
Support 41% Oppose 43%
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000017f-9034-d137-abff-f0f41...
They're two very different, and somewhat conflicting, concepts. For example, is homosexuality an attraction between people of the same sex, or the same gender identity? This is a contentious issue even amongst adults, never mind teaching it to children.
I don't think it's the law stopping the dissolution of the district -- it's that no one important in the state seriously wants to do that. Who does it benefit?
It's true that Reedy Creek is being singled out because Disney has fallen out of favor, but I'm still hoping there is some flaw in this arrangement that leads to the end of all special districts now that people are paying attention.
I'm not sure who was getting screwed there? It honestly seems like it was a win/win situation.
Here's one: normally corporate bond payments are federally taxable, but municipal bonds aren't. Everyone in the country is missing out on taxes on payments on that 2 billion dollar debt.
The added revenue to the counties would be far short of the amount they'd need to provide the current services and service the debt.
Osceola Millage Rates https://www.property-appraiser.org/final-millage-rates/
Orange Millage Rates https://ocpaweb.ocpafl.org/faqcontent/Taxroll_Info#A404411
So they'd need about 9 mills (2/3rds of 13.67) to pay expenses without the debt? It's likely that they could make up the shortfall by reducing some services. Any services that the local community didn't want to pay for and the Disney company still wanted, Disney could pay for itself.
I also wonder if the the district is fairly valuing the land. How much would a hotel be willing to pay for an acre near the park, and is that the valuation the district uses?
I think the purpose was a lot more narrow: to position Ron DeSantis for the 2024 Republican Presidential primaries. Relatively small numbers of Republicans vote in the primaries, and they tend to be the angrier, more extreme wing. Donald Trump was nominated in 2016 despite a majority of Republican primary voters actually voting for other candidates. Once he was nominated, however, most Republicans fell into step and supported him.
That strategy doesn't work as well if you get ranked choice voting or anything other than first-past-the-post.
https://reason.com/2022/04/28/florida-tennessee-ban-ranked-c...
...oh
I don't know if there is a way to determine whether or not that effort actually succeeded, but it did exist and was spoken about with great pride until Trump became the President.
And as a consequence it means less business will ever come to Florida which is a disaster for them. It also means any existing businesses in Florida are likely to move more of their new work outside of the state. It's really a bad decision on DeSantis' part and I don't think he cares obviously but his party does.
[^0]: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4698442/user-clip-reality-lib...
[^1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_un...
It's not an ad hominem attack or partisan name-calling to say someone is <insert negative description here> if they actually, factually fit that description.
> I don't really care what Disney is being called. I care about teachers engaging in sexual discussion w/ minors without permission. If you do that, or you support this policy, I'll call you a groomer and I'll report you.
Ok, so not giving sex talks to kids without parents’ permission is not, in fact, a simple way to avoid being called a groomer. Got it.
Classic "disingenuous use of partisanship to talk past each other", but it's funny how the ostensibly "limited government" people are seemingly unworried about the potential for overreach in this case.
Show me where the Florida law says anything about "families and relationships?" Young kids don't view parental relationships as inherently sexual, and therefore talking about different kinds of families doesn't require talking about sexuality.
That is, in fact, pretty much the point of the law--to prevent teachers from using discussions of families as a vehicle to talk about sexuality and sexual attraction to third graders.
This is the sort of deliberate, disingenuous misapprehension that I'm talking about. You understand that the phrase "sexual orientation" is widely interpreted as "what gender of person a person has relationships with", right? As in, it's not just about "sex" in the prurient, not-safe-for-children sense.
[0] https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557/BillText/er/... (warning, PDF)
> 3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3…
I read this to prohibit discussion of sexual attraction with kids third grade and under. I don’t read this to prohibit incidental mention of someone’s same-sex spouse.
Sexuality \Sex`ual"ity\, n.
The quality or state of being distinguished by sex.
--Lindley.
[1913 Webster]
If the purpose of schools is to undo the instillment of parents' values (or lack of them), we should at least be honest about it. That's the assumption behind most debates of this type.
If the purpose of schools is to teach specialized skills that most parents don't have, then we should cut the crap so that kids can learn them.
If the purpose of schools is to babysit kids so that their parents can be used as human batteries for Nestle and Kroger, then God help us.
Which means that having a law that says teaching human sexuality can't happen is impossible to do without turning the teachers into uncaring robot like beings.
They could have banned the teaching of sexually explicate material but they chose not to.
How archetypally liberal to define the difference between humans and “uncaring robot like beings” in terms of being able to talk about “human sexuality.” It’s really an obsession isn’t it.
http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=sexuali...
We are, after all, talking about a law and a legal system where definitions are somewhat important.
> Definition of sexuality : the quality or state of being sexual:
> a : the condition of having sex
> b : sexual activity
> c : expression of sexual receptivity or interest especially when excessive
I don’t think I’m being a prude in saying that third graders shouldn’t be learning about any of this.
But that's exactly the problem. Parents want to insulate their young children from discussions of "human sexuality." We have strong social conventions to be able to talk about things kids are exposed to--weddings, etc.--without expressly talking about sexuality. Many parents, however, no longer trust teachers to adhere to these social conventions.
That isn't how the law is written. They could have, perhaps, actually written it that way but they didn't. I will leave it to the reader to infer their true intentions.
Why do children have to be taught about $anything in school? They have home and families, even extended ones, for that.
Why would this constitute overreach?
The bill that was passed is deliberately vague. Beyond that, it empowers private citizens to sue teachers in their personal capacities for any alleged transgression.
This is crazy. The status quo was that this question would be left up to school districts, with boards that are elected at the local level. If a teacher was not complying with school district policy, then the recourse was to fire the teacher.
The bill you're arguing in favor of hijacks control from local voters, overrides the expressed preferences of parents and local voters, and relies on civil lawsuits to enforce a state policy.
It absolutely is not the case educational material decisions are a purely local choice as the “status quo”.
Schools need to adhere to the Common Core subject areas, but what materials they use in teaching that was up to the district.
Recently, Florida's state-level Department of Education has been restricting the textbooks that school districts can use, but this is more of a reject list, than an accept list.
I also believe in constitutional republics where we have overriding laws which protect minorities — but that doesn’t apply in this case, as there isn’t an inherent right to discuss sex with other people’s young children.
So it would be acceptable for those same religious people to stop females from getting the same sort of education males receive? The damage done to others by such actions has to be taken into account.
I addressed that already.
> The damage done to others by such actions has to be taken into account.
This is something said but not done: look at how the male minority is treated in education, where the female majority speaks about equality while engaging in institutional sexism against the minority.
If Democrats want me to believe they are genuine in those principles, they should apply them consistently.
>I addressed that already.
Females are slightly more than 50% of the population.
There’s many mechanisms by which a school can be influenced and covering them all at a high level is difficult. In trying to set specific process controls, you merely encourage gamesmanship: “this wasn’t done by the board — we voted to outsource our decision to a NGO!”
A more effective mechanism is to define the standard (ie, don’t talk to kids below 9 about sex in schools) — but give enforcement powers when that standard is breached to the people actually impacted by that breach. This law gives people a tool to hold government accountable when it breaches the norms expected by the community, eg when they groom children.
I know several evangelical parents who want their kids ignorant about sexual health because they think teaching kids about sexual health will lead to them engaging in sex. Of course, thats not how it works, and these kids just end up engaging in sex while totally uninformed or in some cases filled with disinformation (for example, being told that condoms don't work - the parents think if the kids believe there is no safe sex that they won't have sex - but the kids end up having sex and don't use a condom because they believe it doesn't work).
> to keep stoking the fires of the culture wars. When they get their people denouncing the opposition as “groomers”, they are achieving their objective.
It's slimy and dishonest to pretend that only republicans are fighting a culture war when the bulk of the progressive platform is explicitly about changing US culture. It's like calling Ukraine the aggressor for defending against the Russian invasion.
It's about whether the Republicans are only fighting a culture war.
What are their policies on healthcare? Infrastructure investment and repair? Climate change? Transportation policy? Childhood poverty? Topsoil depletion in the midwest? Extreme severe drought in the southwest? etc. etc.
Why do they appear to spend so much time talking about things in the "culture war" realm and so little time advancing policy agendas about things that really matter (not that are no "culture war" issues that matter).
Progressives are quite clear about the metrics by which they consider one state of a society to be better than another. More equality of opportunity. Less income/wealth inequality. A more even distribution of GDP between labor and capital. Reduced discrimination against protected classes. Improved health outcomes. Equal treatment under the law. Above all, the type of society you would choose to live in if you could not control who your parents were or where you would be born.
It is far from clear what the conservative/Republican equivalent of this is.
I have to be honest it's not a night-and-day difference.
Then I met up with a very old friend of mine. Successful SV VC guy. Incredibly smart. Incredibly human. Probably reads Hacker News (actually, scratch that). Happens to be of Indian ancestry, though he grew up in Davis, CA. Very wealthy thanks to a few good choices made after he dropped out of his PhD program. So yeah, maybe he didn't have my middle class white anglo privilege going on, but if there's a ladder, I had always assumed he was only 1 or 2 rungs below me, at worst.
As it turns out, no. Trump's election had made him adopt a policy of no longer engaging in any business travel to anywhere in the USA except major metropolitan areas. Was it paranoid? I don't feel equipped to comment. But that was the verdict of a guy that I respect enormously for his intelligence and his decision making processes. He felt too unsafe in Trump's America to visit mid-size towns in Iowa.
So, when you say:
> I have to be honest it's not a night-and-day difference.
I'd advise checking in with some brown people you know (or don't know). Some immigrants not yet moved into citizenship. Someone in any group that Trump verbally attacked. Because I felt the same way until my friend gently but forcefully told me that I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about if I was trying to generalize from my own experience.
So not because of any negative experience with these areas, just because of some bigoted stereotype? Sounds like the parent post was right, nothing in daily life really changed, except perhaps the perception of some increased danger. Perhaps brought on by the way that Trump was reported on in the media?
The fact that people feel something does not imply that it exists. Humans are notoriously unreliable witnesses.
I absolutely agree.
Nevertheless, to hear that an intelligent, savvy, world-travelling person could now feel unsafe in many parts of the USA was, to me, indicative of a type of change that is as real as them actually being unsafe. Which is to say: I don't know if they were actually in any more danger than they would have been before, but they now perceived American society as if they were. That didn't happen because they ate the wrong thing for breakfast.
The fact that the "overton window" of the visible culture seemed to have move enough after Trump's election that this person now felt unsafe, regardless of whether there was an actual change in their safety, seems really notable to me, and no doubt even more notable to the people who live with this shift in perception.
After Election Day 2016 the formerly mild-mannered Iowans (a state so racist that America's first Black president won a majority of votes there in 2008 and 2012) decided to drop all pretense of being nice to people of color.
I'm sorry but it sounds frankly ridiculous.
Let's suppose that my friend crosses paths with 100 Iowans during a business trip there. Let's suppose that 1% of Iowans are racist or bigoted enough to at the very least yell some abuse at this particular clearly non-caucasian individual. Before Trump's primary campaign and electoral win, social pressure kept the 1 person my friend may have encountered from acting on that impulse, but afterwards, that person felt much freer to just speak their mind (or worse).
Such an analysis says nothing about Iowans in general as people. It says that it's easy to be worried that the general attitude had shifted enough in Iowa (but not, say, in NYC or Chicago) that the tiny percentage of people who might act on their racist/bigoted impulses are now more likely to do so, changing my friend's risk exposure by visiting.
It's not for you or me to judge whether that's sufficient reason to avoid Iowa now. That's an individual decision to be made, and I do not sit in judgement of those who decide one way or another.
But you're also missing the deeper aspect of the point I'm trying to make. You don't have to believe me, but I'm telling you that my friend is a hyper-rational, highly intelligent, well informed individual. The fact that such a person could move from "I have never worried about being brown when moving around the USA" to "I will not visit anywhere outside of large metropolitan areas" - that's the change. You are free to argue that it is is irrational, or even "ridiculous" as you put it, but the point is that the state of American society pre-Trump left this individual feeling safe, and the same state post-Trump left them feeling anxious. If they were a person prone to irrational, emotive decisions or generally over-reacted to anything, then I would be inclined to dismiss the change in their sense of their own safety. If they had always worried about this aspect of life in the USA, I would be inclined to dismiss the change. But they are not and they did not, and so I take this change quite seriously.
Amount of brown people in their voters neighborhood
One could argue that rolling back abortion access (which has existed for decades and is part of US culture) is conservatives in America explicitly changing US culture. Same with bills like the one in Florida that disallow teachers from discussing human gender or human romantic relationships.
Everyone is generally trying to affect the direction of the culture of the US at the political level at all times. It’s not a right va left thing it’s a humans exist thing.
That doesn't obligate a people to quietly accept a culture imposed onto them by out of touch urbanites/intellectuals/ivory tower elites.
>Same with bills like the one in Florida that disallow teachers from discussing human gender or human romantic relationships.
Human gender and normalcy of romantic relationships are culturally defined. This bill isn't about forbidding discussion of genders, its about resisting the imposition of progressive culture onto the children of moderate/conservative parents. This isn't about bigotry, this is a genuine concern that normalizing fundamentally abnormal behaviors can do more harm than good to individuals and society.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
"Would you like to see the Supreme Court overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision concerning abortion, or not?"
No: 58% Yes: 32% No opinion: 10%
You can slice and dice the court of public opinion many different ways to demonstrate support for your preferred position on abortion (as with many other things). That doesn't mean that "conservatives are trying to roll back the law to reflect the culture" (emphasis mine). It means that they have an idea of what the culture should be, and are trying to make it so (like everyone else who is trying to accomplish anything politically).
Asking people a question framed in terms of weeks or trimesters produces a much more accurate reflection of the culture than asking them about a legal decision that most people have never read. Most people think that “overturning Roe” means “banning abortion nationwide.” Maybe you think that’s where Republicans are headed with this. I think it would be equally fair to say, given recent laws passed in New York and Colorado, that Democrats want legal abortion until the moment of birth (and after that if the abortion was unsuccessful).
But the actual legal issue in play right now are 8 weeks, 15 weeks, or 22-24 weeks. And public opinion is much closer to what republicans have enacted on those numbers than what Roe requires.
Just stand up for what you believe in. Stop trying to speak on behalf of "the culture" which is in most ways not accurately knowable, and even if it was, is of dubious significance. Most major shifts in societies (not all, but most) occur in opposition to "the culture".
You don't think it's possible to get a gist of what the public thinks generally? Most Americans (60%) think that abortion should be "generally legal" in the first trimester, while only 28% think that it should be "generally legal" in the second trimester: https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-...
Insofar as Roe requires abortion to be "generally legal" in the second trimester--a position that 70% of Americans reject--it is a departure from the culture.
> Just stand up for what you believe in. Stop trying to speak on behalf of "the culture" which is in most ways not accurately knowable, and even if it was, is of dubious significance.
I believe in democratic values. I believe culture belongs to everyone, and cultural changes should be driven bottom-up, through social consensus, not top down by legal elites, big corporations, etc.
> Most major shifts in societies (not all, but most) occur in opposition to "the culture".
Much more so in the U.S. than in other developed countries, and that's a bad thing. Most European countries ended up making elective abortions available in the first trimester in response to changing social views. In the U.S., legal elites rammed through a second-trimester rule that decades later is still at odds with public opinion.
Likewise, in 2015, the U.S. the Supreme Court found that the Constitution's implicit marriage right encompassed same-sex marriage. A year later, the European Court of Human Rights reached the exact opposite conclusion--finding that the express marriage right in the European Convention on Human Rights did not extend to same-sex marriage: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-.... Accordingly, countries like Germany legalized same-sex marriage in 2017, through the ordinary legislative process, with the support of 73% of the population.