Florida Republicans are planning a broad rightwing legislative push, including new restrictions on gender identification, diversity and equity programs, abortion and press freedoms, and further relaxation of concealed weapons laws and the ability of courts to impose death sentences.
The basket of proposed legislation comes five months after the state’s rightwing Republican governor Ron DeSantis won re-election by a decisive margin and the Republicans established a convincing majority in the state legislature.
The broad push is seen by many as following the Republican governor’s ideological wish-list as DeSantis positions himself for a likely 2024 White House and an attempt to wrest the Republican party from out of the shadow of Donald Trump.
Last week, Republican lawmakers moved to expand the state’s controversial “Parental Rights in Education/Don’t Say Gay” law with proposed legislation limiting the use of gender pronouns within parts of the public and charter school education system.
The legislation, known as House Bill 1223, is aimed at establishing a requirement that “personal titles and pronouns” used in schools for kindergarten through 12th grade match the identity assigned at birth.
The bill says that “a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun” that does not match their sex and expands bans on sexual orientation and gender identity topics in schools by five years, from third to eighth grade.
The legislation, introduced last week, also releases employees, contractors, or students in Florida K-12 schools from referring to others using their preferred personal title or pronoun if it does not match their sex.
Seeking to suppress trans rights has become a political tactic for Republicans in recent months across the US amid a broad right-wing backlash against LGBTQ communities, that has included proposed book bans, attacks on drag shows and the promotion of conspiracy theories.
Other laws set to be pushed in Florida include allowing concealed weapons without a permit or training, a ban on diversity and equity programs at state universities, new abortion restrictions, rolling back press freedoms and allowing courts to pass a death sentence without a unanimous jury verdict.
Republican lawmakers in Florid have indicated that they are guided by DeSantis. “We’re going to get his agenda across the finish line,” Republican Senate president Kathleen Passidomo said last month.
The governor summoned lawmakers to a special session last month that would expand his power to transport migrants solely from Florida to transport from anywhere in the US. Lawmakers also gave state prosecutors expanded powers over voting-related crimes.
The legislative slate follows DeSantis’s 19% margin in his re-election in November and appears to have little effective Democrat opposition. HB 1223 builds on 2021’s Parents Bill of Rights and HB 1557 Parental Rights in Education better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which triggered widespread outrage but has been copied by other Republican-controlled state legislatures.
Under the proposed legislation, both private providers or public schools would also be blocked from providing instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Equality Florida Public Policy director Jon Harris Maurer said in a statement that the legislation “is about a fake moral panic, cooked up by Governor DeSantis to demonize LGBTQ people for his own political career”.
“Governor DeSantis and the lawmakers following him are hellbent on policing language, curriculum, and culture. Free states don’t ban books or people,” Maurer added.
