Editorial Roundup: Florida
Tampa Bay Times. September 3, 2023.
Editorial: Stop allowing zealots to waste Florida school districts’ time and money
A very small number of people have made the vast majority of book challenges in Florida.
We really shouldn’t be surprised that just two people — a transplanted New Yorker and an Escambia County English teacher — are responsible for almost half of the book banning attempts made in Florida schools over the last year.
The two culture warriors submitted about 600 of the 1,100 book challenges made since July 2022, according to a recent Tampa Bay Times investigation, wasting untold hours of school employee time and the taxpayer dollars that pay for it. They are part of a small group of Republican-backed scolds who are making Florida school officials afraid to do their job, which is to educate students, not placate zealots.
They are doing exactly what the Republican officials leading this state want them to do. It would be comical if it wasn’t so damaging.
Last year, at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican-dominated Legislature passed laws restricting public school lessons about race and racism and gender and sexual identity. Lawmakers required school officials to remove any content deemed inappropriate or harmful to minors, and encouraged parents to file complaints, which often triggered immediate removal of the material.
The Times investigation shows it’s not at all clear if the people making the complaints actually read the books they said should be tossed out. Consider Bruce Friedman and Vicki Baggett, the two people who filed almost half of the challenges in the state during the last 12 months. Friedman, a 57-year-old former New Yorker who now lives in Clay County, is responsible for more than 400 complaints. Many of his challenges provide little more explanation than “Protect Children!’’ and “Damaged Souls!’’ Some appear to be photocopies with only the titles and authors changed.
They are doing exactly what the Republican officials leading this state want them to do. It would be comical if it wasn’t so damaging.
Last year, at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican-dominated Legislature passed laws restricting public school lessons about race and racism and gender and sexual identity. Lawmakers required school officials to remove any content deemed inappropriate or harmful to minors, and encouraged parents to file complaints, which often triggered immediate removal of the material.
The Times investigation shows it’s not at all clear if the people making the complaints actually read the books they said should be tossed out. Consider Bruce Friedman and Vicki Baggett, the two people who filed almost half of the challenges in the state during the last 12 months. Friedman, a 57-year-old former New Yorker who now lives in Clay County, is responsible for more than 400 complaints. Many of his challenges provide little more explanation than “Protect Children!’’ and “Damaged Souls!’’ Some appear to be photocopies with only the titles and authors changed.
Neither Baggett nor Friedman answered the Times request for interviews. Friedman has told Fox News he started his crusades after his teenage son suffered “considerable harm’′ while attending New York’s public schools. He went on to found the Florida chapter of No Left Turn in Education, which opposes “progressive indoctrination.’’ He learned about the group while watching Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.
The Times investigation shows quite clearly how a tiny number of activists can effectively overwhelm a school district, especially when enabled by state leaders.
“We have probably spent more resources on (Friedman) than anyone else in the history of the school district,’’ said Roger Dailey, Clay County’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction.
The report also shows that the vast majority of parents aren’t using book challenges to perpetuate DeSantis’ floundering culture wars. This isn’t a mass movement. Parents aren’t showing up in big numbers to censor books.
But his administration’s pretense that they are only empowering parents — when the vast majority are indicating they neither want nor need this power — is still having a chilling effect on teachers and school districts, who are wary of crossing a vindictive state government. In Jefferson County, for example, all school media are closed until the district can inventory its entire catalog. Santa Rosa County quarantined every book that received a complaint.
The saddest aspect of all this is there already is a mechanism to handle complaints about books and other curriculum material. It’s called an opt-out, which allows parents to say they don’t want their child exposed to specific content, but has no impact on other students. Most schools and teachers already routinely inform parents about materials to be used, and offer quality alternatives.
That’s a much better way to empower parents than allowing a few zealots to decide what every student should read.
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South Florida Sun Sentinel. September 4, 2023.
Editorial: The uniquely Florida voice of Jimmy Buffett
Jimmy Buffett left us at at the start of a long Labor Day weekend, as good a time as any for the Bard of Beach Bums to settle his tab.
Very few people are so readily identified in the public mind with Florida. Buffett is and always will be, and he worked very hard to maintain the cultivated image of a carefree roamer with sand between his toes. The tropical shirt. The chilled Margarita. The yearning to escape. The perpetual tan.
Buffett died Friday at age 76 at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y. from a long battle with a rare form of skin cancer, his official website said.
By his own admission, he wasn’t a great singer or an especially gifted guitarist. But he had remarkable staying power for six decades. Not bad for a guy who couldn’t cut it in Nashville when he first tried to make it as a country singer.
He found his unique voice in Key West in the mid-’70s. It became the soundtrack for two generations with songs such as “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” “Come Monday,” “Bama Breeze,” and his signature song, “Margaritaville.”
Many of the troubadour’s obituaries were about the perceived contrast between Buffett the musician, who made Margaritaville the song famous; and Buffett the business tycoon, who spun gold with Margaritaville. A trademarked brand, it became a business empire of hotels, condos, casinos, casual wear, wine coolers and even Latitude Margaritaville retirement communities.
He may have looked like he never worked a day in his life, but in real life he was a workaholic.
A shrewd businessman, too
He last had a solo chart hit with “Margaritaville” in 1977, but stayed on tour, performing for live crowds that seemed to get larger every year. A shrewd businessman, he became one of the richest recording artists in popular music history with an estimated net worth of up to $1 billion (more than Mick Jagger or Bruce Springsteen).
His fanatically devoted fans, known as Parrotheads, were in on the joke. Buffett even wrote a song called “Mailbox Money” about cashing royalty checks. What kept the myth alive was that he kept the common touch with his fans and his Key West roots, and his followers returned the loyalty.
To them, Buffett was about possibilities.
The possibility that somewhere there was a place along a gorgeous beach where just enough money could be made to keep a roof over your head and a drink in your hand. That we would all be comfortable in that life and not missing the small comforts and many more complications that have chained us to our modern lives. The possibility that however old he and we grew, that life was never out of reach, and it would never be too late to try.
He really knew his audience
Like any artist with a hard-core, dedicated following, a Buffett concert was as much about communion as it was about the music, and that was especially true in South Florida, where Buffett enjoyed a home-field advantage. The fans came out early, with leis and flamingos and parrots and tropical floral prints of an impossible variety, and, well, the margaritas flowed like wine.
Just as his business empire will roll on, producing revenue for the Buffett estate for decades to come, so will the idea that spawned it.
The patron saint of South Florida may be gone, but as long as there’s a ratty Hawaiian shirt in the closet and an open tab at the tiki bar, it’ll still be 5 o’clock in Margaritaville.
Broad political appeal
Buffett’s cultural appeal in Florida was so strong for so long that he was in high demand by Democratic politicians for endorsements or gestures of support, often with an environmental emphasis.
He strongly opposed offshore oil drilling and, with a close political ally, Gov. Bob Graham, founded the Save the Manatee Club in 1981.
Buffett recorded radio and TV messages to promote awareness of the plight of the endangered sea mammals and in 1989 lent his support to creation of the Save the Manatee specialty license plate.
Buffett performed a duet with Graham in Tallahassee during the annual press corps skits in 1984, as the two men swapped roles on stage. It may be the only known photo of Buffett in a jacket and tie.
Buffett gave Florida a sense of place, and he always remained close to his audience. His last Florida concert was in Key West in February, and his final public appearance was with one of his bandmates at an oceanside bar in Rhode Island on the Fourth of July weekend.
It was an improbable journey for a Catholic kid from Pascagoula, Miss. But in the end, Buffett lived out the lyric of his song, “Growing Older But Not Up”: “I’d rather die while I’m livin’ than live while I’m dead.”
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Orlando Sentinel. September 3, 2023.
Editorial: Editorial: With quiet dignity, Mount Dora stands against bullies
Even after all the news coverage, it’s hard to fathom the depths of toxic, illogical thinking behind a missive sent to Mount Dora city leaders by the Lake County legislative delegation, in response to the city’s approval of a “safe spaces” program that encourages business leaders to offer refuge to people threatened with harassment or violence.
Smugly hateful, the missive carried a thinly veiled threat to punish Mount Dora residents if their City Council doesn’t knuckle under. The Republican lawmakers signing off on it —Sen. Dennis Baxley, and Reps. Keith Truenow, Taylor Yarkosky and Stan McClain — should be ashamed of themselves. They aren’t.
We understand local leaders’ desire to quietly carry forward with their plans (though it was heartening to hear their reactions at the Aug. 26 council meeting, with each of the six members present signaling their unwavering support of the original Safe Spaces resolution).
But if legislators keep pushing, they can expect Mount Dora to push back. This is, after all, a town that knows how to call out bigotry.
Leaps of illogic
In the letter, the legislative foursome adopts a tone that wavers between willful ignorance and blunt aggression. It starts off by demanding to know what prompted Mount Dora to adopt a safe places ordinance, asserting “we had to go back over 12 years to find reports in your area regarding any such bigotry, prejudice, or outright hate crimes being reported.”
That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the delegation’s information-gathering abilities, or short-term memories. They could have simply called up the video of the council’s August 7 meeting, where Police Chief Mike Gibson explained exactly why he thought this program was a good fit for Mount Dora, as it has been for Orlando, Orange and Osceola counties and more than 300 other law enforcement agencies nationwide.
The concept of “safe spaces” has caught on because research has shown that LGBTQ+ people — along with other marginalized groups — often don’t trust law enforcement to care when they are targeted by threats of violence, and so hate crimes are often underreported, he explained. The Safe Spaces program breaks through that barrier in two steps: Business owners show they’re willing to offer refuge to targets of harassment — and are trained to reassure victims that local officers can be trusted to take such reports seriously.
Yarkosky, Truenow, McClain and Baxley should also know what’s making things particularly bad in Florida. They are among lawmakers who have enthusiastically enabled Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attempts to demonize LGBTQ Floridians, painting them as threats to families and particularly, children. This letter doubles down on that insanity, claiming that offering safety to victims of bias crimes actually makes Mount Dora less safe.
“In light of what we have seen around this country in regards to the pushback and unprecedented financial harm to long standing American made companies such as Anheuser-Busch and Target Corporation, this local ‘Safe Place’ program is negligent, irresponsible and divisive at best,” their letter read. “We believe that you are putting the City of Mount Dora in the crosshairs of potentially detrimental and absolutely unnecessary, economic harm.”
No, fellas, that’s you: This threat is coming from inside the House (and Senate, and governor’s mansion).
Mount Dora says no
Mount Dora council members and residents are precisely the wrong audience for this nonsense. Voters chose LGBTQ leaders for three of the seven council seats. And city leaders are well aware of the upswing in threats and actual crimes this brand of poisonous politicking spawns.
That’s why law-enforcement and community leaders are so anxious to get programs like this in place, explained Henry Ollendick, president of the Triangle Connection, a local civic group. Across the state (and, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the nation) gay, lesbian, bisexual and particularly transgender people are seeing marked increases in persecution and threats, he said.
We would have had a tough time showing the level of restraint and dignity that Mount Dora Council members exhibited when discussing the letter and a potential response at its Aug. 26 workshop.
Council members pointed out, correctly, that the wording of the original ordinance underscored that it was intended to protect all victims of bias crime, not just LGBTQ+ residents and visitors (making the legislators’ allegation that it “picked winners and losers” an outright fabrication). Still, they were amenable to tweaks that would make it even more obvious.
They were also calmly, politely, unanimously unyielding in their support for the Safe Spaces program, even in the face of the legislative delegation’s nasty insinuation that the city could face retaliation from the Legislature in the form of even more restrictive laws or lawmakers’ refusal to help fund Mount Dora’s local projects.
Council members understood that, but also pointed out that this was really just an extension of a 2016 equal rights ordinance that included LGBTQ+ status in its list of protected classes.
A history of protection
The city’s stand on civil rights for all Mount Dora residents goes back much further than that. The city has often acknowledged that there are troubling times in its own history, and apologized for them. But there have often been shining moments when Mount Dora rallied against bigotry — it was one of the first cities in Florida to elect a woman to the City Council and had Black council members before other Lake cities as well. Its displays of what DeSantis would deride as “wokeness” often drew attention from the acolytes of prejudice.
This nasty attack reminds us, in particular, of one incident in 1988, when a local faction of the Ku Klux Klan announced it would be participating in the city’s Christmas parade.
Appalled at the idea, city leaders first canceled, then rescheduled, the parade — but ensured the KKK would be excluded. When Klan members snuck out in the dark of night to litter the parade route with thousands of racist flyers, city employees and police officers quickly swept them away hours before the parade’s scheduled start.
By January, Klan members were threatening litigation. But council members were pretty sure they knew what the reaction would be. So they allowed the Klan to finally stage its “parade.”
And just as expected, the planned parade route was lined with dozens of Mount Dora residents, many carrying signs touting love and acceptance over hate, or mocking the Klan. As for the “white knights” — their showing was pitiful. Four men jammed into one nondescript car, adorned with Confederate flags and a sign that said “Martin Luther King was a commi,” scooted down Donnelly Street. After 10 minutes — most spent while Klan members tried to speak and hoots of derision from the crowd drowned them out — then-Police Chief Bob Roberts ordered the racist crew to skedaddle. And they did.
We suspect this current Gang of Four will hear from Mount Dora residents as well — if not now, then at campaign time when they are seeking donations and windows to display their campaign signs. We have a feeling they won’t find much of a safe place in downtown Mount Dora.
We have no problem with that at all.
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Palm Beach Post. September 5, 2023.
Editorial: Red-flagging troubled individuals; a common sense countermeasure to gun violence
On gun violence, law enforcers must be proactive
From the distraught days, weeks and months that followed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre in 2018, emerged some of the most sensible gun regulation in years. Not nearly enough, and there has been significant backsliding since then. But, despite perpetual resistance from the gun lobby and politicians who took NRA contributions and bought its nonsense, progress was made.
The Florida Legislature passed a law that allowed police to remove guns from people who pose a danger. The state also tightened the purchase process, including raising the minimum age to buy guns from 18 to 21.
At the federal level, too, came legislation. Congress enhanced background checks; supported state crisis intervention; banned anyone convicted of domestic violence from owning a gun; provided funding for school safety measures; and provided $11 billion for mental health programs. Though the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed without support from Florida Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott or many Florida Republicans in the House of Representatives, it passed.
The good news, as reported last week in The Palm Beach Post, is that law enforcement in Palm Beach County has taken these changes to heart — particularly the state’s red flag provisions, meant to take weapons away from twisted souls before they brandish them.
As Investigative Reporter Andrew Marra found, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office led the state in the increase of risk-protection orders sought during the past two years. The county now trails only Polk County in how often it successfully uses the new legal tool. The orders allow police officers to ask court permission to remove a person’s firearms and to bar them from possessing any for a year.
During the 2020-21 budget year, Palm Beach County judges approved 103 petitions submitted by police, the seventh-highest total in the state. In the first 10 months of the 2022-23 year, the number had more than tripled to 325, Marra reported.
At the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, the petitions are handled by a special Behavioral Services Division established by Sheriff Ric Bradshaw in the wake of the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The division works with a Targeted Violence Unit, whose deputies and clinical therapists identify cases that meet the criteria for a risk-protection order and file petitions.
This red flagging has been employed to prevent not just school shootings but domestic crimes and other violence.
“It’s prevented something bad from happening,” Bradshaw told The Post. “You can’t prove a negative but it takes away the likelihood of something happening.”
Other counties and municipal law enforcement agencies would do well to follow Palm Beach County’s example. Most have smaller populations and don’t have the budget to afford the PBSO’s level of service; others have the budget but don’t prioritize red-flagging. In South Florida, according to state data, Monroe County saw only 4 risk protection orders granted from July 2022 to April 2023; Miami-Dade had just 14; Broward, 184; Martin, 20; and St. Lucie, 59.
Given the gun violence sweeping our state, police agencies should find ways to help each other clear the hurdles encountered in enforcing this law throughout Florida. It’s not as if violent and unstable people respect county lines.
Who knows if last week’s racist slaying of three African Americans at a Jacksonville Dollar Store might have been prevented. The shooter, who turned the gun on himself afterward, had made clear in online postings that he hated Blacks. He had previously threatened suicide and was under psychiatric care but apparently off his meds. He was involved in a 2016 domestic violence incident and was involuntarily committed for a 72-hour mental health examination the following year, the Jacksonville Sheriff told the Associated Press. Yet, as of this year, there was nothing legally stopping him from buying a Glock handgun and AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle.
Much more needs to be done to tighten red flag laws and other gun regulation in Florida. But putting the laws to work that we do have, and working through their difficulties to improve and better enforce them, should be a high priority throughout the state.
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Miami Herald. September 5, 2023.
Editorial: Florida’s new immigration law isn’t just cruel. It’s an awakening to our hypocrisy
It’s the inconvenient truth Democrats and Republicans have ignored about illegal immigration: Americans might not like immigrants crossing the U.S. border illegally. But we all have grown to love what we can get out them.
These are the people cleaning our homes and caring for our family members, doing landscape work in our suburbs and harvesting our produce — which better be affordable when it reaches our Publix. The unprecedented inflation since the pandemic is not the American norm. Having abundant goods and services is.
Florida’s new hardline immigration law, which went in-to effect on July 1, was an unprecedented effort to crack down on the hiring of undocumented immigrants. As the Herald reported this week, the law could worsen an existing labor shortage in the state’s agriculture sector, which relies heavily on migrant labor.
Avoiding Florida
From fall through spring, production of some of the state’s main crops, like potatoes and tomatoes, will ramp up, making it clear whether that shortage materializes and to what extent. Some farmers and farmworkers advocates already are telling stories of migrants who are skipping Florida this season out of fear they could get tangled in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ signature law.
The new law is a great sell to conservative voters and the news outlets that amp up fear and resentment over illegal immigration. What’s better than juxtaposing images of caravans of migrants crossing the Texas border with DeSantis inking a measure that, among other things, prohibits people from transporting migrants into the Sunshine State? That provision — cruel and punitive — is being challenged in court. It will affect families of mixed legal status who could face felony charges for simply driving their undocumented loved ones into the state.
The law also requires employers with more than 25 workers to use the federal electronic platform E-Verify to determine whether new hires are allowed to work in the country. It requires hospitals that accept Medicaid to ask patients their legal status on intake forms and makes some out-of-state driver licenses invalid.
The blame doesn’t rest only with Republicans who have exploited the border crisis and legitimate concerns Americans have about it for political gain. Democrats, too, failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform that offers migrants currently in the country a pathway to legal status. It’s been 10 years since Congress seriously considered the issue under the leadership of U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and the bipartisan “Gang of Eight.” The failure to get a bill through also rests with former President Obama, who had a chance to do it when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress.
You can’t tackle immigration with tough laws that risk hurting crucial industries like agriculture without dealing with the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Republicans can promise to kick out every person in this country illegally — whether it be through Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” strategy or zero-tolerance policies. Not only is that unfeasible and expensive, it would also expel essential workers from our economy. Unfortunately, talking about the complexity of this problem doesn’t make for good sound bites and campaign platforms.
Hurting small businesses
It’s not the big corporate farming conglomerates that Florida’s law affects the most. Almost three-quarters of farms in Miami-Dade County are smaller than nine acres, and family-owned operations dominate the area’s agriculture sector. Foreigners make up almost 87% of Dade’s farming workforce, the Herald reported.
The federal H-2A visa program allows farmers to sponsor temporarily farm workers to fill shortages. There’s high demand in Florida for the program, with 32,714 certified H-2A positions in the state in the third quarter of fiscal year 2023, the Herald reported. But the program is costly because employers must pay special wage rates and cover housing and transportation. It’s also ripe with opportunity for to exploit migrants.
Florida needs migrant workers, many of whom are in the country illegally. This is the uncomfortable truth that Florida’s new law has exposed. The state and the country rely on cheap migrant labor to sustain our way of life. Without comprehensive reform, cracking down on immigrants looking for work and the massive economic engine that employs them makes Florida look tough, but it’s no real solution.
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