In campaign stops/official appearances across the state, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tells a story that supposedly illustrates the need for the recently signed “Don’t Say Gay” law. It’s a sinister tale about unnamed persons at a public school who arbitrarily decide to reassign a child’s gender, change their name, change their wardrobe, etc., without parental involvement:
“We had a mother from Leon County, and her daughter was going to school and some people in the school had decided that the daughter was really a boy and not a girl. So they changed the girl’s name to a boy’s name, had her dress like a boy and on doing all this stuff, without telling the mother or getting consent from the mother. First of all, they shouldn’t be doing that at all. But to do these things behind the parents’ back and to say that the parents should be shut out. That is wrong,” DeSantis said during a news conference in Jasper, Florida, on Tuesday.
DeSantis told the same story the week before in Palm Beach County:
“Her daughter was in school up in Leon County, and some of the people at school decided that her daughter was really a boy and wanted to identify as a boy. So they changed her name. They changed her quote pronouns. They did these things without telling the mother, much less getting the mother’s consent,” said DeSantis, who is considered a potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate.
It’s all a big fat lie. And the issue isn’t just that DeSantis is lying on the stump when he tells this story; according to Politico, the Don’t Say Gay bill itself was built on this foundational lie. We know the story is a lie because CNN and the local Tallahassee newspaper obtained emails exchanged between the mother, registered Republican January Littlejohn, and the school:
Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law is built on a liePost + Comments (171)