Florida students protest imminent closing of university LGBTQ center

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/florida-unf-students-protest-closing-lgbtq-center-rcna135758

Welcome to the white fundamentalist maga paradise, Florida.  The purge is well on the way.  Again the goal is to remove / wipe out all representation of LGBTQIA from public society.  Also part of the goal is to return black / brown people to a lower stature and keep them there.   To stop any integration or upward movement of the minority groups.   These people demand a return to the time when white males were automatically in charge, Christianity was the assumed only real religion and all things Christian were good, women were subservient to males and functioned to do for men in the home / public / bedroom, blacks knew their place and stayed there, and the LGBTQIA were not seen or heard of terrified of being found out.   That is the world these people are fighting to have.  Florida is well on the way.  They have basically outlawed the teaching of acceptance or inclusion of any group not dedicated to white people or Christianity.  They have removed any representation of LGBTQIA or racism from schools.  They have rewritten history, legislated being cis, being straight until adult, legislated having a small groups of bigoted racist parents over ruling all other parents on what school age kids can do, read, see, say, and do medically.  They call anything not right wing fundamentalist maga is indoctrination.   Welcome to Florida, a state run by Christian Taliban with help from the moral police.   Hugs.  Scottie

 

The Florida Board of Governors voted to prohibit using state funding for public university programs or activities that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
 
 
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Students at the University of North Florida protested the imminent closing of the school’s four diversity centers, including the campus LGBTQ center, on Wednesday.

The protest took place the day the Florida Board of Governors, the governing body of the State University System of Florida, voted to prohibit funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and activities at the state’s public universities. The vote comes several months after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a measure into law banning all of the state’s public higher education institutions from using state or federal funding for diversity programs.

 

UNF, in Jacksonville, will close its Office of Diversity and Inclusion — and, with it, its interfaith, intercultural, women’s and LGBTQ centers — to comply with the new law, President Moaz Limayem said in a letter to the university community Wednesday night. 

Limayem said the four university centers will be “phased out” immediately but added that registered student organizations that aim to promote diversity will remain active on the university’s campus and that no staffers will lose their jobs. He did not weigh in on student protests or on his views about the state policy.

“We want UNF to be a place where all people feel safe and welcome, and where there is no place for hate,” Limayem said. “This semester, we will begin seeking ways to reinforce UNF’s values in everything we do, and we will review and expand resources as necessary to ensure success for all members of our campus community.”

Cassandra Edwards, a spokesperson for the university system, said in an email Thursday that Florida “will remain focused on high-quality education for our students and not allow indoctrination.”

UNF student Lissie Morales was among the protesters, many of whom were waving rainbow Pride flags and shouting: “What do we do? Stand up, fight back!”

“The center provided me friends; it provided me education to learn more about my gender and sexual orientation,” Morales told NBC affiliate WTLV of Jacksonville. “In regard to the turnout, it warms my heart to see people care about something as much as I do, especially when it comes to the LGBT center, because it was one of the reasons why I came to UNF in the first place.”

In 2022, UNF was among 40 institutions on Campus Pride’s list of best universities for LGBTQ students. 

Carlos Guillermo Smith, a former Florida House Democrat who is a policy adviser at the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Florida, called the new state law “a rubber stamp for Ron DeSantis’s agenda of censorship and surveillance.”

“The Board of Governors had the opportunity to hit the brakes, but instead, shamefully followed their censorship agenda off a cliff in service to DeSantis’s failed political ambitions,” Smith said in a statement Wednesday. 

A representative for DeSantis did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The regulation comes as Florida continues to build on its reputation for enacting anti-LGBTQ laws and legislation aimed at limiting diversity initiatives. 

Dozens of UNF students attend a rally in support of the school's LGBTQ center.
Dozens of UNF students attend a rally in support of the school’s LGBTQ center. WTLV

Florida made national headlines when it enacted what critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law in 2022, which limited the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools in kindergarten through third grade. DeSantis signed a bill last year that expanded the law to apply to students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Last year, Florida lawmakers prompted outcry for blocking an Advanced Placement course on African American studies from being taught in high schools.

Since the start of the year, Florida lawmakers have introduced roughly a dozen anti-LGBTQ bills. They include a sweeping measure that would force Floridians to sign an affidavit when they apply for new driver’s licenses and state IDs to certify that the gender markers on their birth certificates will match their new IDs. Another bill would allow some published accusations of homophobia and transphobia to be considered “defamation per se.”

Student protests over Florida’s policies about LGBTQ issues have also become common. In November, students at a high school in Coconut Creek, about 15 miles north of Fort Lauderdale, staged a walkout after their principal and other school staffers were reprimanded for letting a transgender girl compete on the school’s girls volleyball team.

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I suffered through eighteen years of indoctrination to become straight. Didn’t work

I read books about Dick and Jane…
I’m not out chasing Jane.

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Gloria is out chasing Jane.
I’m out chasing Dick, pun intended.
😉

Yup. I didn’t kiss a boy until I was in my 20s

I found my Dad’s playboys including the one with the Jimmy Carter interview and Jimmy Connors future wife as the centerfold.
Still digging men

Exactly! My whole youth was steeped in the straight world, I knew not one gay person and had zero history of the gay movement, yet I still turned out gay.

Same for the rest of us. This is how we can tell that the evangelicals are completely, utterly delusional; and why they’re a minority now in the US. Dems need to vote them out. If they refuse the evangelicals will begin their new Spanish Inquisition.

Next step: jailing and killing us. I am NOT overreacting. It’s going to happen unless we stop this shit immediately.

They’ve been openly musing about a final solution to the LGBTQ+ “problem”.

 

The War on Women’s Rights
The War on LGBT Rights
The War on Voting Rights
The War on Oversight
The War on Accountability
The War on the Elderly
The War on The Arts

Join the Resistance. Vote in 2024.

The War on Science
The War on Civility

The War on Reality…

Religion is indoctrination.

And, if carefully taught, can have you hating yourself, too…

George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature:

From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling cast, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.

 

I’m currently reading 1984 (incidentally, the year in which I was born). I’m up to the appendix, where Orwell describes Newspeak.

They forget about that whole pesky “separation of church and state”. If the Roberts court is a “traditionalist” court, more states should be challenging the unconstitutional legislation passed in many States (esp the Federal Gov as this is setting up a State vs Federal legal battle), otherwise the Supreme Court will have to justify their reason for overturning Roe and much more. Not that it matters but it’s important for the public to understand.

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I expect DeSantis to become especially cruel now that he is no longer a candidate

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One thought on “Florida students protest imminent closing of university LGBTQ center

  1. (I would only add that I’ve been reading over the past few weeks that Ricky Gervais is transphobic on his Netflix show. I just now searched for a newer piece about it, but this is one of the top stories, so: https://badapple.gay/2022/06/03/ricky-trash/ . Likely this news hasn’t made it to FL. He’s still quite atheist supportive.)

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