With Supreme Court LGBTQ decision, marriage equality is at risk
The court’s decision demeans our nation’s aspirations to equality and inclusion and thereby diminishes us all.
By Laurence H. Tribe and Jeffrey B. AbramsonUpdated June 30, 2023, 3:43 p.m.
The same-sex marriage equality decision stands for now, but it should be added to the list of endangered precedents.GLOBE STAFF/ADOBE
This week, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that businesses generally open to the public can nonetheless discriminate against LGBTQ customers.
At issue in the 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis case was an evangelical Christian website designer from Colorado who did not wish to offer the same services to a same-sex wedding couple that she would offer to a heterosexual couple. The court ruled that, as an artist, the designer would be engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment by selling her customized services and thus could not be compelled to serve those whose wedding plans contradict her beliefs about marriage. Indeed, she could not be required to take down a message saying that she won’t serve gay couples.
Until this week, under long-standing state public accommodations laws, if a business wanted all the benefits that came from being generally open to the public, then it had to serve all customers equally. Since 1964, this principle has applied to a motel in the heart of Atlanta, Ollie’s barbecue joint in Birmingham, Ala., and social clubs and private schools that advertised to the general public. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted about the historic case involving Ollie’s, it would not do for the owner to have said, “I’ll serve Blacks but only on a takeout window, not inside my restaurant because that sends a message that I endorse integration.”
By twisting free speech into a license to discriminate, the court has now carved out an exception from public accommodations law for businesses that recast their services in ways that highlight their expressive features. But the court offers no workable principle to cabin that exception in any meaningful way.
One major problem with the court’s premise is that no reasonable observer would attribute to the website designer the message that she endorses gay marriage merely because, as required by a state antidiscrimination law, she designs a website for a couple regardless of their sexual orientation. The designer isn’t speaking for the couple — she just creates a medium for their message. And Colorado’s law doesn’t prevent her from making that clear to everyone.
Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch relied on a prior case in which the court ruled that the organizers of the Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade could not be compelled to include a float bearing a banner for the Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston. But the unanimous opinion in that case stressed that while parade organizers could exclude the banner, they could not exclude marchers simply because they were gay or lesbian. So that case does not remotely support this decision’s radical misuse of free speech doctrine.
The court left conspicuously unanswered the sensible questions justices asked at oral argument last December: What if a website designer refused wedding business from an interracial couple because of moral objections to such marriages? Or interfaith marriages? Only Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion even mentioned the 1967 Supreme Court decision striking down bans on interracial marriage, adding: “How quickly we forget that opposition to interracial marriage” often reflected religious beliefs akin to those of the web designer in this case. What if a photographer doesn’t want business from a person with disabilities? What if a photo store doesn’t want its “Scenes with Santa” to include photos of a white Santa holding a Black child?
These questions show that there is no way to cabin the decision and limit it to LGBTQ customers or to limit the demeaning message the court’s decision itself sends to any particular category of individuals. As the dissent powerfully shows, the court’s decision demeans our nation’s aspirations to equality and inclusion and thereby diminishes us all.
During oral argument, Justice Samuel Alito tried to distinguish between “honorable” religious objection to same-sex marriage, worthy of respect in his view, from opposition to interracial marriage, which he rejected as indecent even if religiously motivated. His voice was absent from this ruling, and the majority opinion by Gorsuch avoided basing the decision on judgments about which religious messages are honorable and which are prejudiced. Every law student learns that government has no authority to decide whose religious beliefs depart indecently from the norm.
Of course, discrimination against interracial and interfaith marriage is indecent. But who is any justice to tell us that discrimination against same-sex couples is different, not really a matter of prejudice but honorable when religiously inspired?
Recently, the Boston Red Sox released a pitcher who had posted homophobic tweets about gay people being bound for hell unless they repented. The fact that the player was sincere in his religious beliefs did not keep the Red Sox from seeing the harm that his speech caused. But the Supreme Court does not see, or care about, the harm its decision portends.
For many years, the court stopped short of overruling Roe v. Wade, until it did in 2022. For many years, the court stopped short of declaring affirmative action unconstitutional, until it did this week. The same-sex marriage equality decision stands for now, but it should be added to the list of endangered precedents.
As Sotomayor rightly concludes, “It is a sad day in American Constitutional law” when the highest court in the land closes its term with a decision that affronts the basic dignity of us all, for “the promise of freedom is empty” if government “is powerless to assure that a dollar in the hands of [one person] will purchase the same thing as a dollar in the hands of a[nother].”
Laurence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Jeffrey B. Abramson is professor of government and law emeritus at University of Texas at Austin and a former Middlesex County assistant district attorney.
Marchers cheer during the Come Out With Pride Parade in downtown Orlando on Saturday, October 15, 2022. Thousands lined the streets for the yearly event supporting inclusion. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel) User Upload Caption:
Any comprehensive history of Pride Month starts with savagery and defiance — commemorating the first time the nation’s gay community openly mutinied against routine oppression and casual violence. The Stonewall Riots radiated from one small bar in Greenwich Village, which was, in the late 1960s, seen as one of the few tiny havens for LGBTQ+ Americans to live their lives with some degree of openness.
Even inside those confines, any kind of openly non-heterosexual behavior could put life and liberty at risk. That’s why gay-friendly establishments, including the Stonewall Inn, were owned or controlled by organized crime-syndicates. Yes, there was a time in American history when the Mafia did a better job of protecting individual rights than any governmental agency did.
Instead, governments across the nation served as oppressors, raiding gay-and-lesbian clubs or posing as potential sexual partners as a form of entrapment. For the most part, Florida was no different. But slowly, small bastions of liberty began to emerge. And they included Central Florida, where ex-military people were transitioning into the space program.
Pride’s beachhead in Florida
Orlando’s first gay nightclub, The Palace Club, opened the same year as the riots. When Disney’s Magic Kingdom opened its gates, the City Beautiful took on added allure as a safer — though still not safe — space for non-heterosexual Americans to love and live their lives. As documented by the LGBTQ History Museum of Central Florida, a group of entrepreneurs known as the Gay and Lesbian Gang quickly established a series of nightclubs that included the iconic Parliament House. Within a decade of the Stonewall riots, Orlando saw its first Pride Picnic at Turkey Lake Park.
It still took decades to unwind Florida’s layers of hateful, oppressive laws. Every step felt hard-won: Stonewall-era law enshrined total bans on any expression of alternate sexuality. Some of those laws were not invalidated until the early 2000s, when a rapid tumble of landmark U.S. Supreme Court rulings battered sexual-identity and orientation laws until they crumbled. And the ugliness never fully went away. Within the past few decades, Florida has seen cruel debates on whether LGBTQ people could adopt children, or marry.
The hearts and minds of Floridians, however, shifted much more quickly. By the turn of the century, most Sunshine State residents expressed support for civil unions and adoption rights. People flew rainbow flags and showed up for Pride demonstrations without fear.
Every step seemed to move things a little closer to a day when sexual orientation and non-gender-conformity were simply accepted as defining traits. When fear and hate were reviled and forced into the shadows, where love was welcome in the full light of day.
Florida saw the reflections of the fear and anger of the Greenwich Village riots shift to cheerful acceptance of sexuality in The Villages —- saw it as a change for the better. The surge of love and alliance after the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub helped heal hearts ripped apart by an openly acknowledged act of terrorism.
But as this Pride Month draws to a close, we must ask: How is it, in 2023, that we are sliding backward?
Back, to a day when providing gender-affirming care — or simply being transgender — could mean losing access to healthcare or even at risk of arrest and prosecution?
Back, to a time when Florida teachers are warned not to talk about sexuality with their students and innocent books that merely acknowledge the differences among families are outlawed?
Back, to a place where official government sources refer to gay people as “groomers” and suggest their mere existence puts children at risk of predatory behavior? Where the governor seems to obsessed by the mere existence of drag queens, and not in a healthy way?
This is nothing to be proud of.
So as Pride Month draws to a close, Floridians must make it clear: They are ready for this new fight to begin. They are ready to rebuke those who would force shame on people who yearned so long for the right to live in safety and with dignity.
They are ready to stand up for the right to love and be loved without fear once again — and be proud to do so.
Well the super-red and highly politicized Supreme Court is at it again, and, as is always the case, things are now worse for many average Americans than they were before.
Just as everyone predicted, the religious haters and right wing thugs will now try to chip away at all the rights of the LGBTQ+ people including same-sex marriage just as they did with abortion rights until they managed to kill it. Damn these religious right fundamentalist fanatics who desperately want to return to the 1950s when white men were automatically in charge and women were subservient to them. They are desperate for the time when white men had all the rights. Hugs
“What should our strategy be now that we’re getting these precedents? I think we have to flood the zone. I think we have to find good complaints, and this is why First Liberty is so important, everybody.
“It’s FirstLiberty.org, I do a lot of different things with them, we do a lot of events together. They are on the cutting edge. They play to win. And not many groups can say, ‘Oh yeah, we go to the Supreme Court, we win nine-nothing, and we went last year and they won the Coach Kennedy case.’
“Pretty amazing, guys. They are top-tier. FirstLiberty.org.” – Charlie Kirk, interviewing Kelly Shackelford of the anti-LGBTQ hate group, First Liberty Institute, which represents the anti-gay bakers in Oregon.
But she didn’t smile enough. And she was too shrill, and lecturing. And Benghazi. And her emails. And her pantsuits. And she just didn’t excite me. And she talked to Goldman-Sachs. And both sides are the same, anyway, so why bother?
I agree. The whole thing was made up. And I’m sure SCOTUS knew that. And the conservative majority made a horrible, completely wrong ruling. Proving the conservative majority doesn’t give a rats ass about equality, fairness or honesty. I think we need major changes to the supreme court system. Term limits for starters. No one should have that position for life or that much absolute power. And I hate the word “supreme”. It sounds too much like the “supreme being” (jeezus or gawd), the “supreme leader” like Iran’s horrible ruler. There should be no supreme anything. (Except maybe The Supremes) The mere term suggests they are above the rest of us. Not to be questioned or challenged.
By the time Hillary ran for office in 2016 the court was already on the road to being captured by the Republicans AND had been corrupt for decades already.
The Dems didn’t run on the Supreme Court for years like the Repubs did and in not doing so, allowed them to take the court.
I have long held that anti-gay discrimination on account of religion is in itself a form of religious discrimination. Not because being gay is a religion, but because we are discriminated against since we don’t follow the tenets of THEIR religion, which is none of their business. It is a privileging of THEIR religious beliefs over OUR civil rights (as well as our religious beliefs, or lack thereof) in the public accommodations sphere.
The discriminators have ‘blurry boundaries.” Malignant narcissism is like that.
If you claim your refusal to serve anyone is based on your sincerely held religious beliefs . . .
And you don’t have to justify those beliefs with any kind of logical argument. The rightists aren’t required to. All they–and therefore WE–have to do is declare that’s the reason. The Court doesn’t require you to belong to any church or cite any biblical texts.
Lance makes a great point. He is cis so doesn’t understand what it is like to be trans. But if he was forced against his will to be trans it would lead to the same issue in him that trans people feel now being forced to be cis. Wonderful point. Hugs
If Republicans are truly worried about members of the first family improperly benefitting from their name, Mehdi says there are two people besides Hunter Biden that they should be looking at: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
A public business that serves only some of the public, but refuses to serve all the public, sound familiar? Did we not have this same fight in the 1960s? Is gay the new black? Just who gets to sit at the lunch counter? Look, just replace the words same sex with Black or Jews and does it seem correct now. We don’t serve blacks, we don’t serve Jews, I won’t make a cake or a website for blacks or Jews. Imagine the outcry if a Christian was refused service due to someone not wanting to serve, make a cake, or build a website for Christians. I am so tired of being second class. Being gay and paying taxes without the rights that the upper class straight people have. Dogs that love gravy I am so tired. Hugs
Representing the plaintiff—303 Creative, a small business run by a Colorado woman named Lorie Smith—is Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a group whose founder dubbed it a “Christian legal army,” with a long history of opposing civil rights protections for LGBTQ people. But unlike the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, which at least involved real customers wanting a real cake, there is no wedding website. No person has hired Smith to create a wedding website. In fact, Smith has never designed a wedding website.
As such, there is no client Smith has told she is rejecting due to her stated religious beliefs that marriage is only allowed between one man and one woman. In the absence of all that, ADF has, instead, fashioned Smith as the victim of an injury that has never occurred. The group has a $76 million annual budget and thousands of attorneys in its network. The goal with 303 Creative, as it was with Masterpiece, is to redefine civil rights protections for LGBTQ people as a form of religious discrimination against Christians.
Yesterday it was reported that an ADF claim that Smith [photo above] was contacted by gay man seeking a same-sex wedding website is false and that the man in question is straight, was married to a woman at the time, and says that he made no such request.
Later yesterday, however, it was reported that the claim does not appear in the filings before the Supreme Court.
As I’ve said here many times, the ADF invents these businesses with the specific intention of challenging local pro-LGBT ordinances. My first 2016 report on the 303 Creative case is here. And below is today’s ruling.
The Supreme Court decides in favor of Alliance Defending Freedom and guts civil rights laws in the 303 Creative LLC case.
The 6-3 opinion, with the typical breakdown of Republican appointed ultra-conservatives in the majority, is here:https://t.co/QPB7jmydVF
Let's be clear: nothing happened to the plaintiff in 303 Creative, the whole "case" was a hypothetical exercise, and the GOP Justices used it as a vehicle to undermine every single federal, state, county, and city anti-discrimination law in the country. https://t.co/LTgg9LRBwY
The thing that sucks most about the 303 Creative decision is that Smith's case is entirely a fiction. The entire question is based on a business she doesn't have being asked to do something they weren't.
It never should have seen a state court, much less SCOTUS
— Chris supports workers over management (@cokes311) June 30, 2023
Facts and beliefs/opinions sadly carry the same weight in this country. Their religion says sexuality can change. You just have to pray the gay away hard enough.
Legal eagles, I have a question: Would a decision necessarily have to be vacated if the facts of the case are found to be a fabrication? Can there be a ruling in favor of an injured party if there is no injury? Can a decision be made in favor of a party that has based their claim of injury upon that falsehood? Can a party that claims an injury based on a falsehood be guilty of perjury? Can the party that was claimed to have created the injury in the first place have standing to sue?
I would never call myself a “legal eagle” but no, that the court recited made up facts and circumstances makes zero difference. The literal only thing that matters is the holding and the vote. The last religion case Gorsuch wrote, Bremerton, was on completely fictitious facts and the dissent even posted a picture showing that.
Sotomayor did point out the standing issue here – to wit, the plaintiff alleged a facial challenge on a potential future harm. That’s a bit speculative for these things and against the trend of requiring ‘as applied’ challenges to laws – i.e harm in fact.
No theofascist business will be blocked, now, from discriminating against our community. If and when the theofascists are challenged in court, the lower courts will be bound by today’s Supreme Court ruling.
At what point? When the Court upholds religious laws that punish infidelity – at that point the Senators who are cheating on their wives will rise up to counteract the Court’s rulings.
Only some religions, of course. Not pro-Buddhist, or Jewish, or Sikh, or Islam, or anything Native America, or Wiccan, or Taoist, or Hindu, or…well, long list.
To expose the christofascism of this Supreme Court, we need, for example, a case involving a non-Christian baker who won’t do a wedding cake for a Christian couple because Christianity offends the baker’s religious beliefs.
“Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.” – Sotomayor
I feel sorry for Sotomayor. She knows on the deepest of levels how legally and morally wrong all these decisions are, yet she is powerless to stop them.
Perry is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of four books, including Taking America Back for God (with Andrew Whitehead) and most recently The Flag and the Cross (with Philip Gorski). McDaniel is an Associate Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Politics of Race and Ethnicity Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Politics in the Pews and The Everyday Crusade (with Irfan Nooruddin and Allyson Shortle)
On Jan. 12, 2023, Florida Gov. and possible GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis extended his “war on woke,” when his administration rejected a proposed Advanced Placement African American Studies class from Florida high schools. The move was consistent with DeSantis’s proposed “Stop W.O.K.E Act” in 2022, which aims to eliminate certain content from educational curriculum and has been under partial injunction since November. And on Jan. 20, 2023, a U.S. District Court judge upheld DeSantis’s suspension of Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren whom DeSantis claimed had prosecuted cases under “woke ideology.”
DeSantis is only the most prominent example of Republican lawmakers claiming to fight “woke ideology,” “wokeness,” or the “woke left,” and though occasionally pressed to provide definitions, politicians are strategically vague. Even with the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” that clearly targets content about America’s racist history and systems, the acronym simply stands for “Wrong to our Kids and Employees.” Nothing racial. Just as with all effective dog whistles, the racial implications must be subtle, or better yet, implied. The label should evoke demonized Black populations, but their literal sense broad enough and ambiguous enough to provide plausible deniability.
As social scientists with expertise in the area of race and politics, we collected data on who actually identifies with the term “woke”? The patterns make it clear why the label has become the latest in a long line of Republican dog whistles.
In a nationally-representative survey of over 1,700 Americans fielded by YouGov in Oct. 2022, one of us (Samuel Perry) and a collaborator Joshua Grubbs asked Americans how well the term “woke” described them. Overall, 22% of Americans said “woke” described them either “very well” or “somewhat well.” If that sounds like a high percentage, it’s actually somewhat lower than the percentage found in a 2021 Harris poll (32%), suggesting Americans may be backing away from the label as it’s become a slur. Though it’s also slightly less than the percentage of our survey respondents who identified with the term “Christian nationalist” (25%).
When we break down who actually identifies with the term “woke” in the YouGov survey, it becomes clearer why the racial implications are unmistakable. Nearly 40% of Black Americans identify somewhat with the label, more than double the percentage of white Americans (19%). It’s also considerably more than the percentage of Hispanics (24%) or Asian Americans (19%). In fact, only 28% of Black Americans completely distanced themselves from the term, saying “woke” described them “not at all,” compared to clear majorities of white Americans (57%) and Asian Americans (54%).
But “woke” is also a term for Black Americans that transcends ideology and partisanship in a way it doesn’t for any other group. Over 40% of Black Americans in the YouGov survey identify with the term whether they are liberals or moderates. In fact, roughly 40% of Black Republicans and Independents identify somewhat with “woke.” This means the percentage of “woke” Black Republicans and Independents is higher than the percentage of white “Strong Democrats” (39%).
Statistically speaking, the broad demographic for whom the term “woke” most consistently applies is Black Americans. This should be unsurprising considering the term originates among the Black community to denote someone who has been awakened to the reality of systemic injustice. It also demonstrates that being “woke” is a fact of life for Black Americans as they process what W. E. B. Du Bois refers to as a “double consciousness”—the struggle to be Black and viewed as a full American. This is further supported by numerous polls and studies showing Black Americans are far more likely to be aware of the past and current injustices they face in housing, employment, policing, and health.
The disproportionate number of Black Americans who identify somewhat with the term “woke” would ostensibly make Republican “anti-woke” efforts transparently racist. But there is one group who is even more likely to identify with the term “woke” than the average Black American—whites who identify as “very liberal.” In the same YouGov survey, just over 50% of white “very liberal” Americans (representing 6% of the total population of white Americans) say “woke” describes them “very well” or “somewhat well.”
Though this group of whites is small, the relatively high percentage of “very liberal” whites who identify with “woke” provides the deniability that all effective dog whistles need: Policies that clearly target efforts to convey the history of racial injustice in schools under the guise of fighting “woke” education need not be anti-Black when the “woke” are perhaps even more the white far-left.
This is a common challenge when anti-racist language becomes mainstream. Critics point out that white liberals often lay claim to anti-racist concepts and identities without effectively working for anti-racist goals. As a result, the language becomes absorbed into white partisan conflicts, accomplishing little while also setting the stage for counter attacks with dog whistles. A recent study, for example, found the term “anti-racist” itself was more often embraced by white progressives than Blacks or Hispanics, and thus, right-wing mobilization against “anti-racist” concepts, books, or policies could just as easily be framed in mundane partisan, culture war terms in which Republicans oppose movements led by white liberals. This in turn makes the conflict intra-racial, instead of interracial.
This covert form of race-baiting has become a central plank in shaping American partisan politics. Moving away from the language of Strom Thurmand and George Wallace, who overtly rallied their supporters against threats to the racial hierarchy, Republican candidates in the post-Civil Rights era stoke fear and anger over this threat via coded language.
Whether it’s a term like “woke,” or more traditional labels like “welfare queen,” “buck,” “thug,” “terror,” “illegals,” “socialists,” or “unAmerican,” the efficacy of a racial dog whistle is not in the fact that nobody knows whom you’re clearly talking about, it’s the plausible deniability that allows you to respond: “Who’s talking about Black people? I’m just talking about leftists. You’re the one making it about race.”
Republicans have mastered the tactic. And if history is any indication, front-runners like DeSantis will continue their public crusade against the bogeyman of “woke,” the current code word for left-wing radicals who provide the convenient distraction from those whom anti-woke legislation really targets—Black Americans who demand justice.
Media coverage of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s all-but-announced candidacy for president is already in full frenzy, and so far the script is exactly as his handlers would like it to be. The governor regularly opens up new fronts in the culture wars, sowing alarm over critical race theory, transgender rights, or border policies. In response, liberal pundits fall into the trap of accentuating the very issues DeSantis has chosen to fire up his base.
Omitted from the public debate about DeSantis’s policies is almost any discussion of his actual record of governance—what exactly he has delivered to the citizens of his state, especially those without seven-figure incomes and lush investment portfolios.
Even a cursory dip into the statistics of social and economic well-being reveals that Florida falls short in almost any measure that matters to the lives of its citizens. More than four years into the DeSantis governorship, Florida continues to languish toward the bottom of state rankings assessing the quality of health care, school funding, long-term elder care, and other areas key to a successful society.
Florida may be the place where “woke goes to die”—as DeSantis is fond of saying—but it is also where teachers’ salaries are among the lowest in the nation, unemployment benefits are stingier than in any other state, and wage theft flourishes with little interference from the DeSantis administration. In 2021, DeSantis campaigned against a successful ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage, which had been stuck at $8.65 an hour. Under DeSantis’s watch, the Sunshine State has not exactly been a workers’ paradise.
DeSantis weaponizes the cultural wars to distract attention from the core missions of his governorship, which is to starve programs geared toward bettering the lives of ordinary citizens so he can maintain low taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Florida is the ideal haven for privileged Americans who don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes. It has no income tax for individuals, and its corporate tax rate of 5.5% is among the lowest in the nation. An investigation by the Orlando Sentinel in late 2019 revealed the startling fact that 99% of Florida’s companies paid no corporate income tax, abetted by tax-avoidance schemes and state officials who gave a low priority to enforcing tax laws.
This is a pattern that shows up in the statistics of many Republican-led states, which on average commit fewer dollars per-capita to health care, public education, and other crucial services compared to their blue counterparts, while making sure corporations and wealthy individuals are prioritized for tax relief. Arizona cut taxes every year between 1990 and 2019, following up with a shift to a flat tax this year that will cost its budget $1.9 billion. Meanwhile, its public-school spending ranks 48 among the 50 states.
In Florida, the state’s tax revenues come largely through sales and excise taxes, which fall hardest on the poor and middle class. A 2018 study by the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that Florida had the third least-equitable tax system of the 50 states. In the state’s “upside-down” tax structure, the poorest 20% of Florida families paid 12.7% of their income in taxes, while the families whose income was in the top 4% paid 4.5%, and the top 1% paid 2.3%, according to the study.
Florida taxpayers get less for their money than residents of many other states. The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that studies health-care systems globally, found in its 2022 “scorecard” that Florida had the 16th worst health care among the 50 states. It’s no wonder that Florida ranks below the northern blue states in life expectancy and rates of cancer death, diabetes, fatal overdoses, teen birth rates, and infant mortality.
Largely because of DeSantis’s obstinacy, Florida is one of 10 states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, an act of political spite that has cost those states billions in federal health care dollars and cost thousands of people their lives. More than 12% of Floridians are without medical insurance, a worse record than all but four other states. Despite having the country’s highest percentage of retirees, Florida has the worst long-term care among the 50 states, according to the American Association of Retired Persons.
Public schools fare no better than health care in DeSantis’s Florida. Not only did Florida rank 49th in the country for average teacher pay in 2020, but the Education Law Center, a non-profit advocacy group based in New Jersey, found in a 2021 report that the state had the seventh-lowest per-pupil funding in the country. Education Week, which ranks states public school annually, looking beyond mere test scores, placed Florida 23rd in its 2021 report, a lackluster showing for a large and wealthy state.
It says something about the state of our political discourse that Florida’s denuded public sector was not more of an issue in last year’s gubernatorial campaign. In endorsing DeSantis’s Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, the Tampa Bay Times spent so many column inches on the incumbent’s demagoguery, vindictiveness, and authoritarian tendencies that it never even got to the minutiae of his governance. “No matter what you think about the state of the Florida economy or its schools or its future…,” the paper wrote, “the choice really is this simple: Do you want the state governed by a decent man or a bully?”
To be fair to the media, DeSantis and his allies manned the trenches of the culture wars so ferociously that it was all reporters could do to keep up with all the bomb throwing. How do you delve into the state’s tax policy when your governor is flying planeloads of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard or declaring war on Disney for issuing a statement in opposition to the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay Law”?
But that is very much the point of wedge issues, as they have been wielded by scurrilous politicians for decades, to anger and distract voters so they won’t notice the actions of public officials that mainly benefit the wealthy and are against the public interest.
As the 2024 election draws closer, DeSantis must not be allowed to accomplish nationally what he did in his state—cloak his service to the wealthy by frightening working people with stories about transgender recruiting and “socialist” college professors. There are unmistakable signs that Americans are focused on what an activist government can do for the public good, as evidenced by Floridians’ vote to increase the minimum wage.
The failure of DeSantis to better serve the most vulnerable citizens of his state is his weak underbelly in a national campaign.
Scottie's Playtime 