Earlier this week, Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried (D) held a press conference addressing the budding monkeypox outbreak across Florida. Fried criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) saying he is not doing enough on the matter, so she decided to take the issue into her own hands.
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A proposed amendment to the already controversial Parental Rights in Education bill to require parental involvement on sensitive student issues has drawn more criticism from LGBTQ advocates.
The sponsor of the bill, Republican Representative Joe Harding, introduced an amendment on Friday which would require school officials to facilitate a meeting between a student and parents to disclose child-specific information.
The amendment states that the “school principal or his or her designee shall develop a plan, using all available governmental resources, to disclose such information within 6 weeks after the decision to withhold such information from the parent.”
The six-week provision gives school officials a time frame to decide a student is facing unsupportive or abusive parents related to specific issues. If there is a determination by school officials that a student could be in danger from the parents the amendment details a course of action.
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Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani has been a vocal critic of the the Parental Rights in Education bill, however – when given the opportunity – she refused to answer specific questions about the proposed legislation.
Eskamani told CNN that she “whole-heartedly opposes” the legislation, affirming that “it’s always appropriate to acknowledge that LGBTQ+ people and families exist, and any effort to erase them is rooted in homophobia and transphobia.”
Eskamani and other progressive leaders and organizations have labeled the proposal the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, based on a provision that prohibits a school district from encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels.
State Representative Carlos Guillermo-Smith (D-District 49), an openly LGBTQ Latino legislator, said, “We should and we are encouraging these types of conversations in our schools.”
However, the bill address a number of issues related to parental rights.
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The 2020 FBI tracking of hate crimes show that Florida hate crime incidents have decreased 23% from 2018 to 2020 while hate crimes in the United States have increased 15.5%. In addition, the state comparison data (2019) shows that Florida ranks 47 in hate crime incidents with 0.53 incidents per 100,000 population.The national rate of hate crimes per 100,000 population is 2.4.
The five states reporting the most incidents per 100,000 population were Washington (7.1), New Mexico (6.1), Massachusetts (5.7), New Jersey (5.4) and Vermont (5.2). The five states reporting the fewest number of incidents per 100,000 population were Maryland (0.3), Iowa (0.3), Arkansas (0.3), Pennsylvania (0.3), and Florida (0.5).
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program serves as the national repository for crime data and is used to generate reliable information for use in law enforcement administration, operation, and management.
The data, which was updated and released in October 2021, shows that nationwide hate crime incidents have increased from 7,036 in 2018 to 7,103 in 2019 to 8,052 in 2020. Over the period from 2018-2020 hate crime incidents increased 14.5%.
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