Q Toon: The Sunshine State

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his fellow Republicans have their "Don't Say Gay" bill to impose their version of political correctness on state educators, but they haven't succeeded in muzzling their critics. The Walt Disney Company has joined the ranks of some 200 companies from Mattel to Deutsche Bank USA standing up for academic freedom and LGBTQ+ kids.

DeSantis gets all upset when someone calls his law "Don't Say Gay." He complains that those words were not in the bill, so ipso facto, Don't Say Don't Say Gay. 

Heck, just because it authorizes any pearl-clutching Karens and Darrens with an encyclopedic knowledge of that one verse in Leviticus to sue for Big Money any teacher who dares mention Oscar Wilde, Lil Nas X, or meeting Skyler's two mommies at the parent-teacher conference, that doesn't mean that teachers are actually verboten to say gay!

Well, tough titties. The Affordable Care Act didn't have the word "Obamacare" anywhere in it, but it didn't stop Republicans from calling it that.

Republicans are usually the experts in giving their laws names that poll a damned sight better than their contents, and in getting those names to stick. Democrats, and liberal groups in general, tend to be aggravatingly lousy at that sort of thing ("Defund the Police," anyone?), so I strongly suspect that renaming the Precious Little Children's Ears Protection Act "Don't Say Gay" was accomplished by a bunch of liberals who sat down to brainstorm "What would we call this bill if it were ours?"

Part of Democrats' problem is that their leadership prefers when possible to come up with names that make some sort of acronym. So they come up with the Revitalizing Our Transportation Infrastructure National Initiative, but can't get anyone to call it the ROTINI Act because 1.) Bridges are boring until they fall down, and 2.) They don't have anything to do with pasta.

Saddling the Florida bill and the carbon copies sure to follow in the other Red States with the epithet "Don't Say Gay," therefore, was clearly not the work of Democratic Party leaders in Washington D.C. It fits, it works, and it bugs the hell out of the DeSantis crowd.

Now if we could only give all those Ban the Trans bills a moniker that would irritate their authors just as much...