Disney’s activism partner Nadine Smith of Equality Florida tells LGBTQ employees that
@GovRonDeSantis and @ChristinaPushaw want to “erase you, “criminalize your existence,” and “take your kids”—a wild conspiracy theory that Republicans want to kidnap gay people’s children.
TRANSCRIPT: You can look at the comments, you can look at the coverage, but the context is also who is pushing it, what their record is, and what the history is in Florida. You can go back to the 50’s and the Johns committee where the legislature put together a task force whose whole job was to root civil rights workers and any homosexuals out of the universities. And destroyed lives – literally people committed suicide behind the relentless attacked. And then you have Anita Bryant and the Save our Children campaign, which is premised on the are the same ideas that undergird this bill. And because of her campaign that equated being gay with being a child predator, she was able to ban gay people from being able to adopt, marriage ban, and she took that nationwide. And when we react to this, we’re reacting from the pain we experienced of being isolated and stigmatized in school. But we’re also reacting from the reality that when they can erase you and criminalize your existence and demonize who you are, the next step is to criminalize you and take your kids. We’re already seeing that in Texas. The slippery slope between these ugly messages emanating from legislative leaders in our state and amplified by our governor, whose spokesperson immediately began calling everyone who opposed this bill “Groomers” aka pedophiles…
