Poetic justice: A woman’s political fortitude kills DeSantis’ anti-woke junk bills | Opinion

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ anti-woke wars are falling apart in practice.

What isn’t embroiled in judicial review for potential civil rights violations is revealing itself for what the “parental rights” and “stop the woke” legislation he signed into law fosters: racism, homophobia and division.

So much has been evidenced recently about his ill-conceived policies that Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, a Naples Republican, acknowledged that some half-dozen culture war bills have been “weaponized” by politics.

From both the left and right, in her opinion. But, although the left certainly suffers from its own brand of excess, the DeSantis wars are about empowering the extreme right and having a cult-like minority rule over the majority’s lifestyle, healthcare, heritage and voting rights.

This week Passidomo said she won’t take up in the Senate anti-woke bills currently in limbo either in committee or stalled after being passed by the House. So she effectively killed efforts to ban the LGBT flag from public buildings, ban pronouns and protect Confederate monuments, among other measures.

It’s not that, all of a sudden, Passidomo became a conscientious objector to the harm being done to Florida women and gay and trans children. It’s that she has read the election-year political tea leaves well.

“Our bill process is not the Republican Party of Florida. We are the Legislature. We make the laws,” Passidomo said.

That’s about as close as any politician has gotten to saying to DeSantis: Enough! We’ve acted like tools, but we too, are getting tired of you.

A little late for the distancing after so much harm has been done to the quality of a public education and the mental health of minority communities, but I knew DeSantis losing his presidential bid would be a blessing for Florida and shake up the state GOP.

I applaud Passidomo’s fortitude. It’s poetic justice of a sort, in a state steamrolling over women’s rights to reproductive health, that it took a woman to rein in DeSantis’ party domination.

Not surprisingly, the new Florida GOP party chairman, Evan Power, is supporting Passidomo’s call.

What else could he do when two of the top promoters of anti-gay policy — former Republican Party chairman Christian Ziegler and his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler — were revealed as hypocrites enjoying three-way bisexual sex?

They unfairly accused good teachers and school board members who care about their gay students of being “groomers,” and then a sexual assault case, now dismissed, pried open their lives — and shed light on the GOP’s political baloney.

READ MORE: Amid the titillating details of Ziegler scandal, don’t lose the damage done to Florida | Opinion

Black History Month scandal

Another controversy around policy failure has unfolded about Black History Month after a parent posted on X, the former Twitter, the parental permission slip his daughter brought from school, and the NBC News story made it the national nightly broadcast.

It described a Black History Month event for which a parent’ signature was required: “Students will participate & listen to a book written by an African American.”

Thousands of people, including me, objected. Would kids need permission to “participate and listen to a book” written by a white American? Or by a Cuban American?

The Miami-Dade County document crystallized intent to show prejudice against Blacks.

This was only one thing: racism.

Those who enabled the legislation behind this know that bigoted parents won’t sign the permission slip and so a book written by an African American will have a smaller audience. And as they shut down Blacks, simply because they’re in power, far-right Republicans get to shove down our throats their partisan politics and lifestyle on all our kids.

And there won’t be any permission slips required for that.

“Hoax!” cried on X DeSantis’ Censor-in-Chief, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr.

But it was no hoax that parents at Coral Way Bilingual K-8 Center — once the pride of Miami-Dade for its vanguard embrace of bilingual education against the county’s racist tide of the 1980s — were sent that permission slip.

Anger at Diaz and DeSantis grew. But instead of owning responsibility, they resorted blaming the school principal, accusing her of “a political ploy”.

READ MORE: Florida officials blast Miami school about permission slips for Black history event

More of the same

Diaz and DeSantis also thought Americans were gullible enough to believe that book bans were a hoax. But the free-expression advocacy organization Pen America was tracking the bans — finding that in Escambia County alone, 1,600 titles were taken off school shelves.

Deny, deny. It’s what politicians do when they get caught and have a hard time explaining to voters the consequences of their tomfoolery.

They try to confuse, obfuscate and compound the lies.

At a press conference on Thursday streamed live on X, DeSantis played a graphic video of pages of books showing sexual positions and techniques he still claims were readily available to kids before he swooped in to stop it.

He mixed in a gay memoir for good measure.

His power in the state diminished, he was trying to resuscitate outrage and stir more anti-gay hate. But, as luck would have it, an activist who also calls himself a journalist in the audience asked him a question.

How does he reconcile his anti-transgender views with his wearing of boots with heels to increase his height?

And for once, DeSantis’ laughed but couldn’t answer.

Passidomo’s junk-bills kill was only one in a string of deserved bad days for the governor.