By Diane Roberts
It’s a lousy time to be a kid in Florida.
You’re told you can’t read certain books or study certain subjects or discuss certain topics.
You’re told you can’t go by your chosen name; you must conform to the gender you were assigned at birth.
Soon you may have even fewer rights over your own body and your own mind.
The Florida Legislature is considering a bill (HB 173) that would stop doctors treating anyone under 18 for mental health problems, drug abuse, or sexually transmitted diseases unless their parents OK it.
If you’re severely depressed, your doctor can’t help you get treatment without parental consent.
If you need birth control, the doctor won’t be able to help unless your parents consent.
Same if you have an acute case of syphilis, gonorrhea, or chlamydia — all on the rise in Florida. The doctor won’t even be allowed to give you an antibiotic.
Kara Gross of the ACLU says, “Are we really requiring doctors to turn away minors with untreated STIs?”
The Republicans who control the Legislature, and their ever-angry henchwomen, Moms for Liberty, don’t see the young as actual people: They’re merely parental property, without agency or intellectual freedom.
They don’t acknowledge not all parents are loving and caring; a kid might be stuck in a family ruled by adults who are intolerant or rigid, homophobic, disengaged, or abusive.
But hey, suffering builds character.
Once the kids get to college, they’re free, right? Free to encounter different people, different ideas, some of which may challenge what their families told them was “truth,” some of which may redefine how they see the world.
This is called “education.”
Education haters
But Gov. Ron DeSantis, his education-hating state Department of Education, and our retrograde university Board of Governors, don’t see it that way.
Universities and colleges must promote a pro-Western, pro-American, pro-white version of history and culture.
In 2024, the state decreed “Principles of Sociology” will no longer count toward undergraduate core curriculum hours.
They’ve replaced it with a course on pre-1877 American History, which, if it’s taught honestly and not with a view to pushing some whitewashed version of the Civil War and Reconstruction, is fine, but hardly replaces sociology as an important academic pursuit.
Students may still take sociology, but the state wants to control the course content.
The DeSantis administration looked at textbooks used in introductory sociology and declared every single one tainted by “woke ideology.”
Sociology teaches students to analyze their world, how we got here, how we organize our society, what works and what doesn’t. It’s foundational to majors such as economics, business, and the humanities.
The governor does not care, dismissing the discipline as lacking “the type of academic rigor that we’re looking for and that our Founding Fathers would have thought essential to be educating folks.”
If our educational standards are to be modeled on a bunch of 18th century landed gentlemen, then colleges better start requiring Latin, Greek, bloodletting, and slave-management.
Manny Diaz, former Commissioner of Education, now the most unqualified (no higher ed experience, no doctorate) president in University of West Florida history said, “Sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists and no longer serves its intended purpose as a general knowledge course for students.”
Sanitation engineers
Diaz was once a high school coach and social studies teacher, and may think social studies, which focuses on civics and how humans interact with their environment, and sociology, which uses scientific methods to research and analyze the development and complex functioning of society, are the same.
They are not.
But since when does ignorance slow Florida down?
Last year, the state convened a “sociology working group” composed of Board of Governors administrators, some sociology professors, and others whose identities have not been disclosed, to create a new, approved text.
They pulled a 669-page open source book called “Introduction to Sociology 3e” off the web, reducing it to 267 pages, cutting or bowdlerizing chapters on ethnicity, gender, sexuality, media and technology, global inequality, and class stratification.
During this exercise in sanitization, Anastasios Kamoutsas, DeSantis’ new commissioner of education, a man after Manny Diaz’s own heart, fired one of the professors, charging him with teaching “gender ideology” in his freshman sociology course and demanding he lose his job at Florida SouthWestern College.
DeSantis and his anti-intellectual myrmidons want to stamp out academic freedom.
The professors, the ones who’ve studied the field for years and, unlike DeSantis and Diaz, know what they’re talking about, are not impressed.
On Jan. 16, a group of faculty at Florida International University issued a letter alleging “sociologists in the workgroup participated under the clear threat of discipline.”
A letter that same day to the Faculty Senate and United Faculty of Florida from 19 professors in FIU’s Global and Sociocultural Studies Department blasts the new text. It has “no discussions of systemic or structural racism, a core concept in sociology.”
Silly and self-defeating
The letter goes on to point out, “Not only are these omissions an incorrect representation of the field, but they also fail to prepare students for majors and graduate education that require or recommend introduction to sociology.”
It seems universities are not (yet) legally required to use this indefensible hatchet job of a textbook in their sociology classes.
Professors at UF examined it and refused to assign it for classes, but the administrations at FSU and FIU have — apparently — caved and agreed to adopt the text.
God forbid Florida students debate provocative ideas such as that racism is baked into our culture; gender is a social construct, not an “ideology.”
Or read scholars who suggest American history is a messy mix of inspiring, good, bad, and ugly.
Or that the rest of the world might have a few things to teach us.
One of the silliest, most backward notions oozing out of the DeSantis administration and his legislative enablers is that Florida’s university students should be denied the benefit of educators from other countries.
The governor wants to “pull the plug” on H1-B visas, which allow foreign professionals to work in the United States.
He’s not in charge of the visas; that’s the federal government. But Donald Trump, who’s at least as anti-education as DeSantis, has decreed a $100,000 fee for each H1-B.
This is stupid. And self-defeating.
Carson Dale, FSU’s student body president, said, “One of the defining principles of American higher education, and particularly of Florida public universities, is a commitment to merit. We value a candidate based on the quality of their scholarship, passion for discovery, and their contributions to knowledge, not on their country of birth.”
At least, we used to.
Witless sponges
Higher education in this state is immeasurably enhanced by physicists, computer scientists, doctors, artists, historians, poets, and musicians from abroad.
For Florida’s young people, contact with people from other countries, whether professors or other students, makes their world bigger and richer.
The problem is, DeSantis wants to make their world smaller and more impoverished. It’s as if he and his education zealots think kids, under or over 18, are witless sponges, in danger of soaking up noisome thought, and therefore must be kept away from any disfavored words or ideas.
If they read a book with gay characters, they’ll become gay.
If they’re taught about sexuality, they’ll run out and have sex.
Kindergartners, obviously susceptible to the supposedly pervasive Marxist propaganda (invisible to most of us) must be instructed in the evils of communism.
But you can’t let them read a true story about two male penguins raising a chick together.
The plan is clearly to create kids so blinkered they cannot see beyond their parents’ bigotry, learning only what the most backward among us allow.
The thing is, kids live in the 21st century. They’re relentlessly curious.
They know things their parents and reactionary state officials don’t, and they know how to find out things their parents and reactionary state officials don’t want them to discover.
In Texas — always a role model for Florida — a philosophy professor at Texas A&M was forbidden to teach parts of Plato’s “Symposium.”
Seems the politicians who run the universities heard there was something about three genders in there.
Indeed, Aristophanes says that back in earth’s early days, humans had four arms, four legs, and both male and female body parts.
Zeus eventually split them apart.
The chuckleheads running higher ed in this country claim they want more teaching of Western Civilization: You know, Greece! Rome!
Well, Plato is one of the pillars of Western Civilization. And — newsflash! — the ancient Greeks accepted gender diversity.
So did the ancient Romans. The Galli, priests of the goddess Cybele, castrated themselves and dressed as women.
The only good thing here is that kids, especially in college, don’t enjoy being told they can’t do something.
What do you want to bet a good number will go read “The Symposium” and even consider majoring in sociology?
Censorship does not work.
Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.
Atwp says
Republicans are in control because of the votes. They are taking away a lot of freedoms. I don’t like the Republicans but I do agree that a doctor should get parents permission before doing a lot of things for people under 18. To tell schools not to teach about slavery and other things is bad. I believe they want the world to believe white peoples of the pass in this country were very helpful to people of color. They don’t want the world to know about the accomplishments of people of color, and their contributions to this country. I believe they want the world to think the white man is this perfect angelic being that is always helping my people and other people of color. They don’t want the world to know about the demonic way they treated my people. They don’t have to teach it but they can’t delete what they did to my peopke and other people. Too much has been written about their demonic deeds. Might as well say some white peopke did help my people.
JimboXYZ says
“It’s a lousy time to be a kid in Florida.”
Agreed, but it has to be qualified. It sucks equally to be an adult. Inflation, Leaders that lie and monetize their lies for every adult. Life creates victims by it’s very nature.
“They don’t acknowledge not all parents are loving and caring; a kid might be stuck in a family ruled by adults who are intolerant or rigid, homophobic, disengaged, or abusive.”
The article is a premise that every kid is a wonderful life ? what about the kid that is committing grand theft auto by age 10. Dealing drugs to their classmates, bullying classmates.
While on the surface that may be all those things Diane Roberts asserts. When a parent is held accountable & responsible by society ? The Golden rule is, he who pays the bills makes the rules in any household. Some children make solid decisions as juveniles, other’s not so much. Remember the wonderful children that were pointing a gun at motorists, shooting that same gun roadside ? Guess who picks up the tab for that for any legal fees ? The parents ? Take the children that want contraceptives ? Who picks up the tab for the unwanted teen pregnancy.
“You’re told you can’t go by your chosen name; you must conform to the gender you were assigned at birth.”
Last I checked nicknames or alias haven’t been banned ? Assigned gender at birth ? That quite often is a matter of DNA, that “Y” chromosome that makes the call. Not some delusional interpretation of an alternate reality. At birth, one is what the genitalia assigned them. Not what someone feels they should identify as. Funniest video I’ve seen on it ?
James says
Jimbo the “choice some parents make is not as clear as it might seem…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol
I discovered this when I was researching the statue of Trump by the “Indecline” art collective. They ment to mock the president, but they also perhaps inadvertently made a very deep statement about mascalinity, what is perceived as desirerable and what those assuptions can ultimately result in, in our culture.
Do the research.
Just my opinion.
James says
Since there’s no guarantee that Jimbo (or anyone else) would “do the research” and arrive at a scenario that I came to consider, I feel I must explain further (even though it may not be appropriate).
Consider this.
What if Diethylstilbestrol were used as an “underground” form of birth control. What if it was used as such under the mistaken assumption that it was completely effective as such, but the child was not aborted and was born with penile and/or testicular hypoplasia? What would be the right “choice” in that scenario?
And what factors should be considered when making such a decision?
The child is an infant, would it matter whether his sex was “reassigned” at such a stage in development or would one wait and let the child develop into an adult that might decide for themselves… that is, whether they are content with themselves as they are, not as others might perceive it as so.
And just what is the basis for this perception of contentment? Perhaps some form of underlying fetishism, amongst other reasons?
Who is to blame for this possible scenario? The (wed or unwedded) parents, or a culture that doesn’t embrace people as they are?
Sex is an integral part of the human experience, and having a satisfying sexual existence is important… but is it the only aspect of one’s life that is?
Just a clarification and some further thoughts.
Btw, it occurs to me that this scenario has nothing to do with gender identity of the child, but of the preconceptions of others.
Also, the fact that the chemical is still used as a growth hormone is just one more reason to avoid red meat.
MB says
If minors dont need parents to sign off or consent to anything then why not just give them a job and bills when they are born. Your basically saying a CHILD doesn’t need an adult to guide them. Saying a CHILD shouldn’t talk to their parents about things they are doing that could result in these life threatening diseases. If thats they case then yall think children are adults who can make adult decisions. 🤔
Bo Peep says
What they seek to do is too shield their children from age inappropriate material that encourages acceptance of liberal insanity. Once they turn 18 the. You can feed them that stuff in college.