I’ve often thought Florida politicians would be more dangerous if they had more brains.
Instead, they often approach public policy with the savviness of a cane toad. It doesn’t make them any more redeeming. But it does make them easier to catch.
Which brings us to Randy Fine.
You may know that the Brevard County Republican legislator is a leader in the state’s crusade against drag queens. The guy seems to have an obsession that would make RuPaul blush.
The problem for Fine is that there’s a pesky document known as the U.S. Constitution that says government can’t just ban or restrict performances — or speech of any kind — just because politicians claim to dislike it.
That’s why most of the savvier Republicans have tried to be sneaky in their attacks. Even though they’re clearly targeting drag shows, they’ve argued that isn’t the case — that they simply want to protect kids.
Now, their claims are totally transparent horse hockey — as a federal judge already ruled when he wrote that their recently passed bill was “specifically designed to suppress the speech of drag queen performers.”
But again, at least the savvy Republicans tried to act like that wasn’t the case. The same can’t be said for Fine.
Newly released emails show Fine originally tried to target drag acts by tinkering with a statute that mentions “bestiality” and “sadomasochistic abuse.” (We’ll talk more about that in a moment. And if you don’t know what bestiality is, I’d tell you to Google it, except, for the love of all that’s holy, please DO NOT GOOGLE IT.)
Anyway, records obtained by the Seeking Rents website show Fine sent emails to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ staff earlier this year calling for new language that explicitly cracked down on “drag performances.”
You see the problem, right? The state’s entire (failed) legal defense has been to claim these laws don’t specifically target drag performances. Yet here was Fine admitting the unconstitutional truth.
Not only that, Fine’s proposal was so broad and ham-handed — defining drag as any “performance in which a performer exhibits a gender identity that is different than the performer’s gender assigned at birth” — that it probably would’ve targeted everything from “Twelfth Night” to “Some Like it Hot.”
The governor’s staff didn’t take Fine’s suggestion. Instead, they tried a more nuanced approach. Unfortunately for them, Fine had already admitted the state’s true motivations multiple times. So the judge actually quoted Fine saying he wanted to target drag performances as evidence that the state was lying when claiming that wasn’t the case.
Florida drag queen ruling reveals lies. Read the laws yourself.
Jason Garcia, the former Orlando Sentinel reporter who runs the Seeking Rents site, asked Fine why he proposed something that was so clearly unconstitutional, reporting: “Fine said he did not remember proposing the amendment, so he could not say why he ultimately chose not to pursue it.”
Now that sounds like a guy who should be the next president of a major Florida university.
New: Lawyers for Ron DeSantis claim in court that a controversial new state law does not target drag queens.
But emails show it is intended to.https://t.co/0bzs1wNWWg pic.twitter.com/UVPT4Hk75q
— Jason Garcia (@Jason_Garcia) October 18, 2023
I said earlier that we’d get back to bestiality. (Words I never expected nor wanted to write.) Well, that’s because Fine’s original proposal was to add drag performances to an existing list of restricted content in Florida, including movies that feature “sexual battery, bestiality, or sadomasochistic abuse and which is harmful to minors.”
But that was problematic for the anti-drag crowd as well. Why? Because that statute also includes this line: “The provisions of paragraph (a) do not apply to a minor when the minor is accompanied by his or her parents or either of them.”
In other words: Existing state law says parents have the final say over what their kids can see.
But Fine and GOP lawmakers didn’t want parental rights to apply to drag shows. Just bestiality. The law they passed (SB 1438) specifically targets “live performances” while leaving movies alone.
And that’s perhaps the sickest part of all this. Fine and the governor’s office looked at a statute that clearly says parents can take their kids to movies that feature violent sex scenes and intercourse with animals and concluded: Yeah, we’re cool with that. We just wanna go after the queens.
Those are some odd family values.
You might be able to dismiss all this twistedness as political gaslighting, except you’re paying to defend it. The state is continuing to fight in court to defend their attack on drag. And how much of your money are they spending on this? Well, the state won’t say.
Last week, I asked Melanie Griffin, the secretary of the state’s department of business and professional regulation — the state division defending this law in court — how much taxpayer money has been spent. Griffin did not answer the question, saying instead that her communications team “can assist you with the requested information.”
I’m sure they can. But they haven’t as of yet. The state has dragged its feet before when asked to provide similar records. But we persisted and learned the state was paying lawyers up to $675 an hour to defend other clearly unconstitutional laws. So we’ll persist here as well.
Your tax dollars pay lawyers $675 an hour to defend unconstitutional laws | Commentary
Already, though, the records, statutes and court rulings have laid bare these guys’ true intentions — even if they didn’t mean to. And while those intentions may not be good for the Constitution or your tax dollars, I guess they’re good news for sadomasochistic filmmakers.
smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com
