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      Will Alaskans Welcome Sarah Palin’s Political Comeback?

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      Charles Homans, a New York Times reporter who lived in Alaska during Palin’s ascent, reflects on the state’s astonishing political transformation.Greetings from your host Blake Hounshell. Leah Askarinam is off today. We’re joined tonight by our colleague Charles Homans, who writes about Sarah Palin and Alaska’s changing politics.A decade ago, I caught a ride in a pickup truck on the outskirts of Nome, Alaska, with Bob Hafner, a burly, tattooed gold dredger.I was working on an article about the boom in reality TV shows celebrating rugged blue-collar jobs, which seemed to be in production in every corner of America’s most rugged state. As Hafner’s truck bounced along the rutted coast road, I asked what he made of it.He laughed, a little ruefully. “I’m probably partly responsible for it,” he said. “Me and my diving partner, we did that Sarah Palin show.”“Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” produced by Mark Burnett, had recently run for nine episodes on TLC. Palin was filmed communing with enough commercial fishermen, loggers and bush pilots that the odds of randomly encountering one of them on the road in Nome were probably pretty good.Later I watched the Nome episode, and sure enough: There was Hafner standing alongside Palin as she admired a gold nugget the size of a fingernail that he and Palin’s brother, Chuck, had sucked up from the seafloor. “That’s neat!” the former governor said.There was a note of desperation in this strenuous on-screen Alaska-ing, and in Palin’s voice-over declaration during the opening montage that “I love this state like I love my family.”Four years after the 2008 presidential election and three years after her resignation as governor, the waterfront tourist shops in Valdez hawked “Bailin’ Palin” T-shirts. Only 36 percent of Alaskans viewed her positively, and 61 percent viewed her negatively.Ivan Moore, a pollster in Anchorage, recalls that when he asked people who viewed her negatively why they felt that way, “the most common response, streaks ahead of the rest, was: ‘She quit. She’s a quitter.’”Return from the wildernessThe governor’s relationship with her state changed forever with her resignation, which seemed to represent the exchange of Sarah Palin’s Alaska for “Sarah Palin’s Alaska”: a place for a personal brand.Aside from backing an ultimately unsuccessful challenger to Senator Lisa Murkowski in 2010 (and the same candidate four years later, in the race for the state’s other Senate seat), she was mostly a nonparticipant in Alaska’s affairs. Her political ambitions seemed entirely national, though even these appeared to flag quickly.Her 2012 presidential campaign ended before it began. Her political action committee still took in millions of dollars, but spent a tiny fraction of the money on candidates or independent expenditures. Her most prominent return to the arena, in 2016, was a stemwinder in service of a politician who would all but supplant her role within the Republican Party. In recent years, she had been in the news most often on account of her libel lawsuit against The New York Times. A jury rejected her claims in February.So it was a surprise when Palin emerged from a decade in the cable-talking-head wilderness to hint at and, on April 1, announce her candidacy for Alaska’s lone House seat, which had opened up with Don Young’s death in March.It was more surprising still to see Palin give a lengthy interview to Nathaniel Herz of The Anchorage Daily News, in which she excoriated the “establishment machine” that would oppose her.“They have a loud voice,” she told Herz. “They hold purse strings. They have the media’s ear. But they do not necessarily reflect the will of the people.”An Arctic political machineRepublican candidates today frequently denounce a greatly weakened party “establishment,” but the line is more jarring coming from Palin, who in 2006 did fight and beat one of the country’s most entrenched and clubby state-level Republican establishments.It is a story that has long since grown threadbare from Palin’s own retelling, but if you lived in Alaska, as I did, at the time of Palin’s primary election victory over the incumbent and Alaskan institution Frank Murkowski, it was a genuinely astonishing moment of political transformation.Alaska in 2006 still possessed something resembling a political machine, which cannily husbanded the state’s all-important relationships with the oil and gas industry and the federal government.Alaskans did not always love the stalwarts of this mostly Republican machine, but they understood that deposing them would potentially cost the state a great deal, so they kept electing them. Probably only someone like Palin, with her messianic conviction, had a shot at toppling it.The F.B.I. helped, too, of course, mounting a yearslong investigation of more than half a dozen lawmakers suspected of having taken bribes from the VECO Corporation, an oil-field contractor, that happened to come to a head shortly after Palin’s primary triumph.Today, Alaskan Republican politics don’t much resemble the hierarchy that Palin tilted against 16 years ago. They look, for better or worse, a lot more like Republican politics everywhere else.Sarah Palin in New York this winter.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesA 48-candidate ballotMany influential G.O.P. figures in Alaska remain cool to Palin, but over more prosaic matters, like her relative lack of involvement locally over her years as a national celebrity.“Most serious Republican figures in Alaska, their question is, ‘Where have you been?’” said Suzanne Downing, a former speechwriter for Palin’s lieutenant and successor as governor, Sean Parnell. Downing, who now edits the right-leaning Must Read Alaska blog, added, “She hasn’t lifted a finger for Alaska since she left office.”Palin’s campaign did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment. In an interview with The Associated Press this week, Palin objected to the suggestion that she had left the state behind.“I’m sorry if that narrative is out there, because it’s inaccurate,” she told The A.P., offering by way of bona fides the fact that she had recently been “shoveling moose poop” in her father’s yard.Early this month, Downing commissioned a poll of the comically large field for the June primary — the ballot for which, with its 48 candidates, looks like a page from a phone book. She concedes to having been shocked when Palin came out in the lead at 31 percent: five percentage points ahead of her nearest rival, Al Gross, an independent who has in past races been endorsed by the state Democratic Party.And yet when the pollster asked about respondents’ favorable or unfavorable views of Palin, the numbers — 37 percent to 51 percent — were not much changed from when Ivan Moore asked the same question a decade ago. In fact, Moore told me that Palin’s numbers had not moved appreciably in intermittent polls over the intervening years.This is unusual: For ordinary politicians, favorability and unfavorability tend to soften as time passes and headlines fade. It’s possible — Moore thinks this — that the longer half-life of Palin’s numbers reflects the depth of the betrayal Alaskans still feel about her resignation.But her most recent national polling — admittedly nine years old — shows an almost identical breakdown of favorable and unfavorable responses. Which raises another possibility: that Palin’s political celebrity is so all-devouring and all-polarizing that even Alaskans, with their very particular history with Palin, can’t see past it.Can a much-changed state still surprise?Downing brought up another possible explanation. Alaska, she reminded me, is extraordinarily transient: 12.8 percent of the population turns over in an average year, more than in any other state. Many of the Alaskans taking the measure of Palin today were not Alaskans when she was in office.They are, in other words, less familiar with Sarah Palin’s Alaska than with “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” One was a place of heady transformation. The other was a veneer of local particularity, stretched over the same national politics that seemed to offer few potential surprises, only deepening entrenchment.“I don’t know,” Downing said, “if she can get a single voter that she doesn’t already own.”What to readThe Florida Senate passed a congressional map proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, which would give Republicans an even greater advantage in the state.Herschel Walker, a Republican contender for Senate in Georgia, is a risky candidate for the G.O.P. to run, but he has nevertheless surged to the top of the field, our colleague Maya King reports.Barack Obama, who has waded more and more into the public fray over misinformation and disinformation, is expected to give a speech on the subject at Stanford University on Thursday.briefing bookDisney World’s Main Street, U.S.A., under construction in 1970.Associated PressHow Disney got its own state-within-a-stateWhen Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida urged lawmakers this week to consider ending Disney’s special administrative status, he wasn’t just escalating his cultural standoff with his state’s largest employer.He was also pulling on a string that threatened to unravel an arrangement the state made with Disney in 1967 that granted the company extraordinary power over a 39-square-mile patch of former swampland in Central Florida — an unusual experiment in local governance that has few American counterparts.Disney runs everything from the fire department and emergency services to electricity, gas, water and wastewater, subject to the supervision of a five-member board dominated by the company. It decides what is built, and how, and has the power to raise bonds and assess taxes. The charter for the special municipality, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, even allows Disney to build and operate an airport or a power plant using “nuclear fission” if it so chooses.“It’s almost like a sovereign state inside another state,” said Aaron Goldberg, the author of a book on the origins of Disney World, the company’s Florida resort. Others have called it a “Vatican with mouse ears.”At the time of the district’s creation, the brothers Walt and Roy Disney were searching for the ideal site for the successor resort to Disneyland, their California theme park. It had to be somewhere warm and near major highways — but not too near the ocean, because the company didn’t want to compete with the beach. With the help of Paul Helliwell, a lawyer and longtime intelligence operative, they secretly acquired portions of Orange and Osceola Counties. Announcing the project, Disney spoke of his ambition to build a “city of tomorrow.”To fulfill that vision, Disney demanded sovereignty over its own land and, to make a long story short, Florida said yes.Disney’s futuristic city never happened. Portions became Epcot Center, and the special district has under 50 residents. And over half a century later, DeSantis is re-evaluating the state’s bargain as he contemplates some grand ambitions of his own.“Disney has gotten away with special deals from the state of Florida for way too long,” the governor said in an email to his supporters on Wednesday. “It took a look under the hood to see what Disney has become to truly understand their inappropriate influence.”But taking apart Disney’s magical Florida kingdom might prove complicated. For one thing, The Miami Herald noted on Wednesday that residents of Orange and Osceola Counties might be on the hook for a hefty tax bill should DeSantis get what he wants.As Goldberg put it, “How do you dissolve a government that’s been there for 50 years?”— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Florida Senate Passes Congressional Map Giving G.O.P. a Big Edge

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      The map, proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, would most likely add four Republican districts while eliminating three held by Democrats.Florida Republicans are poised to adopt one of the nation’s most aggressive congressional maps, pressing forward with a proposal from Gov. Ron DeSantis that would most likely add four congressional districts for the party while eliminating three held by Democrats.The map, which the Florida Senate approved by a party-line vote of 24 to 15 on Wednesday during a special session of the Legislature, was put forward by Mr. DeSantis after he vetoed a version approved in March by state legislators that would have added two Republican seats and subtracted one from the Democrats.The new proposal would create 20 seats that favor Republicans and just eight that tilt toward Democrats, meaning that the G.O.P. would be likely to hold 71 percent of the seats. Former President Donald J. Trump carried Florida in 2020 with 51.2 percent of the vote.The Florida map would erase some of the gains Democrats have made in this year’s national redistricting process. The 2022 map had been poised to be balanced between the two major parties for the first time in generations, with a nearly equal number of House districts that are expected to lean Democratic and Republican for the first time in more than 50 years.The map would also serve as a high-profile, if possibly temporary, victory for Mr. DeSantis, who has emerged as one of the Republican Party’s leading figures and has not ruled out challenging Mr. Trump for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. The Florida House is expected to pass the map on Thursday, and Mr. DeSantis is certain to sign it.“I think they are good maps that will be able to be upheld,” said Joe Gruters, a Florida state senator who is the chairman of the state Republican Party.If it is adopted into law, the Florida map would face legal challenges from Democrats, who clashed with Republicans on Tuesday over whether the proposal violated the state’s Constitution and the Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on racial gerrymandering.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.“It does appear to be politically motivated, and it does not take seriously the hard-working Black people in the state,” said Rosalind Osgood, a state senator from Broward County in South Florida.Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization, said that the proposed map complied with the state Constitution “while remaining faithful to the U.S. Constitution and the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.”Some Democrats predicted that the DeSantis map would ultimately not pass legal muster — though any successful challenge would probably not arrive in time for the November elections. In addition to the Florida dispute, Democrats are locked in a court battle over a political gerrymander of their own in New York, where a judge last month invalidated Democratic-drawn maps.The Florida map would end the congressional career of Representative Al Lawson, a Black Democrat from Jacksonville, by carving up a district that stretches across North Florida to combine Black neighborhoods in Jacksonville and Tallahassee.It would also eliminate an Orlando district held by Representative Val Demings, a Democrat, and pack Black voters from two districts in Tampa and St. Petersburg into one, creating a second district certain to be won by a Republican. Ms. Demings is vacating her seat to challenge Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican.If the new map becomes law, Representative Val Demings’s congressional district in Orlando would be eliminated. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesMr. Lawson’s district has been held by a Black Democrat since 1993, when former Representative Corrine Brown first took office.Mr. DeSantis’s map-drawer, Alex Kelly, said at a Florida Senate committee hearing on Tuesday that he could not draw a compact majority-Black district based in Jacksonville.“I determined that was not possible to check all those boxes,” he said.But Democrats argued that the map represented an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.“Governor DeSantis is bullying the Legislature into drawing Republicans an illegitimate and illegal partisan advantage in the congressional map, and he’s doing it at the expense of Black voters in Florida,” Kelly Burton, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in an interview. “This blatant gerrymander will not go unchallenged.”Democrats’ objections to the DeSantis map focused in part on a state constitutional amendment enacted by Florida voters in 2010 that set new standards for the redistricting process by requiring compact districts that did not favor one political party. A state court ordered Florida’s entire congressional map to be redrawn before the 2016 elections.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Florida rejects 54 math textbooks over ‘prohibited topics’ including critical race theory

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      Florida rejects 54 math textbooks over ‘prohibited topics’ including critical race theoryMove follows a series of hardline measures by Republicans in the state to alter teaching in schools as governor welcomes news Florida’s education department has rejected 54 mathematics textbooks from next year’s school curriculum, citing alleged references to critical race theory among a range of reasoning for some of the rejections, officials announced.The department said in a news release Friday that some of the books had been rejected for failure to comply with the state’s content standards, Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking [Best], but that 21% of the books were disallowed “because they incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including CRT”.Department officials disapproved an additional 11 books “because they do not properly align to Best Standards and incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including CRT”.Critical race theory is an academic practice that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society.The release does not list the titles of the books or provide any extracts to offer reasons why the books were removed. The announcement follows a series of hardline measures by Republicans in the state to alter teaching in schools as conservatives thrust the issue of critical race theory into the country’s ongoing political culture wars.In June last year, the Florida board of education ruled to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. That included the teaching of the New York Times’s Pulitzer prize-winning series the 1619 Project, which re-examines American history in the context of slavery and its consequences.In a statement, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis welcomed the education department’s announcement and accused some textbook publishers of “indoctrinating” children with “concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students”.Florida Democrats rebuked the announcement. Democratic state representative Carlos G Smith argued on Twitter that DeSantis had “turned our classrooms into political battlefields and this is just the beginning”.Swathes of Republican-controlled states in the US have passed measures seeking to ban the teaching of critical race theory, which will probably be a prominent conservative talking point in this year’s midterm elections.Many of those bills and orders are vaguely worded, leading to fears of censorship on school and college campuses around the country.TopicsFloridaRon DeSantisUS educationRaceUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Will Democrats Soon Be Locked Out of Power?

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      Throughout the Trump era it was a frequent theme of liberal commentary that their political party represented a clear American majority, thwarted by our antidemocratic institutions and condemned to live under the rule of the conservative minority.In the political context of 2016-20, this belief was overstated. Yes, Donald Trump won the presidential election of 2016 with a minority of the popular vote. But more Americans voted for Republican congressional candidates than Democratic congressional candidates, and more Americans voted for right-of-center candidates for president — including the Libertarian vote — than voted for Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein. In strictly majoritarian terms, liberalism deserved to lose in 2016, even if Trump did not necessarily deserve to win.And Republican structural advantages, while real, did not then prevent Democrats from reclaiming the House of Representatives in 2018 and the presidency in 2020 and Senate in 2021. These victories extended the pattern of 21st century American politics, which has featured significant swings every few cycles, not the entrenchment of either party’s power.The political landscape after 2024, however, might look more like liberalism’s depictions of its Trump-era plight. According to calculations by liberalism’s Cassandra, David Shor, the convergence of an unfavorable Senate map for Democrats with their pre-existing Electoral College and Senate disadvantages could easily produce a scenario where the party wins 50 percent of the congressional popular vote, 51 percent of the presidential vote — and ends up losing the White House and staring down a nearly filibuster-proof Republican advantage in the Senate.That’s a scenario for liberal horror, but it’s not one that conservatives should welcome either. In recent years, as their advantages in both institutions have increased, conservatives have defended institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College with variations of the argument that the United States is a democratic republic, not a pure democracy.These arguments carry less weight, however, the more consistently undemocratic the system’s overall results become. (They would fall apart completely in the scenario sought by Donald Trump and some of his allies after 2020, where state legislatures simply substitute their preferences for the voters in their states.)The Electoral College’s legitimacy can stand up if an occasional 49-47 percent popular vote result goes the other way; likewise the Senate’s legitimacy if it tilts a bit toward one party but changes hands consistently.But a scenario where one party has sustained governing power while lacking majoritarian support is a recipe for delegitimization and reasonable disillusionment, which no clever conservative column about the constitutional significance of state sovereignty would adequately address.From the Republican Party’s perspective, the best way to avoid this future — where the nature of conservative victories undercuts the perceived legitimacy of conservative governance — is to stop being content with the advantages granted by the system and try harder to win majorities outright.You can’t expect a political party to simply cede its advantages: There will never be a bipartisan constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate, on any timeline you care to imagine. But you can expect a political party to show a little more electoral ambition than the G.O.P. has done of late — to seek to win more elections the way that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won them, rather than being content to keep it close and put their hopes in lucky breaks.Especially in the current climate, which looks dire for the Democrats, the Republicans have an opportunity to make the Electoral College complaint moot, for a time at least, by simply taking plausible positions, nominating plausible candidates and winning majorities outright.That means rejecting the politics of voter-fraud paranoia — as, hopefully, Republican primary voters will do by choosing Brian Kemp over David Perdue in the Georgia gubernatorial primary.It means rejecting the attempts to return to the libertarian “makers versus takers” politics of Tea Party era, currently manifested in Florida Senator Rick Scott’s recent manifesto suggesting tax increases for the working class — basically the right-wing equivalent of “defund the police” in terms of its political toxicity.And it means — and I fear this is beyond the G.O.P.’s capacities — nominating someone other than Donald Trump in 2024.A Republican Party that managed to win popular majorities might still see its Senate or Electoral College majorities magnified by its structural advantages. But such magnification is a normal feature of many democratic systems, not just our own. It’s very different from losing the popular vote consistently and yet being handed power anyway.As for what the Democrats should do about their disadvantages — well, that’s a longer discussion, but two quick points for now.First, to the extent the party wants to focus on structural answers to its structural challenges, it needs clarity about what kind of electoral reforms would actually accomplish something. That’s been lacking in the Biden era, where liberal reformers wasted considerable time and energy on voting bills that didn’t pass and also weren’t likely to help the party much had they been actually pushed through.A different reform idea, statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, wouldn’t have happened in this period either, but it’s much more responsive to the actual challenges confronting Democrats in the Senate. So if you’re a liberal activist or a legislator planning for the next brief window when your party holds power, pushing for an expanded Senate seems like a more reasonable long ball to try to train your team to throw.Second, to the extent that there’s a Democratic path back to greater parity in the Senate and Electoral College without structural reform, it probably requires the development of an explicit faction within the party dedicated to winning back two kinds of voters — culturally conservative Latinos and working-class whites — who were part of Barack Obama’s coalition but have drifted rightward since.That faction would have two missions: To hew to a poll-tested agenda on economic policy (not just the business-friendly agenda supported by many centrist Democrats) and to constantly find ways to distinguish itself from organized progressivism — the foundations, the activists, the academics — on cultural and social issues. And crucially, not in the tactical style favored by analysts like Shor, but in the language of principle: Rightward-drifting voters would need to know that this faction actually believes in its own moderation, its own attacks on progressive shibboleths, and that its members will remain a thorn in progressivism’s side even once they reach Washington.Right now the Democrats have scattered politicians, from West Virginia to New York City, who somewhat fit this mold. But they don’t have an agenda for them to coalesce around, a group of donors ready to fund them, a set of intellectuals ready to embrace them as their own.Necessity, however, is the mother of invention, and necessity may impose itself upon the Democratic Party soon enough.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Republican-run states mimic Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ bill in chilling wave of gag orders

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      Republican-run states mimic Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ bill in chilling wave of gag ordersOver 156 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced or refiled in 39 states since January 2021, according to report Since Florida passed its controrversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill, conservative states across America have been taking on similar style bills as they attempt to ban the discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms.Last month, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill. The law prohibits all discussion of sexuality and gender identity in schools, a move that advocates say will “erase” LGBTQ+ students and history.Since the bill’s introduction and passage, various Republican-run states have filed similar legislation that mimics Florida’s, reflecting a chilling wave of speech and identity restrictions across the country.Over 156 gag order bills have been introduced or refiled in 39 states since January 2021, according to a February report by Pen America, a nonprofit that seeks to protect freedom of expression in the US. At least 105 of those target K-12 schools, 49 target higher education and 62 include mandatory punishments for those found in violation.“Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill is just the tip of the iceberg. While race, sex, and American history remain the most common targets of censorship, bills silencing speech about LGBTQ+ identities have also surged to the fore,” the organization said.In March, Georgia legislators introduced the Common Humanity in Private Education Act. According to the act, “No private or nonpublic school or program…shall promote, compel, or encourage classroom discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not appropriate for the age and developmental stage of the student.”The act, which is sponsored by 10 Republican state senators, says “a focus on racial and gender identity and its resulting discrimination on the basis of color, race, ethnicity and national origin is destructive to the fabric of American society.”LGBTQ+ advocates in Georgia have pushed back heavily against the bill, arguing that it is not about parental rights but rather “restricting the activities, participation and learning” of children in schools.In Louisiana, a Republican state representative introduced a bill last month that seeks to ban discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation in certain public school classrooms.The bill, proposed by representative Dodie Horton, seeks to prohibit “teachers and others from discussing their sexual orientation or gender identity with students” from kindergarten through twelfth grade. It also seeks to also ban teachers and other presenters from discussing topics o sexual orientation and gender identity with students in kindergarten through eighth grade.In February, Republicans in Kansas introduced a state House bill that would make the depiction of homosexuality in classroom materials a class B misdemeanor.In Indiana, state legislators proposed a bill that would require schools to “obtain prior informed written consent from the parent of a student who is less than eighteen years of age…before the student may participate in any instruction on human sexuality.”The listed topics in the bill that would require parental consent includes abortion, birth control or contraceptives, sexual activity, sexual orientation, transgenderism and gender identity. Prior to obtaining written consent from parents, the bill would require schools to provide parents with “informed written notice which shall accurately describe in detail the contents and nature of the instruction on human sexuality, including the purpose of the instruction on human sexuality.”A bill introduced by Tennessee state Republicans in February seeks to prohibit any instructional materials that “promote, normalize, support, or address lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, or transgender issues or lifestyles”.In Arizona, proposed bills by Republican state senators include those that would block gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth, as well as force teachers, nurses and other school staff to disclose a minor’s gender identity to their parents.Oklahoma state legislators recently passed a bill that prevents students enrolled in colleges from being “required to engage in any form of mandatory gender or sexual diversity training or counseling; provided, voluntary counseling shall not be prohibited”. The law also states, “Any orientation or requirement that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or a bias on the basis of race or sex shall be prohibited.”Earlier this week, Ohio Republican representatives Jean Schmidt and Mike Loychik introduced a bill that would ban kindergarten through third grade classrooms from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity. Additionally, classrooms with older students would be disallowed from featuring those topics in ways that are “not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate.”In response to the bill’s introduction, Democratic representative Brigid Kelly called it a “huge problem} and said: “We’re not giving people access to the tools, the materials, the lessons they need to prepare children for the diverse world that exists.”Similarly, South Carolina state lawmakers introduced a bill that would ban state entities, including schools from subjecting students to “instruction, presentations, discussions, counseling, or materials in any medium” that involves topics including “sexual lifestyles, acts, or practices,” as well as “gender identity or lifestyles”.Additionally, like the Oklahoma law, another South Carolina bill seeks to prevent teachers, staff members and district employees from engaging in gender and sexual diversity training.In states such as Wisconsin and Rhode Island, personal pronouns have also become a contentious subject for conservative lawmakers. Both chambers of the Wisconsin legislature have approved a bill which has yet to be signed into law that includes a parent’s right to choose pronouns for their children.In Rhode Island, a proposed bill would require children to “be addressed by their common names and the pronouns associated with their biological gender” unless their parents grant permission to change them.“Florida’s cruel ‘don’t say gay’ bill is one of hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills moving through state legislatures, most of which primarily attack trans youth,” the American Civil Liberties Union tweeted in February.“Censoring classroom discussions won’t keep kids from being LGBTQ. It just piles on to the national pattern of attacks,” it added.TopicsFloridaLGBT rightsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Stacey Abrams win in Georgia will lead to ‘cold war’ with Florida, DeSantis says

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      Stacey Abrams win in Georgia will lead to ‘cold war’ with Florida, DeSantis saysFlorida governor and potential Republican presidential contender says, ‘I can’t have Castro to my south and Abrams to my north’

      DeSantis takes on Disney in latest culture war battle
      The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, predicted a “cold war” with Georgia if it elects the Democrat and voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams as governor this year.Star Trek makes Stacey Abrams president of United Earth – and stokes conservative angerRead more“If Stacey Abrams is elected governor of Georgia, I just want to be honest, that will be a cold war between Florida and Georgia,” DeSantis said at a press event in the north-west of his own state.“I can’t have [former Cuban leader Raúl] Castro to my south and Abrams to my north, that would be a disaster. So I hope you guys take care of that and we’ll end up in good shape.”DeSantis polls strongly among potential Republican nominees for president in 2024, with or without Donald Trump in the race. Accordingly, he has positioned himself as a major player on culture-war issues, recently signing a bill regarding the teaching of LGBTQ+ issues which critics labeled “don’t say gay”.In California, Los Angeles county has banned business travel to Florida and Texas over anti-LGBTQ+ policies. Such moves have also led DeSantis into direct confrontation with Disney, a major employer and economic engine in his state.On Friday, he said: “I don’t really care what the media says about that. I don’t care what, you know, very leftwing activists say about that. I do not care what big companies say about that. We are standing strong. We will not back down on that.”Abrams has become a major player in her own state and a hate figure among conservatives. A former state representative and a successful author, she ran for governor in 2018 and lost narrowly to Brian Kemp, refusing to concede while protesting his role as secretary of state in controlling his own election.Abrams’ work to turn out Democratic votes, particularly among minorities, helped flip Georgia to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election and then elect two Democratic senators in runoffs in January the following year.She is running unopposed in the Democratic gubernatorial primary this year but trails both the incumbent governor, Kemp, and his Trump-backed primary challenger, former senator David Perdue, in early polling.Abrams did not immediately comment on DeSantis’s comment.A spokeswoman for DeSantis’s office said: “If Stacey Abrams wins the governorship of Georgia, we know that her approach to leadership will involve more heavy-handed government, taxes and bureaucratic influence.”Amid controversy, Craig Pittman, a Florida reporter and author, said the governor was “trying desperately to get attention from Fox News for saying something outrageous to own the libs and diss Black people”.TopicsStacey AbramsRon DeSantisUS politicsFloridaGeorgiaRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      These Days, ‘Help Wanted’ Has So Many Meanings

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      Gail Collins: Bret, let’s relax and talk about long-term goals that we totally do not share. For instance, how would you feel about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour?Bret Stephens: Why not raise the standard of living for everyone by making the minimum wage $100? Just kidding. I think the correct figure is $0.Gail: If your goal is a self-supporting populace that doesn’t depend on government aid, you’ve got to make sure employers are shelling out at least minimal survival salaries. The current bottom line is $7.25 an hour. Nobody can live on that.Bret: I’m taking my $0 cue from a famous Times editorial from 1987, which made the case that “those at greatest risk from a higher minimum wage would be young, poor workers, who already face formidable barriers to getting and keeping jobs.” The editorial may be old but the economic logic is right. Raising the minimum wage is a well-intentioned idea that won’t help its intended beneficiaries. It will hurt them by giving companies like McDonald’s additional incentives to move toward even more automation.Tell me why I’m wrong.Gail: Well, I could quote an editorial from 2020 that said raising the minimum wage “ought to be a priority of economic policymakers ….”And you know, I was once the Times Opinion editor, and the editorial page does evolve in its outlook. Back when the Civil Rights Act passed in the 1960s, our editorial writers made fun of the idea of applying it to gender employment discrimination, theorizing that federal enforcers “may find it would have been better if Congress had just abolished sex itself” and warning it could lead to male Bunnies at the Playboy clubs.Bret: I’m sure we agree that The Times has been wrong about many things in the past — and might even be wrong about a thing or two in the present. I’m still not seeing how the economics have changed since the 1980s.Gail: A higher minimum wage might cause some employers to reduce the number of jobs, at least temporarily. But the danger there is always way overplayed, and those higher-paid minimum wage workers will be spending their new money to lift the economy.Bret: We are living through a period of deep labor shortages, especially in service industries, that allows workers to bargain for higher wages. That makes raising the minimum wage a faulty solution to a fading problem. But I see your point, and this is one of those issues on which conservatives and liberals will argue forever — or at least until automation and robots make it moot.Gail: Meanwhile, on a totally completely different subject, last week we missed the chance to converse about The Slap. Any lingering thoughts about Will Smith hitting Chris Rock at the Oscars?Bret: The truly nauseating part was the standing ovation Smith got for his interminable, self-pitying acceptance speech after hitting Rock. It’s a good reminder of why the American romance with Hollywood is coming to an end, as our colleague Ross Douthat reminded us recently. The best thing the Oscars could do now is to cancel itself.Gail: I have to confess, my husband and I are really into the Oscars. Not the program, which I acknowledge is frequently dreadful. But all the run-up publicity encourages us to catch some fine movies in the more obscure categories like foreign films. I’ll bet you haven’t seen “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom.”Bret: Should I? The only movie I’ve seen in ages is “King Richard,” which, I have to admit, I liked.Gail: I truly hated Will Smith’s performance in “King Richard.”Bret: Really?Gail: Really, from the start. Don’t know why he turned me off, but acting-wise, I’d go with the yak from Lunana every time.As to The Slap, one of the many things that ticked me off was the whole gender aspect. If a female comedian made fun of an actor’s hair loss, would anybody expect his wife to come storming up and slug the offender? No, in part because a guy going semi-bald is regarded as normal. In part because physical violence is still sort of accepted for men.Bret: If the other Rock, Dwayne Johnson, had made the same joke in Chris Rock’s place, it would have been interesting to watch Smith try to slap him.Gail: Chris Rock’s joke was in bad taste the way a lot of the jokes you hear in public performances are in bad taste. It’s presumed that some people’s feelings may get hurt. Someday I’m going to make a list of all the age-related laugh lines comics in their 40s make about people who are older.Bret: Speaking of tasteless jokes, how about Madison Cawthorn?Gail: You mean the part when the young congressman from North Carolina claimed Washington was a wild place where people he admired invited him to orgies and snorted cocaine? I want to say right off the bat that Cawthorn’s behavior should not be a blot on the reputation of 26-year-olds in general.Bret: To fall afoul of House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, as Cawthorn did, is like having George Carlin rebuke you for an excessively foul mouth.Gail: Cawthorn’s Republican colleagues in the House sure are ready to dump him, but Donald Trump seems to still be in his corner.Sort of amazing how consistent our former president is in gravitating to the worst politicians imaginable.Bret: If by some miracle Democrats hang on to one or both houses of Congress this November, it will be because of Cawthorn, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and other would-be G.O.P. candidates trying to be just like them — the Radioactive Republicans. Trump’s embrace of these characters diminishes his chances of being renominated in 2024.In that respect, my money is on Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, winning the Republican nomination and facing the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, in the general, with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado as their respective running mates. Placing any bets of your own?Gail: Impressed by your long-range thinking. If for some reason Trump doesn’t run again — which I can’t really imagine — DeSantis certainly has positioned himself to be next in line. By being as loathsome as possible. I find him completely appalling, but you’re mainly opposed to him as a Trump backer, right? How would you rate him as governor?Bret: I’m no fan of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. But Democrats underestimate DeSantis at their peril. Florida is hopping, Miami feels like the hottest destination in the country and, barring some scandal or mishandled crisis, DeSantis is going to crush his most likely Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, in his race for re-election this fall. He also has a genius for baiting liberals and the media and he’s figured out a way to triangulate between the evangelical, business and Trumpian wings of the Republican Party.Long and short of it: If Biden doesn’t dramatically turn his presidency around to boost the Democratic brand and Trump doesn’t torpedo DeSantis’s candidacy out of spite — two big ifs, I’ll admit — DeSantis is going to be awfully hard to defeat in a general election. How would you propose to beat him?Gail: As far as his current re-election race in Florida goes, this is one of those contests where the impartial experts, asked to comment on the opposition’s chances, say things like “There’s always hope.” Don’t think I’m going to invest any energy in dreaming of a DeSantis defeat this year. But definitely going to keep watching him warily on the national level. I’m kinda fascinated that right now he’s at war with Disney over the Magic Kingdom’s defense of gay rights. Who’d have thought?Bret: Strange to say this, but one of the few things Trump did to the G.O.P. that I liked was try to push it to embrace gay rights. So much for that.The larger question here is how far private companies like Disney should go to take politically divisive positions, especially when corporate executives are dealing with a more politically active work force. My general sense is that it’s a bad idea for them to do so — but an even worse idea for politicians to punish them for essentially making business decisions. If people are offended by Disney’s stances, they’re free to skip Disney World.Gail: Florida aside, it’s gonna be a heck of an election year. One of my own fascination points is Ohio, my old home state, where there seem to be more Republicans running for the Senate than squirrels in Central Park. Recently one of them tweeted that when it comes to Ukraine, “We’ve got our own problems.”Bret: You’re referring to J.D. Vance of “Hillbilly Elegy” fame, whose political views seem to spin about as fast as the revolving doors at Macy’s. The last time I saw him, right before the election in 2016, we were on Fareed Zakaria’s show agreeing that Donald Trump should lose. One of us stuck to his guns.Gail: Any contest you’re focused on at the moment? If you want a break until the end of March Madness, I would totally understand …Bret: The only contest that really matters to me right now is the one between Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin, between democracy and darkness. On this, I’m happy that you and I and most Americans are on the same page — whatever people like Vance, Tucker Carlson and the rest of the mental wet-burp gang happen to think.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law could harm children’s mental health

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      How Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law could harm children’s mental healthLGBTQ+ parents and pediatric psychologists say the law stigmatizes being gay or transgender and could harm the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth Stella, 10, attends a private school in Atlanta, Georgia, and explains to friends that she has four moms. Two of them are the lesbian couple that adopted her. The other two are her birth parents, one of whom recently came out as a transgender woman.Florida governor Ron DeSantis signs ‘don’t say gay’ bill into lawRead more“I’m so grateful that [Stella] is somewhere that sees” the family “as what it is: her moms just love her”, said Kelsey Hanley, Stella’s birth mother, who lives in Kissimmee, Florida.But Hanley, 30, worries that children who have multiple moms or dads or are LGBTQ+ themselves won’t get the same acceptance in Florida.That’s because the state recently approved legislation that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade and prohibits such lessons for older students unless they are “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate”.Hanley and some pediatric psychologists say the law stigmatizes being gay or transgender and could harm the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth, who are already more likely to face bullying and attempt suicide than children who are cisgender and straight.“We all have processes around clarifying who we know in our heads and hearts we are and who we are drawn to or attracted to,” said Laura Anderson, a child and family psychologist in Hawaii whose focus is LGBTQ+ youth and their families. “To make an increasingly large percentage of the population’s experience invisible and taboo is just so harmful and unsafe for all kids.”The Parental Rights in Education legislation, which opponents labeled the “don’t say gay” bill, is part of a flurry of measures introduced by Republican lawmakers around the country. The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, reports that lawmakers have introduced 300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills this year.The wave not only includes laws similar to Florida restricting instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation but also ones that criminalize gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth.Child psychologists say that such laws create an unsafe environment for LGBTQ+ children.Two-thirds of LGBTQ+ youth said debates concerning the state laws have had a negative impact on their mental health, according to a poll from the Trevor Project, an intervention and suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ youth.And transgender people, in particular, already often face greater psychological distress than the US general population. The National Center for Transgender Equality’s 2015 US Transgender Survey found that 40% of transgender respondents had attempted suicide, which is nine times the rate of the general population.“We have governors – that have no education or basis or expertise in child mental health – that impose such laws that are going to have horrendous impacts on kids,” said Natasha Poulopoulos, a pediatric psychologist in Miami.Supporters of the Florida law claim it’s necessary because children are being exposed to “radical concepts regarding sexual orientation and gender identity”.“What’s even more concerning about this is that parents are not just not being included but are being treated as the enemy here,” said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, which supported the legislation in Florida and similar bills in other states. “This legislation is not only good, it’s necessary to protect children and their innocence.”But groups such as the Florida Education Association, the state’s teachers union, say that elementary school teachers do not teach curriculum regarding sexuality and that Republicans are just using it as a cynical political wedge issue.Rather than protect children, the Florida law stigmatizes gender exploration, which is a normal part of child development, Poulopoulos said.“It’s healthy and normal for kids to go out of specific gender roles that have been extremely outdated. Even if a child was assigned female at birth and identifies as female, it’s OK for a child to explore things that may be considered more gender stereotypical for boys,” said Poulopoulos.The legislation puts negative rhetoric “around aspects of gender identity and sexual orientation that are not heteronormative, so for example, if you are not cisgender and heterosexual, you are to be shamed”, said Poulopoulos.To prevent that shame, child psychologists say that it’s important for children to see themselves and their families represented in stories.For elementary school students, this could mean “using very simple language like: families can look diverse. Some families only have one parent. Some families have a grandparent and a mom. Some have two moms. Some have a mom and a dad,” said Poulopoulos. “That simple language is by no means sexualizing children. It is simply explaining the concepts of family structure, of sexual orientation and gender identity in a very developmentally appropriate way.”A 2019 report from GLSEN, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, found that two-thirds of LGBTQ+ youth respondents had not been exposed to representations of LGBTQ+ people, history or events in lessons at school. At schools that did have an LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum, 59% of respondents said they often or frequently heard the word “gay” used in a negative way, compared with almost 80% of students at schools that did not have inclusive curriculum.“If you are a family or a child that is figuring this stuff out about your identity and don’t see yourself anywhere, in curriculum, in stories,” that absence means they must “undo the harm of their child having felt othered for ever”, said Anderson, the psychologist in Hawaii.Two LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations shared the child psychologists’ concern and filed a lawsuit last week challenging the Florida law, describing it as an “unlawful attempt to stigmatize, silence and erase LGBTQ people in Florida’s public schools”.A spokeswoman for DeSantis said of the lawsuit: “This calculated, politically motivated, virtue-signaling lawsuit is meritless, and we will defend the legality of parents to protect their young children from sexual content in Florida public schools.”But Hanley, the Florida mom, said the law tries to shield students from something they are going to encounter anyways. Hanley, who works in customer service, said she was attracted to women before she was attracted to men and realized she was bisexual in middle school.“They are going to go grocery shopping, and they are going to see two women holding hands. They are going to see two men holding hands, and if that’s something that can’t be discussed in school, they are going to feel like they can’t talk about it at home,” said Hanley. ”And if their parents think it’s not appropriate to talk about, then their response is going to be: ‘If I have to hide this part of myself, do I have to hide that I’m on substances? Do I have to hide that I have a crush on somebody?’ They are not going to have any kind of openness.”Hanley also worries about what rhetoric from advocates for the Florida law – about the need to “protect our children” – will mean for children like Stella.“Stella would think that people want to protect children from her,” said Hanley. “And she would think: what do you need to protect yourself from?”TopicsFloridaLGBT rightsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More