A federal judge in Florida tossed out a lawsuit challenging Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) Parental Rights in Education law, which restricts schools from teaching young children about sexual orientation and gender identity.
LGBT-advocacy groups Equality Florida and Family Equality, along with students, parents and teachers, filed the lawsuit in March, the same month DeSantis signed the bill into law. The lawsuit alleged the Parental Rights in Education law violated the First Amendment and due-process protections.
U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor issued a 25-page ruling on Thursday dismissing the case, WCTV noted. Winsor said that the plaintiffs could file a revised lawsuit within 14 days.
In his order, Winsor did not rule on the constitutionality of the law. He focused on a threshold issue of whether the plaintiffs showed they had standing to pursue the case — and concluded that they had not met that requirement.
As an example, Winsor wrote that one factor in determining standing is whether a plaintiff can show a link between a “defendant’s action and the resulting harm.”
“The principal problem is that most of plaintiffs’ alleged harm is not plausibly tied to the law’s enforcement so much as the law’s very existence,” Winsor, who was appointed to the federal bench by former President Donald Trump, wrote. “Plaintiffs contend the law’s passage, the sentiment behind it, the legislators’ motivation, and the message the law conveys all cause them harm. But no injunction can unwind any of that.”
As another example, he said violations of the law would be enforced against school districts, not individual teachers.
“With or without the law, school districts direct teachers as to what they may and may not teach,” the judge wrote. “Plaintiffs do not allege otherwise; they do not assert, for example, that Florida’s public-school teachers may teach whatever lessons they wish. So to the extent plaintiffs allege that some teachers or others wish to provide ‘classroom instruction . . . on sexual orientation or gender identity’ to students ‘in kindergarten through grade 3,’ they would have to show (at a minimum) that without the law their individual school district would allow it. Yet plaintiffs offer no specific allegation that any teacher would be providing such classroom instruction absent HB 1577.”
DeSantis’ Parental Rights law indicates that “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” Liberals dubbed the law the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
As DeSantis signed the bill into law, he said that parents also have the right to access their children’s curriculum and the books in the school libraries. He pointed out that polls show that parents overwhelmingly support these kinds of policies.
“There’s been a lot of discussions about this particular piece of legislation,” DeSantis said. “They [leftists] know, and every single poll that’s been done that actually reads the language in the bill will find overwhelming Americans oppose injecting this type of material into the classroom of young kids.”
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