Doing all the wrong things
Ron DeSantis is making every effort to kill as many Floridians as he can.
The Office of Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that the Florida Board of Education could withhold the salaries of superintendents and school board members who defy the governor’s executive order prohibiting mask mandates.
Now…why would school officials impose mask mandates?
To try to reduce the body count among students, teachers and staff. That’s it, that’s the reason. It’s not a personal insult to DeSantis, it’s an attempt to keep casualties down.
It’s extremely odd and unpleasant to see an elected official planning to punish other officials for doing that. Some people are choosing to see it as a political shouting match, but the reality is that it’s an epidemiological precaution. That’s all it is.
“With respect to enforcing any financial consequences for noncompliance of state law regarding these rules and ultimately the rights of parents to make decisions about their children’s education and health care decisions, it would be the goal of the State Board of Education to narrowly tailor any financial consequences to the offense committed. For example, the State Board of Education could move to withhold the salary of the district superintendent or school board members, as a narrowly tailored means to address the decision-makers who led to the violation of law.“
Parents don’t have a “right” to make health care decisions for their children that endanger other people’s children. They don’t have a right to withhold necessary precautions from their children, either. Children have rights too, and if parents violate them, sometimes the state has to step in.
Despite all the lawyerly language about “narrowly tailored means”, this is like to run afoul of federal labor law. Employers can not withhold wages like that.
Hope so.
Parents also are not in full charge of their children’s education. There is a reason why they send their children to school, where they can have a wide variety of teachers encompassing knowledge in many fields. Children have the right to learn, free of their parents’ opinions, and to learn to think through things even if it leads to disagreeing with their parents. (And, I’ll let you in on a secret. The parents will live through it. Mine did.)
This country has gone collectively insane. To the left, to the right…almost everyone totally off their rocker.
Given a look at what Oregon’s guidelines for “ethnic studies” in kindergarten I’d rather the parents maybe have some say in their education.
Sounds like he wants to fine people without even charging them, let alone convicting them.
@4: I tried googling that, but didn’t find a curriculum.
There’s an article on persuasion.community entitled “Teaching Race in Kindergarten”
I have to agree with you. Things have gone remarkably haywire in the last decade or so. Between having to worry whether the school is going to teach kindergarteners they have to decide what their “gender identity” is, or make up their own pronouns, and having to worry about armed insurrection or mass murder by vaccine prevention, the middle ground seems to be shrinking faster than the glaciers in Greenland.
If Florida were a foreign country, the US would be considering banning travel there.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ron-desantis-florida-covid-ban-travel-from_n_61109475e4b06253fa50f70a
On the bright side, maybe Florida Man will go extinct.
https://floridaman.com
We have long precedents for allowing parents to kill their children. Christian Science, during its more powerful era, coerced multiple states to permit parents to withhold basic care from their children. The more scattered and incoherent holy-roller groups have tagged along.
It’s part of the reason that I refuse to talk politics anymore. They have devolved into accusations of “far left” or “far right” extremism before you can catch your breath. Things that were once considered normal, like fixing bridges or water supplies are now on the leftist agenda. People on the left do the same thing to people ever so slightly to the right, calling them out for neoliberalism, whatever that is.
If I have no choice but to be a leftist crackpot, a Trumpist, or a neoliberal, I opt to fold my cards and just learn the issues themselves as well as I can without talking to my neighbors or friends about it. People don’t want to listen, they want to spew.
Mike @ 10: I’m nearly there with you, as regards refusing to talk politics in most company. I have recently in the same conversation been called a Trumpist, and a marxist (by different people) for stating the same opinions that I’ve always had, and which were once traditionally very uncontroversial mainstream liberal positions.
James, I had a young friend tell me not to call myself a liberal, because that meant I was someone who supported all sorts of things (he listed them), confusing the whole neoliberal pro-business stuff with classic liberalism. He had a whole raft of words I shouldn’t say anymore. I still say them, and in the same way I always have. I realize words evolve, but that doesn’t mean that some young wokester gets to tell everyone what a word really means, when it has never meant that to anyone anywhere, and does not mean that to anyone outside the woke now. Word evolution is something that happens because, well, because it happens. Not because we are told we will be dogpiled if we don’t use it “correctly”.