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For Immediate Release
February, 08 2022, 12:02pm EDT
Contact:
ACLU of Florida Media Office, media@aclufl.org
ACLU of Florida Statement on Education Committee Passage of Senate Bill that Censors Free Speech and Discussions of Gender and Sexual Orientation in Classrooms
Today, the Senate Education Committee passed Senate Bill 1834, a bill that bans school districts and teachers from discussing topics related to LGBTQ+ issues, including conversations about sexual orientation or gender identity, in elementary and middle schools or at any level "in a manner that is not age-appropriate."
TALLAHASSEE, FL
Today, the Senate Education Committee passed Senate Bill 1834, a bill that bans school districts and teachers from discussing topics related to LGBTQ+ issues, including conversations about sexual orientation or gender identity, in elementary and middle schools or at any level "in a manner that is not age-appropriate."
The bill would require all "student support services trainings" in school districts to adhere to the guidelines and standards provided by the Florida Department of Education (DOE), which currently excludes anti-bullying resources intended to help prevent LGBTQ+ youth suicides.
The House companion bill is HB 1557.
Kara Gross, legislative director of the ACLU of Florida, responded to today's hearing with the following:
"This government censorship bill seeks to ban classroom discussions related to sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. If passed, it would effectively silence students from speaking about their LGBTQ+ family members, friends, neighbors, and icons.
"Additionally, it would bar LGBTQ+ students from talking about their own lives and would deny their very existence. It is always appropriate for kids to talk about themselves, their experiences, and their family. These are not taboo subjects, but banning them makes them seem so.
"SB 1834/HB 1557's dangerously vague provisions would have a chilling effect on support for LGBTQ+ youth because it creates new costly liabilities for school districts. Under the bill, any parent who thinks that a classroom discussion was inappropriate or who is unsupportive of a district's policies would be given broad powers to sue for damages and attorneys' fees.
"This bill does nothing to help and support our youth. Instead, it is meant to stigmatize LGBTQ+ people, isolate LGBTQ+ kids, and make teachers fearful of providing a welcoming and inclusive classroom. This bill will have a real and devastating impact on LGBTQ+ youth, who already experience higher rates of bullying, homelessness, and suicide.
"Legislators should oppose this bill and instead pass proposals that protect all students and truly address the challenges so many LGBTQ+ youth face in Florida schools."
The mission of the ACLU of Florida is to protect, defend, strengthen, and promote the constitutional rights and liberties of all people in Florida. We envision a fair and just Florida, where all people are free, equal under the law, and live with dignity.
LATEST NEWS
Trump Threatens to Jail CodePink Protesters Who Disrupted His Dinner With Chants for Gaza
"It is all very reminiscent of McCarthyism," a CodePink spokesperson said.
Sep 16, 2025
President Donald Trump threatened on Monday to jail the peace activists who disrupted his dinner with pro-Palestinian chants last week, referring to their behavior as "subversive."
Last Tuesday, members of CodePink, a women-led antiwar group, verbally confronted the president and several top members of his administration—including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—as they dined on steak and seafood at a swanky DC eatery.
The small group of activists castigated the president for his support for Israel's genocidal war in Gaza and its blockade on humanitarian aid, which has caused mass starvation throughout the strip.
The activists chanted, "They feast while Gaza starves," and called Trump "the Hitler of our time" for supporting the military campaign, which an Israeli general recently admitted has resulted in over 220,000 people being killed or wounded.
On Monday, as Trump and his administration continued to map out a sweeping crackdown against left-wing speech following the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, the president suggested that the women of CodePink should also be punished for their peaceful display of dissent, referring to them as "professional agitators" and "total phonies."
"They started to scream when I got into the restaurant," he said, "'Ohhh'...Something with Palestine. And I said, 'Well, I'm doing a great job for peace in the Middle East, I should get lots of awards for that, right, with the Abraham Accords and everything else.' But the woman just stood up and started screaming. And she got booed out of the place."
Trump called the protester a "mouthpiece" and a "paid agitator," before saying that he'd "asked [Attorney General Pam Bondi] to look into that in terms of RICO, bringing RICO cases against them. Criminal RICO. Because they should be put in jail, what they're doing to this country is really subversive."
RICO refers to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which the government has traditionally used to prosecute organized crime groups. But following Kirk's shooting, Trump has suggested it be used to carry out what his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said on Friday would be an effort to "dismantle" left-wing organizations in the United States.
Trump has threatened to use RICO charges against liberal nonprofits, including the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation, which Vance referred to on Monday as "terrorist networks." The vice president claimed that these groups push "messaging designed to trigger and incite violence," with his leading example being an article published in The Nation that harshly criticized Kirk's political views following his assassination.
Melissa Garriga, a spokesperson for CodePink, told Common Dreams that Trump's allegations against her antiwar group are untrue.
"CodePink has a very small staff," Garriga said. "A majority of our work is done by CodePink volunteers, who are not paid. They represent the majority of the American public and are not 'mouthpieces' of any foreign government or political party. They are workers, veterans, artists, and peace activists from across the country. We are committed to peaceful, nonviolent means of protest when executing our actions."
"This is not new for us," Garriga added. "Over the past few years, elected officials, more often Republican elected officials, have constantly called for investigations into progressive organizations such as ours. They've launched baseless congressional investigations over CodePink's funding sources that their Democrat colleagues often parrot."
Earlier this year, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) claimed that the group was funded by "Communist China" after a retired Army colonel working with the group disrupted a committee hearing with chants of "Stop funding Israel!" CodePink filed an ethics complaint against Cotton in response, calling his accusation "untrue and libelous."
In 2024, when CodePink was castigating the Biden administration's unwavering support for Israel, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) made a similar suggestion that the group should be investigated by the FBI because, "when they advocate for a ceasefire, it's Putin's agenda at play." Prior to that, when a member of the group confronted Pelosi, the congresswoman responded, "Go back to China."
CodePink strenuously denied having received any funding from the Chinese government or any other foreign governments following calls from several Republicans for the group to be investigated over its campaign against military escalation with China.
"Our financial records are transparent and audited, and any suggestion that external governments or political entities influence us is ludicrous," Garriga reiterated to Common Dreams. "As we have officially stated multiple times, CodePink receives no money from any foreign government, and we are funded by thousands of individual donors and US-based foundations."
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According to a Quinnipiac poll released at the end of August, 60% of voters across all parties said they opposed sending more military aid to Israel, compared to just 32% who said they supported it. Half of the respondents said they agreed with the international community's growing consensus that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
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With the world's richest person, Tesla CEO and Republican megadonor Elon Musk, on the cusp of becoming the first trillionaire on the planet, two leading progressive lawmakers are calling on Congress to pass a bill to "rein in the obscene salaries of America's top executives."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) on Monday introduced the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act with the aim of raising taxes on companies that pay their executives more than 50 times their workers' wages.
The legislation would impose penalties starting at 0.5 percentage points for companies with CEO-to-worker pay ratios between 50-to-1 and 100-to-1. Firms where executives make more than 500 times their workers' pay would be forced to pay the highest rate.
The bill would also require the US Treasury Department to crack down on tax avoidance, including schemes that disguise pay disparities by outsourcing jobs to contractors.
Sanders said that exorbitant CEO pay and massive pay gaps at corporations are intolerable "while 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and millions work longer hours for lower wages."
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The proposal would raise an estimated $150 billion over a decade if tech giants, Wall Street firms, and other large corporations continue their current compensation patterns, and Sanders and Tlaib noted that the largest companies in the US would have paid billions of dollars more in taxes last year had the legislation been in effect.
JPMorgan Chase would have paid $2.38 billion in taxes, while Google would have paid $2.16 billion and Walmart would have paid $929 million.
With 62% of Republican voters and 75% of Democrats supporting a cap on CEO pay relative to worker salaries, the legislation would likely be well received by Americans across the political spectrum—but Republican lawmakers have shown little to no interest in confronting the pay gap, ensuring fair wages for workers, or reining in excessive executive compensation.
With the current CEO-employee pay gap, CEOs at the 350 largest publicly owned firms make 290 times more than the average pay of a typical worker at their companies, with the gap much larger at some corporations.
The median Walmart worker made $29,469 in 2024, while CEO Doug McMillon took home $27.4 million—a 930-to-1 gap.
The median Starbucks worker would have to work for more than 6,000 years to earn the pay CEO Brian Niccol took home in 2024.
"Working people are sick and tired of corporate greed," said Tlaib. “It’s disgraceful that corporations continue to rake in record profits by exploiting the labor of their workers. Every worker deserves a living wage and human dignity on the job."
"It’s time," she added, "to make the rich pay their fair share.”
Tlaib and Sanders introduced the legislation as Pope Leo spoke out against exorbitant CEO pay in his first interview since taking the helm of the Catholic Church, reserving particular condemnation for Musk, for whom the Tesla board proposed a $1 trillion pay package if he grows the company by eightfold over the next decade.
“CEOs that 60 years ago might have been making four to six times more than what the workers are receiving... it’s [now] 600 times more than the average workers are receiving,” the pope told the Catholic outlet Crux.
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Sanders said Monday that the pope "is exactly right."
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US President Donald Trump on Monday evening filed a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times that was quickly ridiculed by legal experts for entirely lacking merit.
In the lawsuit, Trump accused the Times of conspiring to prevent his victory in the 2024 election through a campaign of "election interference" that included, among other things, its editorial board's decision to endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris.
"It came as no surprise when, shortly before the election, the newspaper published, on the front page, highlighted in a location never seen before, its deranged endorsement of Kamala Harris with the hyperbolic opening line '[i]t is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump,'" the lawsuit states.
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The three articles cited by the lawsuit include one that quotes Trump's own former chief of staff, John Kelly, warning that he would rule "like a dictator" in his second term; a news analysis piece that described Trump as facing a well documented "lifetime of scandals"; and an article by Buettner and Craig that is an adapted excerpt from their book.
"The book and articles are part of a decades-long pattern by The New York Times of intentional and malicious defamation against President Trump," the complaint stated. "Defendants maliciously published the book and the articles knowing that these publications were filled with repugnant distortions and fabrications about President Trump."
The lawsuit then demanded the Times pay $15 billion in compensatory damages.
The Times issued a brief response to the lawsuit in which it defended its reporting and labeled Trump's defamation allegations as baseless.
"This lawsuit has no merit," said the paper. "It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting. The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics. We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor and stand up for journalists' First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people."
Some experts who examined the lawsuit were quick to side with the Times in this dispute, and many of them flat-out ridiculed Trump for filing the suit in the first place.
Holger Hestermeyer, chair of international and EU law at the Vienna School of International Studies, wrote on Bluesky that the lawsuit was "a full frontal attack on free speech" that also "almost reads like a parody."
In addition to lampooning the suit's specific defamation claims, Hestermeyer also mocked the suit for being loaded with hyperbolic statements, including one that said "The Apprentice" reality TV series "represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump's singular brilliance, which captured the zeitgeist of our time."
Attorney George Conway delivered an even pithier dismissal of the suit.
"Is it possible for a legal pleading to be psychotic?" he asked rhetorically. "I think we have an answer."
Chris Geidner, a journalist who publishes the "Law Dork" newsletter, similarly expressed astonishment at the contents of Trump's lawsuit.
"I honestly thought there was a chance that I'd fallen asleep and was dreaming the most absurd, childlike, ego-maniac lawsuit when I tried to read this Trump defamation complaint against the Times, Penguin Random House, and individual journalists," he wrote. "Like, seriously. What are we even doing here, folks?"
Bloomberg columnist Tim O'Brien, who was unsuccessfully sued by Trump for defamation over his 2005 book "TrumpNation," predicted that Trump's lawsuit against the Times would similarly end poorly for him.
"Trump says he plans to sue the Times for $15 billion," O'Brien wrote on Bluesky. "Been there, done that. He sued me for less—$5 billion. Discovery will be invasive and grueling—and involve Trump’s finances, family history and political machinations. And that’s just for starters."
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