Republished with permission from Florida Phoenix, by Diane Roberts

Kids. You never know what will rot their little minds, corrupt their little souls, turn them into porn addicts, or lead them to understand that grown folks lie to them.

So sponge-like and blank-brained are Our Youth, that if they read about gays or Latinos or Black people or liberals, they’ll get Ideas.

And if they encounter sex in a book, well, they’ll instantly go out and have sex.

At least, that’s what the Florida Legislature thinks; therefore, said legislature is hell-bent on making sure no Florida student is ever again damaged by the seductive ways of language, even in books teachers and other elites call “classic.”

SB 1692 says any text “depicting nudity, sexual conduct, or sexual excitement when it predominantly appeals to prurient, shameful, or morbid interest and is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole” will be verboten.

No word on who gets to decide what “prurient, shameful or morbid interest” actually means. Some think Judy Blume’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” is dirty because the main character gets her first period; some think a picture of Michelangelo’s “David” sculpture is filthy because you can, er, see the guy’s junk.

Claiming “artistic merit” won’t cut it any more.

If the likes of a preacher or two, a parent, or Moms for Liberty deem a book unwholesome, that book is gone.

Out of the library. Out of the classroom.

The Moms and their fellow travellers don’t need to read the material. They’ve heard about it. On social media, Fox “News,” and other “reputable” sources.

Books are destroying America.

Anti-God: Pulitzer Prize-winner Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “The Poisonwood Bible” suggests missionaries in Africa damage Africans who are not sufficiently grateful to have Jesus foisted upon them.

Anti-family: Anna Karenina cheats on her husband with a Russian count, then kills herself.

Gay-friendly: And Tango Makes Three is about a penguin chick being raised by two male penguins.

This one could make children want to become homosexual. Or flightless birds.

Smut: The heroine of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Orange County’s own Zora Neale Hurston likes sex way too much.

All these books have been banned in various Florida school districts.

‘Things in Their Minds’

Sen. Stan McClain of Ocala, sponsor of SB1692, says, “The biggest thing we should be doing in life is trying make sure that our children are growing up with the most knowledge that they can have without a lot of other things in their minds.”

Things in their minds such as, say, the workings of their own bodies. Tolerance of others. Questioning authority.

This nonsense is presented as concern for children. It is the opposite.

Florida’s government doesn’t care about kids.

The state has—once again—refused to apply for a federal food program that helps people feed their families in the summer when school’s out.

When there’s no free or reduced lunch, many children may not get lunch at all. The state Department of Children and Families claims the $259 million in federal money is “welfare” (as if that’s a dirty word) and has some kind of Deep State strings attached.

Florida, they claim, can take care of its own.

Except Florida doesn’t take care of its own: One in five children in this state lacks access to nutritious food.

In other words, kids go hungry here in one of the richest states in America.

While Sen. Lori Berman has introduced a bill to provide free breakfast and lunch to all schoolchildren, the Musk administration wants to cut aid, forcing states to fund SNAP benefits and other programs for the poor.

The nonpartisan Florida Policy Institute calls this “catastrophic.”

There’s no guarantee the state will pick up the slack. A bill similar to Berman’s died last year.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has again voted to lower the age at which young people can buy rifles and shotguns from 21 to 18.

OK, they’re not allowed to drink (because that could be dangerous), but they can vote and join the army, so why not let them play with instruments of death?

Nikolas Cruz was 19 when he shot up Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, killing 14 students and three staff members.

A hopeful sign: In a rare fit of good sense, efforts to allow college students to pack heat on campus has once again failed in the Legislature.

Lest you get giddy, 1. That bill will almost certainly be back next year; and 2. There’s also a bill to repeal the state ban on bump stocks for the under-21s.

In case you don’t spend time hanging around with gun-crazed sociopaths, a bump stock is a device that allows a semiautomatic rifle to basically rock and back forth while you keep the trigger depressed, mimicking full auto fire. The Las Vegas concert shooter, the guy who murdered 60 people in 2017, used bump stocks. In response, Republicans, Democrats, the NRA, and President Donald Trump all supported a federal ban. It passed in Congress.

Renditions, Child Labor

Then the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ban, and now Sen. McClain (see above) thinks it’s unfair to stop anyone, no matter how angry, deranged, or obviously homicidal they might be, from what is almost a fully-automatic weapon.

Even teenagers! This is the Free State of Florida, where you are free to shoot at anything that scares or annoys you

But then, schoolchildren need a dose of real life, don’t they?

Venezuelans, Salvadorans, Mexicans, Haitians, and their ilk used to do Florida’s fruit-picking, toilet-cleaning, pool-scooping, house-framing, grass-mowing and floor-sweeping.

Now the Trumpists are deporting those people to El Salvador and Guantánamo, sometimes for having tattoos, sometimes just for looking kind of not white.

No matter: Florida needs to exploit our homegrown children to answer the call and get to laboring.

Make ‘em earn their keep.

Gov. DeSantis huffs, “That’s how it used to be when I was growing up.”

Sen. Jay Collins of Hillsborough agrees. His bill would repeal required parental consent for a kid to work more than 30 hours a week when school is in session. If the kids are 16 or 17, they can work six days in a row. If you homeschool your 14-year-old, or if he or she learns online, that kid can work overnight shifts.

Water breaks and other such fripperies will no longer be required.

Collins calls it “workforce development” and says it will “empower minors to gain valuable skills and experience in a responsible and structured work environment.”

In olden times, kids would gain “valuable skills” picking oranges, chopping cotton, dragging a seine net at dawn and then again at midnight, logging the forest, and then going out to shoot a mess of squirrels for supper.

Happy days: Everybody went to church, men were men, women cooked and children contributed to capitalism.

In Victorian England, the Royal Commission on Popular Education declared it is “far better that a child should go to work at the earliest age at which it can bear the physical exertion than that it should remain at school.”

Children working in the factories or down the mines could be paid as little two pennies a day.

The Florida Legislature probably thinks that’s fine. Indeed, there’s a bill allowing kids to “opt out” of the lawful minimum wage.

Because indentured servitude builds character.

Sen. Jonathan Martin of Fort Myers thinks interns, apprentices, and “pre-apprentices” should trade their right to make fair money for alleged transferrable skills, preparing them for future low-wage jobs.

Some employers can’t believe their luck: It’s almost as good as exploiting undocumented workers.

Doctors Are Terrified

And speaking of Victorians, those teenaged hussies going around flaunting themselves had better watch it.

Sen. Erin Grall of Vero Beach  wants parents to police their children’s sexuality.  Which is frankly a bit weird.

If your 17-year-old needs treatment for a sexually transmitted disease, the parents have to OK it; if she wants birth control, the parents have to OK it.

You can see the problem with this. If a 15-year-old is raped or molested by a family member or if her parents are abusive, emotionally or physically, she could end up with AIDS, human papilloma virus, or maybe syphilis.

Or pregnant.

But Sen. Grall would rather your child have a child, possibly wrecking her life, than get an abortion.

Grall was the chief driver of Florida’s six-week abortion limit.

The only way a minor can terminate the pregnancy (which, at six weeks, she probably won’t even know about) is if she can prove rape or incest or if she’s at death’s door because of life-threatening complications.

Even then, her chances of survival won’t be good: Grall has a new bill which would allow people to file suit over the “wrongful death” of a fetus.

Doctors are terrified now: Florida already has a critical lack of OB-GYNs. This bill would make them even more reluctant to intervene in a medical emergency. The mother, the father, whoever, could get lawyered up and take them to court.

Under this bill, parents could claim mental anguish, loss of “services,” and “the decedent’s probable gross income after taxes.”

The upshot is, by God, that fetus could have grown up to be a billionaire, and its parents have every right to cash in on what is a completely fictional scenario!

The courts will love that one.

‘For the Children’

Grall, Martin, McClain and, of course, the governor, will say in pious voices they do everything “for the children.”

Everything’s always “for the children.”

But you can bet none of their children will work for sub-minimum wage 30 hours a week to help support the family while also trying to finish 9th grade.

Their children will have time to play sports, play in the band, go on school trips, be a kid.

If one of their sons gets an STI, he’ll get great medical care.

If one of their daughters gets pregnant, she will, as the privileged classes say, be “taken care of” out of state.

Florida’s powerful will always protect their own children.

They don’t give a damn about yours.