Florida GOP State Rep Says ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill ‘Does Not Go Far Enough’, Dismisses Critics as Making Up ‘Straw Man’ Arguments

In an interview with Mediaite at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Fla., Florida State Rep. Anthony Sabatini (R) shrugged off critics of House Bill 1557, the Parental Rights in Education bill (aka the “Don’t Say Gay” bill), as offering “straw man arguments” and said he would have preferred for the bill to have even stronger language.

Sabatini currently represents a district in Lake County, north of Orlando, and is running for Congress. He’s been a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO). He frequently criticizes the GOP leadership in the Florida House for being “too moderate,” and his comments regarding HB 1557 reflected this viewpoint.

Sabatini is also an attorney, and I asked him to respond to some of the conservative legal criticisms of the bill for vague definitions and other language issues.

“I think the bill should have been stronger and more specific,” said Sabatini, “so I probably have the opinion you’re not hearing.”

He summarized the bill as being two parts:

First, it says primary grades, K through third grade, you’re not allowed to basically discuss in your curriculum — I guess part of the formal conversation, not like, you know, just naturally or whatever — you cannot discuss gender identity, sexual identity, and all of that. And then after third grade, it’s — and this is where the vague language comes in — at that point, it’s based on if it’s “developmentally appropriate.”

Sabatini acknowledged the bill’s liberal critics who called that phrasing “vague” and said they were “mad because they want to be able to discuss sexual identity and all of that at grades four, five, six, seven, and eight.”

“I personally would have made it say K through 12, no discussion, at all, ever, of sexual identity and, and gender identity and all that,” he continued. “If it’s part of the curriculum where you have to learn like science, you basically just have a parental consent form.”

“That’s what I would have wanted,” he said. “So I think it’s a weak bill. I’m attacking it from the right, saying the bill does not go far enough. And that’s my, that’s my issue with the vagueness of the language.”

“One of the concerns, too, is that when you have vague language that you’re inviting in a lawsuit,” I said, “and wasting taxpayer dollars, whether at the state level [or] a local school district issue.”

“Oh my gosh, yeah,” Sabatini said. “I agree with you 100 percent.”

“So is there, is there any hope for getting this bill either amended in a different way or blocked?” I asked.

Sabatini replied that he thought there was hope, but only “if you have the right people working on it…less squeamish kind of moderate Republicans in charge of the state legislature,” but “you don’t have those people.”

The current Florida House leadership, Sabatini said, was “afraid to embrace my position, which is just straight-up banning these discussions in a K-12 school, they’re trying to like leave this wiggle room open so they can, like protect kids up to the third grade from being exposed to that, those sorts of so-called lessons, but then leave it kind of hands-off afterward.”

Instead, he said, they had tried to “make the bill less controversial” by having that “developmentally appropriate” clause, but that term’s vagueness had “caused the giant mad situation that’s going to be very legally volatile very soon.”

Sabatini emphasized again that he would prefer to “fix it” by just a school-wide ban on these discussions in the curriculum, “but right now we have a Speaker that is afraid of the controversy,” referring to Florida Speaker Chris Sprowls, a frequent target of Sabatini’s criticism.

“I can’t tell you exactly why he’s doing it, but it was a very stupid thing, I think,” he added.

I also asked about the criticism of the bill that it, as written, may prevent teachers who are in a gay marriage from speaking about their own family or even having a photo on their desk, or children that have gay parents from being able to talk about that in school.

“So the bill is really all about curriculum,” Sabatini replied, and therefore it wouldn’t be a violation of the law for a female teacher to mention her wife. “There’s no argument that it could” with the bill’s language, he argued, dismissing the criticisms as “kind of a straw man argument that the left made up to make it more of an exciting bill to debate…it literally says, like, formal curriculum, etc.”

“Once again, personally, I don’t think that a teacher who is there to instruct children on arithmetic and spelling and science should be engaged in those kind of conversations, but that’s actually not in the bill,” he said.

He reiterated again that he would prefer to “ban all conversation, all conversation about gender identity and sexuality” in grades K-12.

“We’ve got to go back to what school used to be,” he said. “The reason we allow the government to take our money and run these schools is because we actually expect the teachers to do a really good job educating the kids, not being their surrogate parents and socializing them and making them more, you know, whatever the school board wants them to be like. We just want to educate them, get them moving on then, say, let the parents do everything else.”

Watch above. Video by Sarah Rumpf for Mediaite.

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