While the present governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis uses Drag Queens, Trans kids, and Gay people as threats to Florida’s children, freedom, and Christianity as he attempts to cement himself as the 2024 Republican Presidential nominee by appealing to the fringe elements of his party and the country at large, his sincerity comes under question when there is a measurable increase in sex trafficking in that state.

While some may see this as something a great man like DeSantis will effectively address, the surprise might be that a report in the South Florida Sun Sentinel revealed that Florida’s foster care system has been a breeding ground for sex trafficking victims for years, even under DeSantis.

His Department of Children and Families has been placing vulnerable children in environments that directly foster drug use, sexual and physical violence, and even death and Florida’s elected officials have been well aware of the crisis but have taken little to no action especially when it comes to girls.

According to the report, a girl entering the state’s welfare system has a good chance of being sex trafficked.

By its very nature as a vacation and retirement state, with its resorts and hotels, Florida has been a venue for trafficking. Last year there were 3,182 reports made to the Florida Abuse Hotline, yet, the state has only 18 family foster homes approved to care for trafficking victims in the entire state. This might be acceptable to a degree if one sees the problem as a new one, but the report also revealed that the state has known that sex traffickers specifically target underaged girls within its care for years.

In 1998 the Florida legislature decided to privatize the foster care system based on counties working with private contractors who would hire subcontractors to run group homes. Hoping to have this seen as the state taking steps to improve a system for the sake of the children, the paper’s report explained that after years of negative headlines detailing “neglected, abused or missing children” within the foster care system the state chose to deflect public outrage away from the state and put it on the contractors.

In spite of the warnings and the statistics about the increasing number of teen girls being trafficked, the DCF has been employing a loophole to continue sending teen girls to group homes, many often in unsafe areas where traffickers watch for girls simply walking down the street from the group home. Compounding this is the number of children who run away from these group homes and have to survive using their bodies as the means. The South Florida Sun Sentinal found that of the 355 foster children it looked into, 82% ran away while under the state’s care in group homes.

Fixing the problem requires time, energy, and action. There is no instant fix.

So, when DeSantis needs a sensational issue to exaggerate and employ as distraction from people seeing you are not doing what actually needs to be addressed, he keeps raising a moral panic about Drag Queens reading books in public libraries to children, claiming it is teaching children sexual deviance.

While sending  migrants from Texas, not his state, to cities around the country, often separating fathers from families to give the impression when the plane or bus arrives that all the evil migrants are young men most likely salivating to join gangs and commit crimes, creating school policies banning any celebration or acknowledgment of Minorities and Gay people because it makes people like him uncomfortable, waging war on Trans student athletes and banning gender affirming health care for minors in the name of protecting children basically from the monster in the bedroom closet, Desantis looks the other way choosing to leave a staggering number of girls in a system shown to be the pipeline to sex trafficking. Because the former is sensational and headline grabbing, while the later takes work and time and is often done out of the spotlight.

I have told the story before.

The Bible thumping assistant principal who objected to having an openly Gay teacher on the faculty in a Bible Belt school who spoke about my being Gay negatively and demeaningly, quoted the Bible to justify his statements and anti-Gay animus, having me attend meetings with parents where I was assaulted by Bible verses, and once publicly declared at Prayer at the Pole as I passed by that they praying for me to see the error of my ways and that I was receiving soaking prayers for my “conversion” while I was working to make schools safer for Gay kids, ended up pleading ”no contest” to accusations of having been making sexual advances by a number of female students.

He used my being openly Gay as the distraction from his own actions.

Like DeSantis does in this case.

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If you do not understand why the marriage protection law is important, then you are not in a position where such a law is important and should just accept there are those for whom it is regardless if it makes sense to those to whom it has no connection.

I do not understand the rules of Cricket and have laughed at some of the antics that are involved when I have come upon a match on television or a game being part of the plot of some show, but those rules are important to the people playing that game and for its outcome without any need for me t o get it. Imagine the rules of any game dependent on people who neither play or do not totally understand the game.

I had been living in Los Angeles before getting to Oklahoma, and laws and practices I had taken for granted in one place did not exist in the other. There had still been DADT and DOMA, but there had been no overpowering and controlling Christian Fundamentalist ideas that in practice treated groups of people as lessers while in the new state people’s personal religious belief was a legitimate reason to treat people like dirt and not the images of God they are. Marriage equality was still 11 years away in Massachusetts and 22 in the rest of the country, but enough states allowed for recognized Domestic Partnerships, separate but equal marriage not quite as good as straight ones, so same sex couples could adopt and function in many ways similar to straight marriages minus the addition 360 or so civil benefits of marriage.

As a result, companies had no reluctance to send employees to any state they had a presence, and continued the domestic partner benefits that had been won in places like Los Angeles.

However, in states like Oklahoma, the Fundamental Christian attitude was that same sex relationships of any kind were sinful and an abomination as were the people in them.

One of my first cartoons for the local and then regional Gay publication, The Gayly, dealt with a parental rights case. A woman had married a man following her rural town’s expectations, but there was both something missing and additional to the union.

She had found the marriages loveless and abusive. There was something missing in her traditional marriage but it also included a lot of physical, mental, and verbal abuse from her husband and this garnered the community’s pity for her, but, as a Christian woman, it was her job to accept this treatment as the woman.

Eventually she had found what had been missing in her marriage and why her life should not have been so controlled by community expectations with another person and found a relationship not based on control and abuse but one more healthy for the child she and her husband had had.

Long story short, the judge decided that her being a Lesbian was worse than the drunken abuse meted out on the child and the crack house atmosphere of the home. The child was handed over to the known physical abuser of wife and child during his almost daily drinking binges, but with her not being a straight woman, the judge decided being raised by a loving Lesbian mother in a healthy atmosphere was the bad living condition. The mother had no recourse because the Bible heavily influenced legal decisions regardless of the faith or lack thereof of the people involved.

The case was not decided on facts, but religious misbelief. Had there been legal protections even for the mother’s domestic partnership, her child who she was forbade to visit would not have been sentenced to the life faced.

In another case, a Lesbian was sent to the conservative state by her company as they were opening a plant and she was the right person to kick start the department in which she worked.

She had legally adopted a child in her home state and was raising it with her domestic partner. As often happened in those days, regardless of legalities, the woman’s and her partner’s family did not approve of their relationship and wrote them off. And so, the adoptive parent and her significant other arrived with their legally adopted child, were living an uneventful life making contributions to their employers’ success until the adoptive parent was killed by a drunk in a highway crash.

Without marriage and with the state not recognizing domestic partnerships the child was judged a ward of the state as the child had no parents now. The partner with whom the child had been growing with and being raised in a loving household by suddenly was rendered a stranger with no rights regarding the child.

The child lost one mother in the crash and her other mother in a state move.

Under the new law, if applicable in those days, the Domestic Partnership from out of state would have counted for something. Under the new law, if applied back then, the adoptive mother’s partner would have continued raising the child while the state would have to accept it even as it would do anything not to have the Domestic Partrneships of one state acknowledged there.

We have done away with the Separate but Equal approach and in many states, without the 2015 SCOTUS decision, have come to recognize the legality of Marriage Equality. However, some states oppose it largely for fictitious reasons. If the present SCOTUS acts as promised, these states would be able to decide that, as there is no Marriage Equality in that state, anyone legally married who moves to that state would have their marriage seen as shacking up with no value and dismissed.

A same sex couple moving to a state like that having done so because of a business transfer or a military assignment would find themselves having no parental rights and, as in the second case, one partner would lose the child because the state would rather have the child in a stable heterosexual, heavily religion based home even if, unable to attain that, they would take the child from a loving parent and place the child in foster care or what orphanages have now become no matter how long the child languished in the system.

The new law says that you may choose not to sanction same sex marriage in your state, but as citizens have the freedom to or may have no choice in moving to that state, if the marriage was legal in the state in which they wed, the fear of becoming a stranger to your own child you have been raising is no longer a threat.

Basic scenarios otherwise are that the company may be reluctant to send a good worker there or move the company to a more open state removing employment from many, good workers who are needed in that state will not go to it, and those who need a job offered in that state by necessity or training will forfeit the job and perhaps go where conditions are better to raise a child but perhaps not reaching the quality of life that could have been theirs and the child

The small minded approach to Marriage Equality has collateral damage.

Another part of the bill that may surprise people is that with many states still not liking interracial marriages and would rather not allow them or recognize one from another state, it protects interracial marriages.

They too are as solid as was a woman’s right to choose.

The bill protects much more than is seen on first look.

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