Corrupt Google Execs Exposed Again by Video When Will This Corruption Stop
Michelle Goldberg
The Right'due south Disney Freakout
I don't know Latoya Raveneau, but I feel terrible for her. An executive producer at Disney, she was a speaker at a contempo virtual all-easily company coming together nearly Florida'southward "Don't Say Gay" bill. Inside Disney, in that location had been considerable anger that the company, ane of the state's largest employers, had donated to politicians behind the neb and hadn't washed more than to fight it. Raveneau stepped up to defend the company's queer friendliness, just to become a national object of right-wing fury and cloy.
On a video phone call, Raveneau spoke about her initial apprehension about taking a job at Disney, fearing she wouldn't be immune to include gay characters in the projects she worked on. Instead, she said, anybody she'due south worked with has welcomed her "not at all secret gay agenda," letting her add together "queerness" to the animated show she directs, a revival of an early on-aughts serial called "The Proud Family."
The results of Raveneau'south calendar seem sweetly anodyne. The prove'due south main character, Penny Proud, has a flamboyant gay friend who has to deal with bullying, and another character has gay dads. At that place'south been some reporting virtually the groundbreaking nature of the show in the entertainment press, simply equally far every bit I can see, information technology hadn't caused much if whatever controversy. Then the conservative activist Christopher Rufo stepped in.
Rufo obtained video of the all-hands coming together, and he presented clips of Raveneau's remarks, along with those of several other Disney executives, every bit testify that Disney is sexualizing children. The story has blown up on the correct, where Raveneau's arch reference to a gay agenda is being treated as an admission that she has a plan to corrupt kids.
"This isn't programming. This is propaganda for grooming," hissed Fox's Laura Ingraham on Wednesday. "Disney isn't simply grooming children with radical sexual propaganda — at present they're bragging nigh it," said a writer for The Federalist. Raveneau has landed in the centre of a renascent moral panic, ane that combines elements of QAnon with old tropes about gay predators.
When I spoke to Rufo on Thursday, he was frank about wanting to punish Disney for giving in to employee pressure to oppose the Florida police force. "Perhaps the lesson that they're learning — and certainly the lesson that they should be learning — is that they should stay out of politics," he said.
Until recently, Rufo was best known for his piece of work mobilizing the correct against critical race theory. But in recent months, both he and the movement he helped catalyze have turned their attention to gender and sexual identity. He believes there'due south a lot of latent alarm among parents over irresolute ideas about gender, and he intends to tap into information technology.
"I remember in that location'southward an opportunity to do the reporting, to build the narrative, much in the same way as disquisitional race theory," he said.
Rufo'southward work helped inspire a moving ridge of state legislation limiting the fashion teachers can talk nearly race, history and current events, under the guise of banning critical race theory. Now, a new wave of legislation is targeting what teachers can say about Fifty.G.B.T.Q. issues. Equally PEN America reported, the fight against critical race theory "has primed the public to support sweeping censorship of classroom speech. For anti-L.G.B.T.Q.+ activists, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, a take chances to ram through bills that are far more restrictive than anything the public would normally accept."
The most notorious of these new laws is Florida's H.B. 1557, the "Don't Say Gay" law, which prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity for kids below quaternary class, and whatever such instruction that is not "age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate" for older students. It has an enforcement mechanism similar to the recent Texas abortion compensation law, allowing private parents to sue for amercement and recoup attorney fees if they win. What constitutes "classroom educational activity" is unclear, but many fear it could include any mention of gay or transgender people, including students' families. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it on Monday.
To justify the police force, the right has taken to accusing anyone who opposes it of wanting to betrayal immature kids to explicit material in order to prime them for abuse. On Twitter, DeSantis's press secretary wrote, "If yous're against the Anti-Preparation Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don't denounce the training of 4-viii year former children." The QAnon thought that the right's political opposition is a cabal of pedophiles has gone mainstream.
This is, of class, not the first fourth dimension that gay and gender-nonconforming people have been framed as a moral threat to children. In 1977, Anita Bryant, a former beauty queen and spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission, started the anti-gay Save Our Children campaign. "Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit," she said. "And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America."
In recent years, the Republican Party has largely eschewed such language, actualization to make their peace with the presence of gays, lesbians and transgender people in public life. Now such rhetoric is dorsum, and it's potentially explosive.
Companies' nigh valuable asset is their make, said Rufo, "and nosotros're going to start to erode that." In the video of the Disney meeting that Rufo released, Raveneau enthused about how much freedom she's been given to depict queer characters. Only the price of that freedom just went upwards, and information technology remains to exist seen if Disney volition be willing to pay it.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/opinion/disney-dont-say-gay.html
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