This includes laws limiting access to abortion, restricting voting rights, banning transgender girls from participating in high-school or college sports, barring transition medical treatment for transgender minors, censoring how teachers can talk about current or historical racial and gender inequities, removing licensing requirements to publicly carry firearms, increasing penalties for public protesters, and immunizing drivers who hit and injure protesters.
Since 2021, Republican-controlled states such as Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, Idaho, and Montana have advanced a torrent of socially conservative legislation. “The president is the first to say we want to work together and we want to work in bipartisanship for the American people but … we are also going to call out some of these really hateful bills that have gone after some of our most vulnerable communities,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, told me. In his State of the Union address last week, Biden singled out for criticism the new state laws on voting, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. The Justice Department is challenging a steadily growing list of state actions that it views as violating federal constitutional or statutory rights.
During 2021, many activists complained that the president was largely ignoring the red-state offensive while focusing on passing his Build Back Better economic plan and stressing his willingness to work with governors from both parties on the pandemic.īut in the past few months, the administration has notably sharpened its tone on many of these red-state efforts. The Biden administration is pointedly moving in the other direction.
“ have other priorities, which impact their bottom line and their profits, and they view that as more important.” The refusal of the Walt Disney Company, one of Florida’s most powerful employers, to publicly criticize Florida’s “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill as it moved through the legislature has quickly come to symbolize a retreat from the loud public opposition that many companies expressed to earlier state initiatives restricting civil liberties, such as the “bathroom bill” North Carolina Republicans approved in 2016.Īcross the broad range of socially conservative initiatives that Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and the GOP state legislature have advanced since 2021, business has been “silent, silent as fuck, they are so silent,” says Florida Democratic State Representative Anna Eskamani, echoing a complaint I heard across several states from Democrats and civil-rights advocates this week. In multiple states, prominent companies that regularly tout their commitment to diversity and inclusion have largely stood aside as GOP-controlled legislatures and governors have approved laws that restrict voting access, curtail abortion rights and LGBTQ freedoms, and limit how teachers can discuss race, gender, and sexual orientation in public schools.
President Joe Biden’s administration is leaning more heavily into the fight, even as business leaders are retreating from the battlefield.
The red-state drive to roll back civil rights is entering a new phase, perhaps best symbolized by Florida’s passage this week of the “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill censoring how schools discuss sexual orientation.