Welcome to the 200th episode of the Dispatch Podcast. I'm not your host, Sarah Isger,

although her voice may sound closer to mine as she recovers from COVID-19. This is

Declan Garvey, editor of the Morning Dispatch, and today we're going to talk about Florida

House Bill 1557, the Parental Rights in Education Act. When I say Parental Rights in Education

Act, there's a good chance you understandably don't know what I'm referring to, because

the bill in question has almost exclusively been referred to by a nickname crafted by opposing

activists. Don't say gay. After several weeks of debate in the Florida legislature and lots

of media and corporate backlash, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law on Monday.

It's arguably one of the most controversial and least understood pieces of legislation

in recent memory. In today's episode, I'll be joined by two legal experts with slightly different

perspectives on the law, Gabriel Mallor and a pellet litigator based in Virginia, and Eugene

Bollock, a law professor at UCLA who focuses on the First Amendment. I wrote about the law in our

Morning Dispatch newsletter earlier this week, and they were both instrumental in helping me

understand the ins and outs of what the act does and doesn't do. To set a baseline for our conversation

and allow us to go deeper in the time I'll audit, I'll tick through the basics. HB1557 was framed

by its sponsors as a measure that gives parents in Florida more control over the public school

education their young children receive on certain complex and hot button social topics.

It prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for students in

kindergarten through third grade and for students in all grades if that instruction is not done in a

quote manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate in accordance with

state standards. There are other provisions we'll get into with Gabe in Professor Bollock,

but that's the big one and the rhetoric around it has gotten incredibly heated.

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