Despite dozens of protesters and a previously canceled venue, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke at the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York City on June 12, telling the crowd of approximately 700, “They can’t cancel me, I’m going to speak my mind.”
Many of the protesters outside the conference at Chelsea Piers held signs objecting to the governor’s appearance during Pride month, citing his Parental Rights in Education bill, or the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” as critics have dubbed it. Other signs mentioned the six-year anniversary of the shooting at Pulse, a gay club in Orlando, in which 49 people were killed. Before the governor was scheduled to speak, he had ordered flags flown at half-staff in remembrance of the Pulse shooting on June 10.
The bill protecting parental rights, signed by the governor in March, prohibits the teaching of gender and sexual identity in grades kindergarten through third grade.
“I’m not going to let some protests deter me from coming to speak in front of a lot of future voters in Florida,” DeSantis said.
“Every parent in the state of Florida has a right to send their kid to elementary school without having concepts like woke gender ideology jammed into their curriculum.”
He said that children should not be subjected to teachers “transitioning their kids’ gender to a different gender, giving them a different name, having them wear different clothes without the parents’ knowledge and consent,” as well as asking them which pronoun they wanted to be referred as.
Referring to the negative reaction he received after signing the bill, the governor said:
“When the Left is having a spasm, that just tells you that in Florida, we are winning.”
During his speech, DeSantis referred to wokeness as a “cancer” that will destroy the country and said that Florida would never be “overrun” by an ideology he has described in past speeches and at press conferences as “teaching kids to hate our country” and forcing employees to participate in Critical Race Theory (CRT).
“You can have differences in political judgments, but if they have an ideology that expects me to believe that a man can get pregnant, that doesn’t work for me,” he told the crowd.
DeSantis lauded Florida’s Jewish community and pointed out that he signed legislation in 2019 that guaranteed that institutions such as state universities are “treating antisemitism the same way they treat racism.”
DeSantis was the final speaker at the daylong conference. Other speakers included journalist Bari Weiss, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Panel discussions included, “How to Fight Back Against Wokeness” and “What every Young Jew needs to Know about Western Civilization.”
