Florida politicians suddenly like protesters who threaten, intimidate school board members
ORLANDO SENTINEL EDITORIAL
Brevard County School Board member Jennifer Jenkins made national headlines recently, describing a campaign of harassment and threats of violence over her position that students should wear masks during the pandemic.
She’s not alone. School boards across Florida and the nation are facing loud, unruly crowds at meetings, threats on social media and protesters who gather in front of board members’ homes.
Protests are a fundamental American right, whether they’re directed at police for brutality against Black people or at school board members over their decisions on masks.
Parents absolutely have a right to voice their displeasure over mask mandates.
They don’t have the right to use weedkiller to etch obscenities into a school board member’s lawn, or make phony child abuse claims about a board member’s kid. And they don’t have the right to threaten someone’s well-being because they don’t like how an elected official voted.
That’s what Jenkins said happened to her.
“I don’t reject people coming here and speaking their voice, they do it all the time,” Jenkins said at the Oct. 12 School Board meeting. “We don’t stop them from doing that. I don’t reject them standing outside my home. I reject them following me around in a car, following my car around. I reject them saying that they’re ‘coming for me,’ that I need to ‘beg for mercy.’ ”
If state leaders were acting in good faith, the would defend the right to protest and denounce threats and intimidation directed at elected officials.
That’s not what’s happening.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had zero tolerance for protesters in 2020 when the cause was racism and police brutality, is giving a full-throated defense to protesters targeting school boards in 2021.
DeSantis is not only ignoring the threats being made against board members he’s declared he’s not going to lift a finger to help the Department of Justice, which is drawing attention to the threats of violence against school boards stemming from controversies over masks and critical race theory. The governor, unsurprisingly, is falsely claiming the feds are targeting everyday parents merely expressing their opinions. No, governor, it’s targeting people who make illegal threats.
Siding with the governor are legislators like state Rep. Randy Fine, who published Jenkins’ personal cellphone number on his Facebook page in late July, and followed that up with a Facebook live post where he urged his 37,000 followers to call Jenkins, saying, “I encourage you to melt those lines down.”
Ironically, Fine’s call to action against the School Board member has him facing a criminal complaint, brought by Jenkins, alleging “cyberintimidation,” which is illegal under the so-called “anti-riot” law that Fine and other Republicans introduced earlier this year.
That law made it a first-degree misdemeanor to publish someone’s personal information, like a phone number, with the intent that someone else will “threaten or harass the person, placing such person in reasonable fear of bodily harm.”
When Fine isn’t painting a target on Jenkins’ back, he’s questioning her honesty. He recently demanded on Facebook to see the police reports of vandalism at Jenkins’ home and wrote that he suspects “it’s all fabricated.”
Good thing we have newspapers and not just lazy, self-serving politicians firing off Facebook posts. Florida Today on Thursday published an article detailing the police reports of vandalism, a fake child abuse allegation and neighbors of Jenkins’ who said they’ve seen protesters brandishing firearms.
It’s one thing for protesters to go beyond the bounds of the law, but it’s another thing when state and national elected officials are egging them on, which is what we’re seeing.
Leaders of the state House and Senate would never stand for the kind of disorder they seem to now think is perfectly fine at School Board meetings, where people refuse to follow rules requiring they speak in turn and wear face masks.
Both the state chambers outline specific rules of decorum that empower the House speaker and the Senate president to clear the chambers if they feel the need. When the Brevard School Board did that recently after a meeting got out of control, Fine filed a criminal charge alleging a Sunshine Law violation.
Never mind that the state Legislature conducted most of this year’s lawmaking session outside of the public’s presence, ostensibly because of COVID restrictions.
The hypocrisy of these politicians is enough to induce a bout of vertigo.
Imagine these politicians who are so vigorously defending school board protests in this year doing the same last year when Floridians took to the streets to protest the police brutality that cost George Floyd his life. Instead, their response to the Floyd protests was to pass a law so sweeping that even people who don’t riot could face arrest for rioting.
But today’s mask protesters are singing a tune more to the politicians’ liking, so now protests — even when they turn ugly — are suddenly a good thing.
Which is it?
