“It always leaves a huge impression on me to see the whole community come together as one to celebrate Pride,” said Dave Cook, executive director of Pride.
The turnout is especially significant for the “billion dollar sandbar” of 92,000 residents as it shows how the popularity of the expanded, three-day celebration has grown exponentially in such a short amount of time, said Pride Board Chairman Mark Fernandes. The three-day Pride weekend, which started on Friday, April 7, with a poolside VIP reception at the W South Beach hotel and transitioned into a full-day beach party on Saturday before culminating with the Pride parade and festival on Sunday, saw an estimated 135,000-plus come out for the weekend’s festivities. It has not yet been through another Senate hearing.MIAMI BEACH – Ap– A quartet of Pride Marshals greeted a record crowd of proud revelers who turned out throughout the weekend for the 9th Annual Miami Beach Gay Pride Parade and Festival presented by Celebrity Cruises. The Florida Senate Education Committee has reviewed the bill’s companion, Senate Bill 1834, where the version at the time passed on a party-line vote. If passed with the rest of the bill, the amendment would allow students to sue the Florida Department of Education for damages and attorney fees for causing “irreparable harm” by revealing their sexual orientation. Ana Eskamani, D-Orlando, seems aimed directly at the potential negative consequences created by forcibly outing students.
The bill will face a full Florida House vote this week, with 14 amendments to vote in or veto, before it goes to the next step of the legislative process. It is unclear how the state will deal with cases where outing leads to abuse. The amendments, as filed, do not discuss how mandatory disclosure would affect mandatory abuse reporting by school personnel. Requiring schools to report sexual orientation to parents may not always lead to abuse individual actions of parents and families are unpredictable and are typically a case-by-case situation. White House calls Russian moves on Ukraine an invasion The amendment instructs revision by replacing the relevant section with protocol for how school leaders can “develop a plan, using all available governmental resources,” to tell parents their child’s sexual orientation “through an open dialogue in a safe, supportive, and judgment-free environment that respects the parent-child relationship and protects the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of the student.”Īs written, the amendment does not specify how the mental, emotional and physical well-being of the student would be protected, in cases where previously the proposed bill had found it possible for them to experience abuse, neglect or abandonment as a result of their LGBTQ+ status being known by their family.
However, it left an option for exemption from disclosure, or “outing” as it’s known, for cases where there was a suspicion of the information leading to abuse, neglect or abandonment.īased on the amendment’s instruction, that safety mechanism would be removed. In the originally filed version, the bill already required schools to inform families of their child’s LBTQ+ status, should the student inform a teacher, counselor or other school personnel. Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill ‘hateful,’ Biden says