Florida to LBGTQ tourists: You are not welcome here. (And Governor Ron DeSantis approves this message.)

 

In general, you will find few people of color pictured on Visit Florida webpages

Headline:  New York Times, 8/27/2024

For years, L.G.B.T.Q. people planning a trip to Florida could turn to the official website for Visit Florida, the state’s tourism marketing organization, for resources on where to go, what to eat and where to stay. While there are other resources for queer travelers, the site offered information about L.G.B.T.Q.-owned businesses that visitors could patronize as well as activities “appealing to a gay community looking for a sense of belonging and acceptance,” a page on the site once read. 

But sometime in the past few months, Visit Florida — a private-public, nonprofit partnership created by the Florida Legislature in 1996 — quietly took down pages with information for L.G.B.T.Q. travelers. Although no one has been able to pinpoint exactly when the pages were removed, NBC first reported on their removal on Aug. 19 and said it had happened sometime this summer

As for the despicable guy still fuming after being so brutally humiliated by Trump during the 2024 GOP presidential primary campaign.....

At a news conference on Wednesday, a day after this article was published online, Mr. DeSantis said he only learned about the removal of the L.G.B.T.Q. travel pages after they had been taken down. “Our view as a state is we are the best place to visit, we’re welcome to all, but we’re not going to be segregating people by these different characteristics,” he said. “That’s not how we’ve done business in any of the things that we’ve done.”

Not going to be segregating people, huh?

 

Associated Press, 8/22/2024

In the Florida panhandle, one tiny district plans to consolidate its last three stand-alone elementary schools into one campus because there aren’t enough students to cover the costs of keeping the doors open. But the Madison County School District’s decision to do so has exposed tensions around race in a community where for years some white families have resisted integrating public schools.