Florida schools become battleground in US culture wars

Decades-old tug of war to define national values coming to a head in US election year

- Bhagyashree Garekar

Florida - In the Republican-ruled state of Florida, public schools have become battlegrounds in a high-stakes contest to decide what is fit to be taught.

It is part of a larger, decades-old tug of war between conservative and liberal Americans to define national values, coming to a head in an election year.

Its many contradictions are in plain view and have pulled the nation in different directions.

Acceptance has grown for the LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) population, for instance, and polls say almost 70 per cent of Americans believe that marriage between same-sex couples should be valid, compared with around 50 per cent a decade ago.

Support for the Black Lives Matter movement, on the other hand, fell to 51 per cent from 66 per cent at its height in 2020, when millions of Americans staged protests after the death of a black man, Mr George Floyd, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.

Attitudes to transgender people have also see-sawed. As their visibility grew in the media and universities, states introduced laws that discouraged gender-affirming care for transgender youth, restricted their access to public bathrooms and banned transgender athletes from competing in girls' sports.

While transgender people make up less than 1 per cent of the population, they were the subject of more than 200 Bills introduced across states in 2023.

Likewise, there continues to be a sharp divide on access to abortion since the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, a case that guaranteed nationwide abortion access. Several Republican-majority states have since banned abortion, while Democratic leaders have consolidated abortion and reproductive rights on the state level.

A combination of Governor Ron DeSantis' political ambitions and his conservative policies has made Florida ground zero in the culture wars that are being waged across America.