Mickey Mouse is Trapped in the Culture War

What in the chitty-chitty bang-bang is going on in Florida?

First, it was a recently passed law which — as I’m sure you know — bans any discussion on gender identity or sexual orientation in classrooms.

Around the same time, another Florida law made book banning in school libraries easier.

Then, just last week, education officials in the Sunshine State banned more than one-third of math textbooks over supposed references to critical race theory.

I don’t know about you, but I don't recall any math book I ever saw being particularly controversial.

Of course, I called math quits after dragging algebra II across the goal line as a high school sophomore. I mean, why should I have to do a page and a half of work on a math problem if I already know that X is always going to equal one?

I can only surmise that trigonometry and calculus classes must be where all the controversial stuff happened. I’ll have to ask some of my six-figure income friends.

And now, Disney is under attack for its long-standing attitude of diversity and inclusion.

We do know Tinkerbell really was a female, despite what Archie Bunker said, right? And “The Bare Necessities” has nothing to do with nudity.

Of course, Disney didn’t handle the whole situation real well from the get-go.

Nobody inside the Magic Kingdom publicly said much of anything about the bill until after it was passed, which made Mickey Mouse look a little wishy-washy in the whole deal.

Regarding the book banning and the related Floridian shenanigans, I don’t know what the answer is, but I know what the answer isn’t.

It pretty much looks like the government only wants students to learn about straight white people and forget that anyone different from people like me doesn’t matter — or maybe doesn’t even exist.

When I think about it, that’s the way it was when I was in school. I thought we had evolved a little.

And before you email me, I am 100 percent against anyone being exposed to anything they are not mature enough to understand and process.

Courtesy of one of my childhood friends whose uncle lived in his basement, I saw lots of things as a child I wasn’t mature enough to consume. My mother would have died, and with good reason.

As unbelievable as it sounds, the same thing happened with the weirdo who drove the snow cone truck through my neighborhood for a couple of weeks one summer.

Protecting minors from things they aren’t ready to see is important. A couple of kids I grew up with and I are living proof.

That’s one thing.

But while doing research for today’s topic, I ran across an article about a group trying to ban books in public libraries.

That’s a totally different animal. That’s censorship. And it goes directly against the First Amendment. 

Not the second, or the third, or the fourth through tenth.

The First. The most important one.

That simply cannot happen.

We can protect our kids and educate them at the same time.

We can also protect the First Amendment.

But we can’t do it if all we ever do is yell at each other on Twitter and blame a flying elephant with big ears for the state of society.