Opinion | DeSantis’s shameless defense of the Amanda Gorman fiasco is revealing

A new turn in the explosive saga involving the poem that Amanda Gorman read at President Biden’s inauguration underscores the point. DeSantis is now defending a Florida school’s decision to restrict access to “The Hill We Climb” — a move that has become a national controversy.

“It was a book of poems that was in an elementary school library,” DeSantis told a convention on Friday, though it was in fact one poem. DeSantis insisted the school district in question merely “moved it from the elementary school library to the middle school library,” and ripped “legacy media” for calling this a “ban,” complaining of a “poem hoax.”

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That’s a shameless but revealing characterization of what happened. It’s true that Gorman’s poem was removed from the elementary school section of the library at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes and that access was preserved for middle school students. But this came in response to an objection from one parent.

That parent’s complaint, which was obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, was that the poem has indirect “hate messages” and would “cause confusion and indoctrinate students.” In reality, Gorman’s poem calls for bridging our divides to enable our country to live up to its promise, declaring this an incomplete project. The idea that this represents hate and indoctrination is farcical.

If anything, the poem offers a dramatically different message from racial discourse the right usually objects to, i.e., that our white-supremacist past and continuing structural racism render our country irredeemable. The poem says our nation “isn’t broken but simply unfinished.”

DeSantis objects to calling what happened a “ban.” But the book was placed beyond the reach of elementary school kids for no reason whatsoever. What message does it send that a school went along with the idea that the poem read by the young Black poet at Biden’s inauguration is inappropriate for children, on grounds that it constitutes hate and indoctrination?

It’s also important to note that in response to complaints from that same parent, the school removed two other titles about Black history: “Love to Langston” and “The ABCs of Black History.” Her main objection to these books? They are “CRT” — meaning critical race theory.

That’s preposterous. Those books were written expressly to introduce kids in lower grades to these topics. As Stephana Ferrell, co-founder of Florida Freedom to Read, told me: “The books celebrate Black history, culture and famous voices in a way that connects with elementary school students.” Isn’t that what we want?

Finally, it’s absurd that all this happened due to such specious objections from one person. The school’s rationale for removing the books is that they’re age-inappropriate, but it doesn’t even say why they’re inappropriate for elementary school kids. It’s obvious that the school tried to split the difference, not removing them entirely but still seeking to make this one parent happy.

This is happening all over Florida. In another county, a single right-wing activist persuaded officials to pull 20 books by Jodi Picoult and eight by Nora Roberts from school libraries, citing vague directives from the DeSantis administration as their rationale.

All this confirms that the fever-pitch climate created by DeSantis is maximizing the impact that lone parents can have. That’s because it has encouraged officials to err on the side of caution and remove targeted titles rather than brave right-wing anger, which incentivizes parents-turned-activists to sweep ever more broadly in their efforts to ban as many titles as possible.

This is what DeSantis wants. Rather than seriously consider whether one out-of-control parent drove the process off the rails in the Gorman case, he leapt at the chance to engage in more culture-warring, this time casting the “legacy media” as the cultural enemy. DeSantis’s obvious relish of this moment shows he believes having an army of lone parents out there stirring up cultural controversies wherever possible can only help him in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries.

In a little-noticed local interview this week, DeSantis’s education commissioner, Manny Diaz, defended the Gorman saga. “The process worked,” Diaz told WLRN, noting that “a parent has the right to make a complaint,” and as a result, the poem is now available only to the “right” grade levels.

Diaz is wrong. The poem — a historical document and a paean to unity — should be available to all grades. But he’s right in another sense: The fact that one parent could exercise her right to make this unhinged complaint, resulting effortlessly in such an absurd outcome, did show the process working exactly as DeSantis intends.