Florida's Anti-DEI Law Is So Vague It Could Cancel St. Patrick's Day — SB 1134 Breakdown

Florida just handed its governor the power to remove elected local officials for welcoming their own constituents — and wrote the law so vaguely that St. Patrick's Day, Oktoberfest, and the Jewish Film Festival have no legal protection under it. Mike Smithgall breaks down SB 1134 — the Anti-Diversity in Local Government bill — section by section: what it actually says, what its sponsor admitted he didn't know, the $1.5 billion tourism economy Florida is putting at risk, and why a federal court already struck down a narrower version of this same idea.

This one isn't just an LGBTQ+ story. It's a story about who gets to govern, who gets to celebrate, and what happens when a bumper sticker becomes a statute.

Full sources at atheistville.com

QUESTION: The bill gives the Governor power to remove elected local officials by executive order for violating it. Does that concern you regardless of your position on DEI — and why or why not?

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Transcript

Michael Smithgall 0:00

So St. Patrick's Day is in two days. That's the time of the year when every white guy that's ever had a bowl of lucky charms lays claim to his Irish heritage and gets drunk on Guinness. But I want to ask you something before the green beer starts flowing. Could a Florida city official be removed from office for helping pay for the St. Patrick's Day Parade? Under a bill that has just passed the Florida legislature, headed right now to Governor DeSantis' desk, the answer is genuinely unclear. The bill's own sponsor was asked direct questions on the Senate floor about what his legislation actually covers, and he couldn't answer them. And I'm just telling you what the Senate record shows. Florida lawmakers just passed SB 1134, the anti diversity and local government bill. And the stated goal is to stop cities and counties from spending taxpayer money on DEI programs. Reasonable enough, I guess, if you're so inclined, but as a premise, except the language they wrote is so broad, so vague, and so poorly thought through that it could swallow up St. Patrick's Day celebrations, Oktoberfest, Diwali festivals, Jewish cultural events, and Latino heritage programming, right alongside the Pride Parade, which it was clearly designed to eliminate. Now, when you write a law that catches everything, you've written a bad law. And this one is going to find that out the hard way. Hey, thanks for tuning in. I'm Mike Smithgall, the unelected mayor of Atheistville, and this is today's mic drop. Okay, so let's start with the text because this is where the most coverage gets kind of lazy about it. SB 1134 prohibits Florida counties and municipalities from funding, promoting, or taking any official action related to diversity, equity, inclusion. Existing ordinance programs and policies that fall under that definition are declared void and they're just gone. This is effective January 1st of 2027. Now, the bill also creates a contractor certification requirement. Every business seeking a county or municipal contract, which is like your road paving companies, your IT vendors, your trash pickup services, they must certify in writing before being awarded that contract that they do not and will not use government funds on a DEI-related training or instruction. So here's the enforcement mechanism worth your attention, regardless of where you stand politically. Any elected county commissioner or municipal official who violates this law commits what the bill calls misfeasance or malfeasance in the office. Under the Florida Constitution, that gives the governor, the governor, the power to suspend that official by executive order without a court hearing, with the only appeal going to the Republican controlled Senate, which holds right now 28 to 12 supermajority. All right, so that's the architecture. Now let's look at the definition because that's where the law of unintended consequences just barrels through the door. The bill defines DEA as any effort, and I'm quoting directly from the statute, to promote or adopt training, programming, or activities designed or implemented with a reference to race, color, sex, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation. So just sit with that for a moment. It's designed or implemented with reference to ethnicity. Remember that. Keep that in mind. A city co-sponsoring a St. Patrick's Day Parade is programming, organized with reference to Irish ethnicity. A city posting about Diwali on its official website is programming with reference to South Asian ethnicity. Oktoberfest is German ethnicity. The Jose Marte Festival in Miami, Cuban heritage. The Jewish Film Festival in Miami Beach, Jewish cultural identity. These aren't hypotheticals pulled from thin air. Miami Beach Commissioner Alex Fernandez raised those exact examples on the House floor. He asked directly whether his city could continue to support the Jose Marte celebration and the Jewish Film Festival under this legislation. There was no clear answer. The bill does have some carve outs. Federal holidays are protected, uh, state holidays are protected, national monuments and patriotic observances are protected. But St. Patrick's Day is not a federal holiday. It's not listed in Title V, Section 6103 of the United States Code. That's the federal statute that defines a legal public holiday. It has no safe harbor in this bill. So when you write a definition this broad and then try to carve out only what you politically favor, you can't pretend that you've written a neutral policy. What you've actually done is written a favorites list with legal consequences for everybody who's not on your preferred list. And here's something worth thinking about. The bill explicitly protects a local government's ability to issue event permits in what it calls content neutral manner. That's actually a First Amendment requirement. A city can't deny a permit based on the message of the march, even if that message is one most of us find repugnant. So, under the law, a city official risks losing their job for welcoming their LGBTQ neighbors at a pride event. And they are simultaneously required by that same law to process a permit application for a group that exists to terrorize those same neighbors, such as a Nazi march or a clan rally. The bill doesn't protect everyone equally, it just removes the ability to choose who gets celebrated. Okay, so this is where it gets really important because it tells you something about how this bill was constructed. Now, Senator Clay Yarborough, he grew up in and he represents Northeast Florida. That's the Jacksonville region, same area that I grew up in, in a matter of fact. Yarborough attends the first Baptist Church of Jacksonville. That is a 25,000-member megachurch. And it has been one of the most politically active evangelical institutions in Northeast Florida for decades, going as far back as I can remember when I was a kid. I'll let you draw your own conclusions on what really shapes his legislative priorities. But what I can tell you is what he said on the actual Senate floor. Now, he introduced SB 1134 in January, and he shepherded it through the committee hearings and a full Senate vote. And on the Senate floor, when Senator Jason, I think it's Piso, pointed out that Stonewall Pride in Wilton Manors commemorates events that occurred at a site that is a U.S. national monument and a national historic law monument and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. He asked whether the federal designation might protect the event. And Yarborough said, and again, I'm quoting from the Senate record, uh, let me research that because this is the first time ever hearing about that one. This is the guy that wrote the law, and he has never heard of the Stonewall federal designation. Come on, come on, man. Get out of the church once a while. Look around. Stonewall is one of the most historic significant sites in American civil rights history. It's a federal designation. It's not obscure. But even setting that aside, when Yarborough was pushed to identify any provisions in his bill that would broadly protect LGBTQ community events, he acknowledged he couldn't find any. He had no idea. Why? He knew exactly which communities he was writing the carve outs for. The LGBTQ community wasn't one of them. But in building the law that way, he also left the door open to catching a whole range of ethnic and cultural events. He almost certainly didn't intend to eliminate them. When you can't explain what your own bill covers, you're just writing bumper stickers. You're not writing policy. All right, so quick pause. If you've not subscribed yet, do that now. It's free and it helps more people find these conversations. And leave a comment. I read all of them and I do respond to you directly. Whether we agree or disagree, that is a promise I make to you. And uh if something in today's episode sparked a thought, share it with somebody. Use it to start a conversation. That's how we get back to actually talking to each other instead of just shouting past one another. All right, let's get back to it. Now, the bill's fiscal analysis projects what it calls indeterminate cost savings from eliminating DEI offices. That's the government's own language. Indeterminate. They don't know how much it saves, they just know that it probably does save. I mean, it's a trust me, bro, type of clause. Now think about this. Fort Lauderdale alone, just one city, welcomes about 1.5 million LGBTQ visitors annually who spend an estimated one and a half billion dollars in the local economy. That information is from the Greater Fort Lauderdale LGBTQ Chamber of Commerce. It's confirmed by multiple independent tourism sources. In Orlando, LGBTQ tourism generates over$3.1 billion a year and draws roughly 4 million visitors. We're talking about billions in economic activity that depend directly on Florida being perceived as a welcoming destination. But here we go. A 2024 survey by the International LGBTQ Travel Association found that 80% of US LGBTQ respondents already perceive Florida as unwelcoming. Nearly half of the global LGBTQ meeting planners are reconsidering business travel to the state. Conferences and conventions aren't casual day trips. They are multi-night, high-spending events that fill hotel rooms, they pack restaurants, and they generate bed tax revenue. Losing them is a measurable economic injury. Tampa Pride already canceled all of its 2026 events before the bill was even signed, citing political climate and the collapse of corporate sponsorships. Port St. Lucie's Pride Fest is already gone. Stonewall Pride in Wilton Manors, which generates over$6 million in direct economic impact for that city annually, is now at serious risk. The chilling effect doesn't wait for the governor's signature. And then there's the contractor certification requirement from section three of the bill. The part almost nobody's really covering, every business seeking a local government contract now carries a new compliance burden. Small contractors without in-house legal teams have to figure out whether their standard onboarding software, the kind bundled in almost every HR platform by default, qualifies as DEI instruction under a definition that the bill's own sponsor couldn't fully explain. And some will decide the contract isn't worth the risk. So what happens? When you shrink the bidding pool on government contracts, competition drops. When competition drops, prices go up. That is basic economics that I would hope that Yarborough would understand. The projected savings from eliminating a DEI office could be erased by higher procurement costs on a single infrastructure contract. The bill's proponents call this fiscal responsibility, but fiscal responsibility means counting all the costs, including the ones that don't fit on a cute little press release. Florida has been down this road before. The Individual Freedom Act, also called the Stop Woke Act, tried to ban DEI training in private workplaces. But the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals struck it down on First Amendment grounds. The court found the law wasn't narrowly tailored to address any legitimate government interest. It was broadly focused on suppressing viewpoints the state disagreed with. Under strict scrutiny, it couldn't hold up. SB 1134 is broader. Its definition of DEI is wider. And unlike the Stop Woke Act, this bill doesn't just regulate private employers. It voids existing local government ordinances and creates a mechanism for the governor to remove elected officials for policy disagreements. The ACLU of Florida has already signaled opposition, legal challenges are most definitely coming. And the legislature passed this bill, knowing that precedent exists, which tells you something about the strategy here. Bills that chill behavior don't have to survive in court to accomplish their goal. Again, Tampa Pride was canceled before anyone filed a lawsuit. Officials at Wilton Manor are already having conversations about what they can and can't say at their own community events. These events don't come back while the lawyers argue, they just go away. Hey, listen, if you want to check out all the receipts on everything we covered today, the bill text, the Florida debate transcript, the tourism data, the 11th Circuit ruling, I've pulled the links and I've posted all that, plus a full breakdown over at atheistville.com. It's all over there. Go ahead and check that out. All right, so that's my two cents, unblessed and unfiltered. Agree or disagree, but that's what I got for you today. So listen, this episode comes down to one idea. A law written so vague that its own author couldn't explain what it covers was never really about saving money. It was always about deciding whose community gets to exist in public life and whose doesn't. And the people who get swept up in the collateral damage, they just happen to be standing nearby. What matters here is perspective. You don't have to have an opinion on DEI programs to have an opinion on this. Because the question worth considering is simpler than that. Should a governor be able to remove an elected local official, someone who was chosen by their own neighbors by executive order with no court hearing, just simply for welcoming their constituents? Because that's what this bill creates. And the answer to that question doesn't depend on your politics. This kind of legislation doesn't resolve itself in a news cycle. It's going to play out through the courts and through elections and through the slow work of people who keep paying attention. So I want you to pay attention. All right, I'm Mike SmithGall. Thanks for tuning in, and I will catch you on the next one. Hey, I really hope you enjoyed today's show. Before you go, make sure you like and subscribe to the show and tell a friend. It really helps us grow. If you'd like more great content from us, be sure to check us out right here on YouTube. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts, and check out our blog at atheistville.com. Until we talk again, remember reason and compassion go a very long way.