Press Uses Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' Catholicism Against Him On Social Issues

Religion Unplugged believes in a diversity of well-reasoned and well-researched opinions. This piece reflects the views of the author and does not necessarily represent those of Religion Unplugged, its staff and contributors.

(OPINION) Two things a lot of people don’t want to read about these days are the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump — part of a larger trend regarding news fatigue in this country. Unfortunately, this post will mention both and only because it is about Ron DeSantis. 

The Florida governor has been in the news the past few years because of his connection to the former president and a virus that paralyzed the planet for two years. A hero to the right and bogeyman to the left, DeSantis has received plenty of mainstream news coverage — much of it one-sided — because of his use of so-called culture war issues to push legislation.

DeSantis, who is running for reelection and among the favorites to run for the White House in 2024, has been a lightning rod for Democrats and a focus of criticism from the mainstream press for the last two years. His actions regarding COVID-19 were at odds with how blue states handled the virus, often catapulting him to national attention.

While the coverage has predictably focused on politics, the religion news hooks in these stories have largely been ignored — unless they were highlighted to be used against him. The bottom line: DeSantis is not the kind of Roman Catholic who draws cheers from journalists who admire progressive Catholics. Those angles were once again set aside by the press coverage of the recent debate about the state’s sex education bill. 

As political conservatives and liberals battled it out over the merits of this bill, the press ignored DeSantis’ Catholic faith throughout the past few weeks of coverage. The legislation — which the press has insisted on calling the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — was, as the Associated Press recently noted, the following: 

Since its inception, the measure has drawn intense opposition from LGBTQ advocates, students, national Democrats, the White House and the entertainment industry, amid increased attention on Florida as Republicans push culture war legislation and DeSantis ascends in the GOP as a potential 2024 presidential candidate. 

There’s a lot to unpack in that paragraph, but mostly for what’s not mentioned.

If you guessed religion, you’d be correct. While the Catholicism of President Joe Biden is lauded in some media circles and debated in others, DeSantis’ faith is hardly mentioned in press coverage of this recent bill or of his work in general.

We know the governor is Catholic because Roll Call listed him as such when he was a member of the House between 2013 and 2018. We also know it because it became a talking point among Florida opinion writers in 2019 on the hypocrisy of DeSantis supporting the death penalty, something the church opposes.

This is what South Florida Sun-Sentinel columnist Steve Bousquet had to say:

Speaking to reporters after a Cabinet meeting on March 12, he said: “I’m supportive of it for the most serious offenses. When you look at some of these people who rape and murder young children, I just think it’s appropriate punishment. It’s not something that I take glee in supporting. I wish we didn’t have to. But I just can’t see any other appropriate punishment.”

The Catholic Church argues there is another appropriate punishment: life in prison without parole.

He got the same negative treatment about his faith from Religion News Service in February when it came to immigration. This is what RNS argued in a piece under the headline, “On immigration, DeSantis chooses Trumpism over Catholicism”:

Naturally, faithful Christians care more about helping vulnerable children than playing petty politics, and a broad array of faith leaders around Florida have called on the governor, a professed Roman Catholic, to reconsider his attacks on migrant children and those organizations that have helped them without incident or controversy until now.

But the governor’s fight against faith leaders became a national story this month when he provoked the Most Reverend Thomas Wenski, archbishop of Miami. DeSantis held an immigration roundtable in Miami on Feb. 7 in which he said that equating the Mexican border situation today with Operation Pedro Pan “quite frankly is disgusting. It’s wrong, it’s not even close to the same thing. They were fleeing a communist dictatorship that was persecuting them. Those were not illegal immigrants.”

DeSantis did speak publicly about his faith — and got local media attention in Florida for it — last November when he revealed that his wife Casey was battling breast cancer. This is what Florida Politics reported at the time:

DeSantis fashioned Florida’s First Lady as a fighter. Better days, they believe, are on the horizon.

“I have faith in God. I have faith in her. And I do have faith in the power of prayer,” DeSantis told reporters.

In addition to faith, DeSantis said fellowship is fueling the family of five’s resiliency. Both he and Casey, DeSantis said, are appreciative of the widespread support.

“There’s a lot of people pulling for her, not just in Florida, but throughout the country,” DeSantis said. “And so it’s really uplifting. It’s helped her spirits, it’s helped my spirits.”

The family announced the diagnosis in October.

Casey DeSantis, 41, is an Emmy Award winning TV host. The DeSantises married in 2010 and have three children — Madison, Mason and Mamie. Casey gave birth to Mamie in March 2020. Madison, the eldest, is 4.

“She may have been given a bad break, but she’s got an awful lot to live for,” DeSantis said. “So many people care about her.”

Oddly, the piece does not mention what faith tradition DeSantis belongs to, while Biden repeatedly received “devout” Catholic treatment — something repeated by the White House press office — during the 2020 presidential race. Features such as this — NPR on how faith shapes Biden’s politics — were the norm. In DeSantis’ case, not so much as the examples above note.

As for the sex education bill that received so much national attention, DeSantis’ faith was hardly discussed. When it was, you had to read The Tablet, a U.K.-based Catholic news site, to find context. This is what the site — under the headline “US Catholic governor in battle over new education bill” — reported:

The Catholic governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, is resisting political pressure from the LGBT community in the latest culture war battle. DeSantis is expected to sign into law the “Parental Rights in Education” bill that passed the Florida legislature last week. The law prohibits “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” for children in public schools under the age of ten.

Critics of the law have dubbed it the “don’t say gay” bill and one of Florida’s largest employers, the Disney Corporation, acknowledged it reached out to DeSantis and urged him not to sign the bill into law. “I called Governor DeSantis this morning to express our disappointment and concern that if legislation becomes law, it could be used to unfairly target gay, lesbian, non-binary and transgender kids and families,” Disney CEO Bob Chapek told a shareholder meeting.  

DeSantis told supporters: “First graders shouldn’t have ‘woke’ gender ideology imposed in their curriculums.”

Conservative Catholics are lining up to support the new law. “It’s a legislation about transparency so that the parents can understand what their children are being exposed to,” Deacon Patrick Lappert, a board-certified plastic surgeon and deacon for the Diocese of Birmingham, Alabama, told the National Catholic Register. He also serves as a chaplain to Courage, a group that helps members of the LGBT community live in accordance with Church teaching about sexuality.

A Politico/Morning Consult poll of 2,005 registered voters released just last week saw support for several items contained within the bill. When it came to “banning the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade,” at least 51% of respondents were in support, while 37% said they “strongly support” it.

Cultural issues like this will certainly be at the forefront during this coming November’s midterm elections, a prelude to the fights that could take place in two years, when Biden is up for reelection.

Like Trump, DeSantis has made sparring with the media a staple of his news conferences. On March 8, as the bill continued to be debated, DeSantis tried to clarify the bill’s language:

DeSantis took time for questions from the media at the Florida Strawberry Festival Monday, at which time a reporter asked about HB 1557, which would prohibit discussions of sexual identity and gender orientation in lower grades, according to Florida Politics.

The reporter noted how critics of the bill have called it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, an observation which led to a fiery response from DeSantis.

“Does it say that in the bill? Does it say that in the bill? I’m asking you to tell me what’s in the bill, because you are pushing false narratives,” DeSantis said. “It doesn’t matter what critics say.”

The reporter then noted how the bill allegedly banned classroom instruction on sexual identity and gender orientation.

“For who?” DeSantis clapped back. “For grades pre-K through three. So five-year-olds, six-year-olds, seven-year-olds, and the idea that you wouldn’t be honest about that, and tell people what it actually says, it’s why people don’t trust people like you because you peddle false narratives."

The summary of the bill, which you can read here, does not mention the phrase, “don’t say gay.” The bill, known as HB 1557, does say that it “restricts discussions of sexual orientation or gender identity to only those that are age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate for students while prohibiting a school district from encouraging discussions of these topics in primary grades.”

This sort of thing will only intensify should DeSantis start a run for the White House. The governor, already a national figure for what he’s doing in Florida, is likely to see his faith ignored — unless it’s meant to highlight that he’s a hypocrite. It appears that he is the wrong kind of Catholic.

This post originally appeared at GetReligion.