The Walt Disney Company announced this week that it will help leftist activists work to repeal a bill banning the instruction of gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade classrooms, which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law this week.
Disney’s denunciation of the bill included many of the same falsehoods the Left has been spreading about it for weeks, namely that it targets and punishes gay and transgender Floridians. The law does no such thing, as anyone who bothered to read the text of the legislation knows. But claiming otherwise has given Disney a convenient cover for its real motivation: The company believes in left-wing gender ideology and wants it taught to young children.
Disney’s executives have admitted as much themselves.
In a recent company meeting about the law, Karey Burke, president of Disney’s general entertainment content, said it is Disney’s intention to feature “many, many, many” lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual characters in its films and programs. By the end of the year, she said, half of Disney’s characters should be either LGBTQIA or racially diverse.
“I’m here as a mother of two queer children, actually,” Burke said on the call, “one transgender child and one pansexual child.”
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Disney production coordinator Allen March agreed with Burke that increasing representation is necessary and revealed that his team has a “tracker” to make sure they are creating enough “gender-nonconforming characters,” including “canonical trans characters” and “canonical bisexual characters.”
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In the same meeting, Disney’s diversity and inclusion manager, Vivian Ware, went on to announce that the company has scrubbed all gendered references, including the phrases “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” from its parks in an effort to be more welcoming.
“We want to create that magical moment with our cast members, with our guests,” Ware said. “And we don’t want to just assume because who someone might be, in our interpretation, maybe presenting as female, that they may not want to be called ‘princess.'”
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Disney’s executive producer for television animation, Latoya Raveneau, then bragged about how the company’s showrunners were “super welcoming” to her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda.”
“Maybe it was that way in the past, but I guess something must have happened … and then, all that momentum that I felt, that sense of, ‘I don’t have to be afraid to let’s have these two characters kiss in the background.’ I was just, wherever I could, just basically adding queerness. … No one would stop me, and no one was trying to stop me,” she said.
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These comments from Disney executives make it perfectly clear why they want Florida’s law repealed: They want young children to learn about gender identity and sexual orientation. They believe that indoctrinating children with these ideas early on is not only good but necessary, which is why they’re turning their own company into a vehicle for this ideology.
But unfortunately for Disney, few parents would agree that telling a young child she is “pansexual” or “asexual” or that there are multiple genders is either good or necessary. In fact, several polls have found that a majority of the public opposes teaching these things to young students and supports Florida’s law as a result. Perhaps that same majority will now think twice before throwing a Disney show or movie on the television for their children to watch. I know I would.
Kaylee McGhee White is a commentary writer and the deputy editor of Restoring America for the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
