Florida teacher investigated for showing the Disney cartoon with a Gay character.

Disney animated character, Ethan Clade, is Disney’s first openly Gay kid.

As a veteran teacher I totally get Florida fifth grade teacher Jenna Barbee.

I taught five classes a day, 25 classes a week for 45 minutes. That’s not a lot of time and I rarely wasted it on showing movies in class.

But there were times.

Like picture day. My students would come to school dressed in their best. I was an Art teacher and I was not about to risk getting emails from home because James or Emily had gotten paint all over themselves.

Testing week too.

Holiday sing.

So I get it.

Jenna’s students were in the middle of standardized testing and she thought they needed a time out from the stress of testing.

She wanted to give them what she called a “brain break.”

She decided on the Disney movie, Strange World.

Strange World is no Little Mermaid. It was not one of Disney’s bigger hits.

I’m not a big Disney animation fan and at 75 years old I don’t watch a cartoon that lasts longer than three minutes.

I often joke that if it doesn’t end with “That’s All Folks,” I’m skipping it.

I think the last animated movie I saw was Chicken Run. It was okay, but it came out twenty three years ago.

While not a block buster hit, Strange World features a Gay character named Ethan Clade.

And in MAGA Florida where there is actually a law that bans teaching historic truths and where you can’t say Gay, showing Strange World is literally against the law.

All that needs to happen is for one homophobic parent to complain for all hell to break loose.

One.

Ms Barbee says she has a number of LGBTQ+ kids, but one parent complaint was enough for the shit to hit the fan.

A letter went home from the school. They promised to never show Strange World again. Jenna Barbee is now under investigation.

This is what the MAGA version of parents’ rights looks like.

It’s the right of a one bigoted parent to have veto power over everyone else.

When she spoke to board members at their May 9 meeting, Barbee said that the film focuses on Ethan’s sexual orientation for about 2½ minutes of its 107-minute run time, none of which contains “sexualization or inappropriate content.”

But don’t think for a second that this is a goofy isolated incident. Over the past three years MAGA legislators in nearly every state have proposed hundreds of laws designed to limit what teachers can say about race, racism and American history; change how they can teach on gender identity, sexual orientation and LGBTQ+ issues; and prioritize phony “parental rights” in public schools that are intended to serve every kid.

The thing is that Jenna Barbee already had handed in her resignation before this whole thing happened, saying she was done with trying to teach in Florida.

Remember when a parent got a Florida charter school principal fired because the art teacher had shown their students the master work, Michelangelo’s David?

And it wasn’t even because Michelangelo was Gay.

The dumb ass parent probably didn’t even know that.