Judge issues blistering decision striking down Ron DeSantis’ drag ban

Leigh Shannon – Orlando Florida Actor, Comedian, Voice Over, Narrator, and Iconic Female Impersonator
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An appeals court has issued another legal defeat against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ attempt to ban all-ages drag performances, calling the law overbroad and saying that it attempts to take a “shotgun” to constitutionally protected free speech rights.

This week, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 2-1 decision against the law, effectively continuing a lower court’s injunction against the law and sending it back down to Florida’s Middle District to receive a full bench trial.

Appeals Court Judge Robin Rosenbaum wrote that the law’s prohibition against “lewd conduct” was like a “prosecutorial skeleton key” that any state officials could use to ban speech that they consider obscene.

“Florida’s S.B. 1438 takes an ‘I know it when I see it’ approach to regulating expression,” Rosenbaum wrote in the majority court decision. “The Act prohibits children’s admission to ‘live performances’ that Florida considers obscene for minors. But by providing only vague guidance as to which performances it prohibits, the Act wields a shotgun when the First Amendment allows a scalpel at most.”

“The possibility that [Florida officials] might view a gender-bending but chaste drag performance as ‘lewd’ and lacking ‘value’ is far from an unreasonable conclusion,” she added.

Rosenbaum also called the law “the…

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