Gov. Ron DeSantis hasn’t exactly been shy about targeting businesses that have offended in him some way, but NBC News ran an unexpected report two weeks ago about the ambitious Florida Republican targeting, of all things, the Orlando Philharmonic’s liquor license.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis filed a complaint against the Orlando Philharmonic Plaza Foundation alleging that the nonprofit group held a sexually explicit drag show in December in the presence of minors. The complaint, filed Friday through the Department of Business and Professional Regulation’s Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco and shared with NBC News, alleges the foundation violated Florida statutes on lewdness and maintaining a public nuisance and seeks to revoke its liquor license.
A Miami Herald report published this morning helped add the backstory as to how and why this happened.
Evidently, late last year, the historic Plaza Live theater in Orlando — a venue run by the Orlando Philharmonic Plaza Foundation — hosted an event called “A Drag Queen Christmas.” That wasn’t especially remarkable: The same theater has hosted the same event every year for nearly a decade.
This year, however, Florida law enforcement dispatched “a small squad of undercover state agents” to determine “whether children were being exposed to sights” that ran afoul of the state’s decency laws.
There wasn’t much to report. As the Herald’s article explained, those in attendance saw some “bare-chested men who wouldn’t have been out of place at a Madonna concert,” and a couple of hip thrusts that spectators might’ve seen at a football game after a touchdown.
The undercover agents saw some minors in the crowd who appeared to be accompanied by adults, but “they acknowledged that nothing indecent had happened on stage.”
The DeSantis administration went on the offensive anyway. From the Herald’s report:
[T]he state’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation proceeded to file a…
Read the full article here
