No one elected the NCAA to a ‘goddamn thing,’ if one might borrow the phrase from Jules Winfield. Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis knows this, unlike other governors across America.
On Tuesday, the Florida governor boldly went where other “conservative” politicians have inexplicably been unwilling to go: He has taken on the cultural neomarxists latest bit of insanity and decided to “follow the science.”
DeSantis signed a bill banning biological males posing as females from playing in sports that are meant for biological females.
“In Florida, girls are going to play girls sports and boys are going to play boys sports,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said. “We’re going to make sure that that’s the reality.”
The Florida governor pushed back on the NCAA’s threat to withhold championship events from states that enact legislation that doesn’t conform to the leftist board’s personal opinions. On April 13, the NCAA’s Board of Governors issued a statement on the matter:
When determining where championships are held, NCAA policy directs that only locations where hosts can commit to providing an environment that is safe, healthy and free of discrimination should be selected. We will continue to closely monitor these situations to determine whether NCAA championships can be conducted in ways that are welcoming and respectful of all participants.
Governor DeSantis seemed to be directly addressing the NCAA’s threat in a statement on the transgender athletes bill he just signed.
“I think as these bills were going through various legislatures, I remember the NCAA put out a statement saying any state that enacts this, we’re not going to hold events there,” DeSantis said. “And so I called the Speaker of the House in Florida and I said, ‘did you hear what they said?’ And he’s like, ‘yeah,’ I said, we definitely got to get this done.”
“You can’t be cowed by these organizations, or particularly by woke corporations from doing the right thing,” he explained. “And so my view was throughout this whole time, we have to protect our girls, it is discriminatory to force them to compete against biological males. And so if the price of having a tournament is that I have to deny equal opportunity to hundreds of thousands of young girl and women athletes throughout Florida, I am much more willing to stand with the girls. And to hell with these events.”
As noted at Red State by the blogger shipwreckcrew, Men’s Baseball and Women’s Softball regional events are still scheduled to be played this weekend. If the NCAA wants to open Pandora’s Box and go after Florida for college football bowl games, they may soon find itself with a backlash of Texas, Alabama, Georgia and other red states following suit. College football is the NCAA’s biggest moneymaker, and it happens to have the most devout following in deep red states that the effete leftists on the NCAA’s Board of Governors despise.
Ron DeSantis knows this. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is playing a game of ‘chicken’ with the NCAA. It looks like the NCAA has blinked first.
