- [Narrator] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- Next on WEDU, are Florida's school children about to be indoctrinated by the new civics initiative?

A South Florida faith leader says the Supreme court's ruling on abortion conflicts with his and other mainstream religious views.

And California's governor challenges Florida's governor on the question of freedom.

All coming up right now on "Florida This Week".

(dramatic music) - Welcome back.

A South Florida synagogue is suing the state of Florida over the new state law that bans abortions after 15 weeks.

Leaders say it infringes upon their religious freedom and violates the Jewish faith.

The lawsuit was filed by a congregation in Boynton Beach, in Palm Beach County.

In it, the plaintiffs say, "The act prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion and this violates their privacy rights and religious freedom."

Adding, "Forcing parenthood upon women against their will harms women, their families, our society, and the religious freedom of those who do not share the views that are reflected in the act."

Joining us now from Boynton Beach is Rabbi Barry Silver who filed the lawsuit.

He's also an attorney and a former democratic state legislator.

And Rabbi Silver, thanks for coming on the program.

- Thanks for having me, Rob.

It's a pleasure to be here.

- So what does Jewish scripture say about abortion?

- Yeah, scripture is very clear.

Human life begins at birth.

These fundamentalist Christians who are trying to impose their will on everybody else they don't read Hebrew, they don't know the Bible and they don't even agree with most other Christians.

They're trying to impose their narrow minded, ignorant views on everybody else.

Jewish law also says that if you ever have a contest between the fetus and the mother, the mother wins every time.

We respect women.

We give them credit for bringing life into the world.

We should all be so grateful that we had a mother who was willing to go through the vicissitudes and the risk of health and life to bring us into the world.

We don't want to be telling them that you're gonna be forced to be a parent.

Having a child out of love is the greatest blessing.

Being forced to have a child by the state is one of the worst curses and we will fight against it.

- So have you heard from other religious leaders who, let's say beyond the Jewish faith?

Have you heard from other religious leaders that want to join your lawsuit?

- Oh my yes, we've heard from so many different leaders across the board.

Like I said, these folks don't even represent most Christians, but nobody wants one narrow religion to write the law of abortion for everybody else.

Even if somebody has laws or rules that are kind of similar, they don't want it legislated so that if they violate the state, they're criminals.

We now have criminalized Judaism in the state of Florida.

If I were to counsel someone to have an abortion according to Jewish law and they have that abortion, I could be tossed into jail.

That's outrageous.

It's a blatant violation of the establishment clause.

They're trying to establish fundamentalist Christianity as the law of the land and afflict it upon anybody else and everybody else and they're restricting or prohibiting the free exercise of Judaism.

You know, if you wanted do enforce one law and make it the law of the land, why not unitarianism?

If that was the case, everybody would just love each other and try to protect the planet or Bahai.

But this law, fundamentalist Christianity with its narrow minded views and its archaic views on abortion, this is a disaster.

Our founding fathers knew that this was a terrible thing, that's why they put as their first amendment, the separation of church and state and they wanted to avoid all the evils of Europe that when the church and state were united, they saw (indistinct), inquisitions and crusades and countless wars, they wanted to avoid that.

So they put in the Constitution separation of church and state.

This law, HB 5, and other efforts like it throughout the country want to take us back to those horrible days in which people were killing each other and fighting over religion, and we're gonna resist it and fight it.

There was a great Jewish hero, a partisan, Tuvia Bielski who fought the Nazis and he said, "Every act of freedom begins with an act of defiance."

Freedom begins with an act of defiance, and we will defy this law.

We're thrilled that President Biden has signed an executive order, but we don't know what's gonna happen with the Congress and the Republicans and what's gonna happen in the next election.

We want to vindicate rights now to say that no group has the right to dictate to everybody else abortion or when life begins.

- I want to ask you about this term pro-life, which is adopted by the people who are anti-abortion.

What do you think it means to be truly pro-life?

- Well, first of all, they should call themselves pro-lie 'cause they're not pro-life.

If they were really pro-life but not liars, what they would do is they would ask, they would work with us to get universal healthcare 'cause if you don't have access to healthcare, you can't stay alive.

They would work with us to get rid of all these crazy assault weapons that are in the hands of everybody, and usually they're on the wrong side of that.

Pro-life means get rid of these assault weapons.

Pro-life means be an environmentalist, work with us to prevent climate change, deal with the environment.

Pro-life doesn't mean inflicting your views on women and forcing them to bring children into an already crowded world that they're not even prepared to have.

That's not what pro-life means.

You know the people that wrote this law, they're thinking about the next world.

They're thinking about when they're gonna go to heaven and live happily ever after while the rest of us sinners who don't believe their nonsense are gonna go to hell.

They don't care about this world, they care about the next one, but we who live in the real world, we care and we care enough to make sure that women have the right to choose.

And all of the justices of the Supreme Court, they should be impeached as the fruit of the poisonous tree.

You have a serial abuser who brags about abusing women and he's the guy who appoints three people on the Supreme Court not to serve the ends of justice but to serve his needs to abuse women and codify it into law and they all lied to get on the court.

They all said, "Oh yes, we respect Roe V. Wade, it's precedent."

Soon as they get on, there goes Roe V. Wade.

They should be impeached as liars and the fruit of the poisonous tree.

- Rabbi Barry Silver, thank you for coming on "Florida This Week".

- Thank you so much, Rob, always a pleasure.

Keep up the good work.

(mysterious music) - The Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald report that several South Florida high school educators are alarmed that a new state civics course designed to prepare students to be virtuous citizens is infused with a Christian and conservative ideology.

The civics training is part of governor Ron DeSantis' Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative.

Teachers who've been through the training say they were told the nation's founders did not desire a strict separation of church and state, that the training downplayed the role the colonies, and later the US, had in slavery and pushed a judicial theory favored by conservatives that requires people to interpret the us constitution as the framers intended it, not as a living, evolving document.

Teachers who spoke to the Times Herald said, they do not object to the state's new standards for civics, but they do take issue with how the state wants them to be taught.

One teacher called it skewed and that it leaned toward Christian fundamentalism.

In response to the teacher's concerns, the State Board of Education issued a statement saying, "Every lesson we teach is based on history, not ideology or any form of indoctrination."

Andrew Seidel is the vice president of the group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

His group has raised concerns about Florida's new civics initiative and he joins us now.

And Andrew, thank you for coming on the program.

- It's my pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me on.

- So what have you heard?

What are your objections to the Florida's civics initiative?

- Well, it appears that religious extremists are trying to smuggle disinformation into the public school curriculum.

So DeSantis' trainers reportedly highlighted, as you mentioned, the influence of Jesus Christ and the Bible in the country's foundations, which is by definition an over exaggeration.

The training whitewashed role of slavery.

One teacher said that Christian nationalism was baked into everything, and that is not history, that's propaganda and it doesn't belong in our public schools.

- But what do you say to people who say, look, the founders of the country mention the creator and God in several of the founding documents, although Jesus is not mentioned, but they say that God was at the centerpiece of a lot of the founding documents.

- I've actually written a book on that topic called "The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American", which gets into the nuts and bolts of that.

But what we are hearing is that this is a very one sided presentation of our history that deliberately tortures and twists and over emphasizes that Christian nation narrative, which is for the most part really fundamentally not true.

And Americans United for Separation of Church and State is not going to let Christian nationalists use our public schools to disseminate their disinformation and propaganda.

So we've launched an investigation into the program.

- Tell us what you mean by Christian nationalism, and how does that differ from what we might consider mainstream Christianity, you know, Presbyterians or Episcopalians or Lutherans or Methodists or Catholics?

How does that differ?

- So Christian nationalism, it's not a particular brand of Christianity.

It's really a political theology, it's an ideology.

It's the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, that our laws and our government is based on Judeo Christian principles, and most importantly, that we have strayed from that foundation.

And that appears to be what they're trying to teach in this new curriculum.

That's not only false, but also dangerous because Christian nationalism claims this historical ground so that it can use the language of return, of getting back to our godly roots, to justify everything from harmful public policy, like the Muslim ban and the child separation policy at the border, to insurrections, I mean really January 6th is very much a Christian nationalist insurrection.

Christian nationalism has provided the permission structure that those Patriots needed to attack their own government.

- We're talking about the civics training that's going on in Florida.

There has been a move nationally to expand civics training to make sure that young people, especially in high school, know the structure of our government, how it got to be the way it is and how to use the structure of that government.

Is this kind of training, what you say is indoctrination, is this going on in other states?

- It's certainly something that we are worried about.

We are seeing nationally an attack on our public schools and this attack dates back quite awhile, even to the Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board of Education.

We initially saw a lot of this as a pushback against that attempt to desegregate our public schools.

And if we're gonna be teaching these things in our public schools, we really ought to be teaching about the wall of separation between church and state, which is an American original, that is an American invention, and that is something that we can all agree on and should be taught in our public schools.

- All right but the pushback against that is that the words wall of separation don't appear in the US Constitution and we only have 45 seconds.

What would you say, that this is a made up construct?

- It's absolutely woven into the very fabric of our Republic.

The idea was floating around in the enlightenment, but it was first implemented in the American experiment.

Until then, no other nation had sought to protect the ability of its citizens to think freely by separating religion and government.

We should be proud of that fact and we shouldn't let ideologues undermine it with myths about a Christian founding anywhere, but we especially shouldn't be letting them use the public schools to disseminate such propaganda.

- Andrew Seidel, thanks for coming on the program.

- My pleasure, thanks for having me.

(mysterious music) - Joining us now on our panel this week, Yvonne Fry is a businesswoman, a consultant and a Republican, and Patrick Manteiga is an editor and publisher of "La Gaceta Newspaper" in Tampa and a Democrat.

It's nice to see both of you.

Thank you for coming.

- Thank you.

- Yvonne, I want to start with you.

We heard Rabbi Silver earlier say that this is this abortion decision is an attack on religious freedom and that there's an attempt to establish a Christian fundamentalist law covering our land.

What would you say back to the rabbi?

- I appreciated his vigor.

I would say that your faith, just as with abortion, is one of the most personal things, and this with abortion, you know, I haven't really ever shared much about this, but as a single woman, I faced pregnancy with major complications and was recommended to have an abortion, I didn't, that was a personal decision that was very, very difficult, whichever direction that would have gone, and I, thankfully my son is 23, healthy, well, but I also recognize that that could not have been the case and what that would've meant for him, for me, and so many other situations that women face of financial concerns, family support or lack thereof, on and on that are just devastating, very difficult.

And I am lamenting how politicized this has become instead of supportive of women and how difficult of a situation we find ourselves in right now.

- You were happy you made the decision, your son is doing fine.

Did you feel pressured into making a decision the other way?

- I felt a lot of things.

I can't even begin to wrap around or explain the multitude of emotions with that.

And I know that, you know, in my case, it was medical issues.

Thinking about rape, thinking about other things, what women face.

And I go to, I am a conservative, to me, fundamentally, this is my personal view on this.

Women though have had abortions when it wasn't legal, they've been butchered.

The compassion that I feel for women in this and their families and situations and so on, I want to, whatever I can do to focus on, I applaud my friends who put that into action through adoption, on and on, there's so many other things that I say we need to activate around as well.

- Can I ask you if you're pro-choice now or are you part of the right to life camp?

- For me, personally, I do believe because my experience as a mother, that bond that I had with my baby in utero is strong.

I can't force that on others and again, believe that that is a personal choice, that is a personal choice.

And I faced it, I made my decision, but I can't force that for anybody else.

- What I took away from the rabbi is that there's a diversity of opinions within the faith community, Patrick, and that he's trying to represent that part of the faith community that doesn't agree that life begins at conception.

- I think what the rabbi's saying is is that your faith shouldn't top mine and I agree with him.

I think that everybody should struggle with their decision, with their doctor, with their rabbi, with their priest, whoever they want to, or by themselves, but government doesn't need to be in this decision.

Government is wrong to try and be in this.

This is a huge growth of government.

This is making government in our most intimate place and I don't know how anybody who values conservative ideas, values a free country feels this is the right thing to do.

We had in Ohio, a report of a 10 year old girl who can't get an abortion, had to go to Indiana.

I mean forcing a 10 year old to have a baby, that's forcing babies to have babies, that's third world country stuff.

I didn't know Ohio was a third world country.

You know, this is horrible and so I agree with the rabbi.

I have my beliefs and I believe that a woman's life is more valuable than that of a fetus and this goes against my religious beliefs.

- Speaking of religion, I want to ask about this concept of a wall of separation.

The reports coming out of the civics training for Florida teachers is that some of the training suggests that there is no wall of separation between religion and government in the US based on the Constitution.

A lot of conservatives think that concept of a wall of separation is wrong.

Where do you come down on this, Yvonne?

- Well, I have a 16 year old also.

I'm gonna talk about my kids today it seems.

I have 16 year old daughter.

She just finished AP US history at Plant City High School and how engaged our students are, there's no indoctrination going on.

They are standing up, they are dialoguing around all the dynamics of what they believe, where they come from.

And in those classrooms, they're not being exposed to things for the first time in the classroom.

What is out there on social media and so many other sources that they're on around the issues of today and framing it in history, because there's so much of that discourse that's going on in reference to our social issues right now, they are engaged, they are speaking up, they are loud.

- They're getting the big picture, not just a tiny picture.

Patrick, Hillsdale College, which is famously used to advertise on Rush Limbaugh's radio show is one of the groups that's involved in developing the civics initiative, but so is the Bob Graham Center, too.

So do you think the kids are gonna be indoctrinated with the new initiative?

- I think there's some big movement from people like DeSantis to try and rearrange our thinking in the US.

Dictators all the time are saying, oh, they're indoctrinating people and then they do the indoctrination.

And that's what we're having here.

We're having this conversation about wokeness, but then we are having a horrible conversation with teachers about teaching that the Constitution isn't a living, breathing document, that it's fixed in time.

This country is about us today, it isn't about people who lived 250 years ago.

And so the founding fathers, I've always had great respect for because I believe they wanted a living, breathing document, they designed it to be amended.

If you didn't want it to be amended, you wouldn't have a process of doing it.

We designed the country to grow.

We designed states to be added, counties to be created, cities to be created.

And so this all lends to believe that America was designed to change, to grow, to adjust, and anybody who wants to come back and say that you have to view the Constitution very strictly and the day was written and that when they said all men are created equal, that they were talking about men, not women, when they were writing about things that they were fixed in time, that's silly.

- They didn't envision African Americans having equal rights.

- Yeah, it's a different day.

And anybody who wants to argue those points, I think is really trying to make a point of making it a Christian nation, changing us from what we really are.

- Let's kind of continue on this track.

On the 4th of July, California's governor Gavin Newsom paid for an ad on Fox News directly attacking the policies of Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, The ad targeted some of the legislation that DeSantis is most proud of, the new limits on abortion, the Parental Rights or Don't Say Gay Law, the anti woke laws, and the restrictions on what history can be taught in schools or in corporate diversity training.

Newsom summed up DeSantis' actions as an assault on freedom.

- It's Independence Day so let's talk about what's going on in America.

Freedom, it's under attack in your state.

Your Republican leaders, they're banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors.

I urge all of you living in Florida to join the fight or join us in California, where we still believe in freedom, freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate and the freedom to love.

Don't let them take your freedom.

- So Patrick, is at the ad that Democrats have been waiting for?

What do you think of that ad?

- It's a great ad, it's a great message, and we do need on the democratic party to address things like freedom.

We gotta stop talking wonkish policy issues and we really have to talk about what this country's about and where we're going here.

And you have a Republican party led by DeSantis here locally that keeps trying to find these cultural divides.

And there was a very clear message about a culturally united culture.

And so I think Gavin Newsom spent his best $100,000 ever and I think it's a great ad and I think that we need people like that thinking about how to message the democratic party.

- Yvonne, do you think it's fair to say that Florida's governor is trying to take away freedom?

And do you think this is gonna spur anybody from Florida to move to California?

- Absolutely not.

Gavin has clearly tried to do a political move.

Maybe he is hopeful that he could have a first step up towards the presidential platform where DeSantis is.

I think he's punched the wrong governor in the nose.

If you look at the successes that we've had around freedoms, which have led to economic prosperity and record numbers of people moving to Florida and desiring to be here and be part of this state and what we're about, Gavin might have bitten off more than he can chew.

- All right, so everybody's talking about Gavin Newsom running as a Democrat for president.

And let me ask you, Yvonne, is Joe Biden, do you think he's too old to appeal to voters the second time around?

Should Biden step aside and a younger person like Newsom step up?

- I can't speak for the democratic party.

I think he's got a lot of challenges ahead of him, his age being just one of those so yes.

- Patrick, how do you think Joe Biden plays in Florida if he were to run for reelection?

- You know, I think that Biden's been a very good president.

I think he's not the best messenger for the democratic party sometimes.

We need some better messaging and he leading the party has not done that and so I'm not gonna side with anybody this early, we don't even have a primary process yet, but I think that the party's gonna have to think about its future.

I mean we're really facing a tough time in this upcoming election and abortion might be the thing that actually makes our, lets us have fewer losses.

- But it would be fair to say that Joe Biden can't issue a punch like that punch in that ad that Gavin Newsom punched DeSantis?

- Yeah, that's fair, absolutely.

- Okay, well before we go, what other news story should we be paying attention to?

And Yvonne, let's start with you.

What's out there that we should be paying attention to?

- I am very excited and encouraged by our employment numbers, 372,000 jobs is a marked step forward in making sure that people know we are alive and well in the economy and our businesses, it's a great signal to them, our small businesses, construction, on and on, keep going.

It's very important, I think there is still some correction, but I'm very, very encouraged by that.

I deal with a lot of employers and talking about workforce and that's an issue near and dear to my heart.

- A lot of people, when you ask the American public about the economy, a lot of people don't feel good about it.

In the business community that you're talking with, how do they feel about the economy?

Is a recession around the corner?

- I've been in a lot of rooms with a lot of leaders talking about this, a lot of people are a lot smarter than I am who are cautiously optimistic.

The cycles of the economy are things that we embrace and recognizing, I think the last time I was here, Florida, last in, first out, we have to have some corrections around some things, we need to true some things up, but we are in great, great shape in the state of Florida and I'm really glad, and to see the national backdrop of this, because a national recession, none of us want that, a hard recession, but a correction, I'm optimistic for.

- Yeah because the other states have to do well in order for Florida's economy to do well because we're so tourist-based.

Patrick, the other big story of the week?

- Well, I'm gonna stick on topic.

You know, we had this shooting in Highland Park 4th of July and Marjorie Taylor Green, a thought leader in the Republican party, comes out and starts to muse that perhaps it was a designed shooting to somehow trick Republicans in supporting gun control.

And you know, and as she's musing around, she's trying to kind of let people believe that maybe the Democrats are behind the shooting.

And so this is crazy and this is an elected official and this is somebody who is serving on committees that are important and the Republican party's got to police its own.

This is dangerous stuff.

We had another woman running for governor in Georgia who wanted to tear down the stones in Georgia, which got blown up a couple of days ago and she had on her website that if she was gonna get elected, she was gonna tear them down herself.

And so these people aren't understanding that there are people listening to them and there are people believing them.

I find them crazy.

Some of these people think they're prophetic.

- Yeah, well the country seems to be on edge, but thank you both for the civil conversation.

It's great to see you.

Thank you for joining us.

You can view this and past shows online at wedu.org or on the PBS app and "Florida This Week" is now available as a podcast.

From all of us here at WEDU, have a great weekend.

(dramatic music) - [Narrator] "Florida This Week" is a production of WEDU, who is solely responsible for its content.

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