DeSantis omits references to LGBTQ, Hispanic communities in latest Pulse remembrance
DeSantis, who has led the state since 2019 and sought the 2024 Republican nomination for president, has mentioned the LGBTQ and Hispanic communities — the groups most devastated by the attack that killed 49 and injured dozens more — in near identical orders issued during each of his last five years in office.
In those statements, DeSantis called the massacre 'a horrific act of terrorism against the LGBTQ and Hispanic communities.' Thursday's order says the attack was 'a horrific act of terrorism' without mentioning any specific groups.
In 2019, his first year as governor, DeSantis was forced to issue an amended proclamation after an initial statement that also omitted references to LGBTQ people attracted widespread backlash. He said at the time that he was 'not involved' in drafting the first proclamation and requested his office issue a new one once he became aware of the exclusion.
'Sometimes these things happen, and you've got to correct them,' DeSantis said during a 2019 news conference on an unrelated matter.
Multiple spokespersons for the governor did not return a request for comment on this year's omission or say whether the office would issue a new statement.
Florida has recognized 'Pulse Remembrance Day' each year on June 12, the date on which the 2016 attack occurred, since its creation in 2018 by former Gov. Rick Scott (R).
Now a U.S. senator, Scott said in his original proclamation that the state 'continues to mourn the tragic loss of life and recognize the lasting impact it has on our state and communities, including Florida's LGBTQ community.'
In a statement on Thursday, Scott called the shooting, one of the deadliest in U.S. history, 'an act of terror targeting Orlando's LGBTQ and Hispanic communities.'
A statement from Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.), Florida's former attorney general whom DeSantis appointed to replace Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the Senate in January, makes no mention of LGBTQ or Latino people.
DeSantis's decision to delete references to the LGBTQ and Hispanic communities from his annual order mirrors Trump administration efforts targeting diversity and inclusion and LGBTQ rights.
References to diverse historical figures, including Jackie Robinson, were removed from government websites in an initial purge related to Trump's executive orders against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and 'gender ideology.' Last week, military.com reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to rename an oil tanker named for the assassinated gay rights activist Harvey Milk.
The Navy is also considering renaming other ships named after prominent civil rights leaders, including Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall and Lucy Stone, according to a CBS News report.
DeSantis has also campaigned against diversity efforts, frequently saying that DEI actually means 'discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination.' Laws signed during his tenure, including one forbidding classroom instruction on sexuality and gender, have been criticized for targeting the LGBTQ community.
'Governor DeSantis's erasure of the LGBTQ+ and Latino communities today may say a lot about what kind of person he is, but it doesn't change the fact that those were the communities most directly impacted at Pulse,' said Brandon Wolf, a Pulse survivor who serves as spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ advocacy organization. 'His erasure doesn't change the fact that families have empty seats at dinner tables, friends have missing faces at birthday parties, and our communities still bear the scars.'
'Today, rather than letting the governor's petty political cowardice write our story, I hope people choose to remember those stolen and impacted, reflect on the costs of violent hate, and recommit to honoring those we loved and lost with action,' said Wolf, who lost two friends, Drew Leinonen and Juan Guerrero, in the shooting at Pulse, in a text message.
Florida state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democrat and the first openly gay Latino person elected to the Legislature in 2016, called DeSantis's omission 'a petty slight.'
'The Governor's on again, off again acknowledgment of those impacted by the Pulse shooting shows he cares more about scoring political points in the moment rather than showing authentic solidarity with his own constituents,' Smith said in an emailed statement, speaking on behalf of the LGBTQ rights group Equality Florida, for whom he is a senior adviser.
'Either way it would be a mistake to focus on the Governor's bigotry and exclusion. That's already well-known,' Smith added. 'Today is about remembering the 49 taken by gun violence, as well as remembering the strength and courage of those who survived and the families impacted. They will not be erased.'
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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In this context, the background leading up to the Summit has been defined by categorically denying Baku the option of using force, offering creative (economic, energy, infrastructure, etc.) incentives to both sides to make certain they adhere to the U.S. plan, and using these developments to formalize a normalization framework that, by 2028, will lead to the signing of a final peace agreement. For Armenia, the U.S. proposal was not only a highly-preferable outcome of its Western pivot and policy of diversification, but more specifically, it has fundamentally altered its security architecture. The joint U.S.-Armenia venture in building TRIPP, for official Yerevan, is not, in and of itself, only an economic or commercial endeavor, but just as, if not more importantly, an important layer of robust deterrence against any future acts of Azerbaijani aggression. Within the domain of security, TRIPP offers Armenia an expansive and multilayered framework of soft deterrence, which exponentially diminishes the threat propensity within its security environment. In essence, whereas the threat of Azerbaijani incursions were a continuous and high-probability threat since 2020, that threat has been exceedingly marginalized by virtue of the U.S.-led normalization initiative and the development of the TRIPP project. Furthermore, the outcome of the Washington Summit, and America's vision of undertaking a multi-year process of finalizing a peace treaty, extensively handicaps Aliyev's capacity to tap into his hybrid warfare toolkit. While Baku, for tactical and strategic reasons, will still seek to utilize certain methods of hybrid warfare, it will, nonetheless, be unable to utilize its wide-ranging toolkit the way it has for the last five years. Within the confluence of such developments, Aliyev's penchant for relying on kinetic and coercive diplomacy will also lose efficacy, since the theater of conflict has been transferred to a normalization format with immense U.S. investment. In no uncertain terms, the normalization process brings Armenia a state of de facto peace, and while a peace treaty, if achieved in the future, will produce a de jure outcome, the more important variable, in the immediate and near future, is that Aliyev's war machine, which had fed off of the power disparity with Armenia, would have go into hibernation. What the U.S. normalization initiative has done for Armenia's security architecture is quite unique: it has given Armenia a transit route that it controls, not the Zangezur Corridor of Aliyev's dreams or the FSB-controlled corridor of Moscow's desires, while at the same time strengthening Armenia's position as a regional actor. Finally, inherent in the normalization initiative is the implicit understanding that Azerbaijan will have to withdraw from the territories it has occupied within Armenia-proper as the TRIPP project comes close to conclusion and reaches the opening stage. More simply put, Azerbaijan will either have to withdraw or act as an obstructionist force against the U.S. project, for the U.S. normalization initiative envisions the operationalization of TRIPP with the de-occupation of Armenian territories. Thus, Azerbaijan's occupation of Armenian sovereign territory will soon become a liability, and what Aliyev had initially deemed an important instrument of leverage against Armenia will now become a source of diplomatic weakness in its relations with the U.S. Quite similar to what will also happen soon with the POWs: as the process develops, the issue of Armenian prisoners of war, a topic of growing importance to the White House, will become a political liability for Baku.
