Biden calls Florida laws targeting transgender people ‘sinful’

Joe Biden appears to be preparing for a head-to-head presidential election with Governor Ron DeSantis with new attacks on Florida laws that the president says are “sinful” against the LGBTQ community.

An excerpt released Monday from The Daily Show shows Biden being interviewed by guest host Kal Penn at the White House.

During the sit-down, Biden claims recent Florida laws, many of which DeSantis spearheads, are “cruel” and in the clip the president reveals his high school “revelation” moment when he decided being gay was OK in his book.

“It’s just horrible what they’re doing,” Biden said in a preview clip with the actor who served as associate director of public engagement for President Barack Obama.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who could announce a presidential candidate at any moment, is leading the way with a slew of laws that would prevent minors from receiving transgender medical care and surgeries

Lawmakers in Florida, where the legislature is led by a Republican supermajority, introduced several bills during this session that activists say will deprive members of the LGBTQ community of their rights.

Opponents of the proposed legislation say the governor is using the guise of education and parental rights to enact laws they say are anti-gay and anti-transgender.

For example, one bill would ban transgender surgeries and health care, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy, for children who say they are the opposite sex they were born into.

DeSantis released his memoir The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival last month and is currently on a book tour that many see as a pre-presidential bid-announcement tour of the states.

The book and the priorities of Florida’s current legislative sessions are largely seen as a platform on which DeSantis would campaign once he bid for the GOP nomination in 2024.

The Parental Rights in Education Act, which the governor signed into law last year, has been called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics because it prevented educators from including discussions of gender identity or sexual orientation in their curriculum. The law currently includes children in kindergarten through third grade, but the Florida legislature is now considering expanding it to minors through eighth grade.

“It’s not like a kid wakes up one morning and says, ‘You know, I’ve decided I want to be a man, or I want to be a woman, or I want to change.’ I mean, what are they thinking? They are people. They love. They have feelings,” Biden said during his conversation with Penn.

“It’s cruel,” the president added of Florida’s laws targeting minors.

When Penn asked about the “evolution” of his view of marriage equality, the president said it stretched back to his high school days.

Biden spoke to Kal Penn in an extended interview for The Daily Show. A portion of the clip released Monday shows the two discussing when Biden had the ‘revelation’ in high school that same-sex marriage was OK

“I can remember exactly when my epiphany was,” Biden said before telling a story about his high school senior seeing “two well-dressed men in suits” kiss.

“I will never forget, I turn and look at my father. He said, ‘Joey, it’s simple. They love each other,’ he recalled.

“It’s that simple,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a same-sex couple or a heterosexual couple, you should be able to get married. What’s the problem?’

“Transgender kids are really harder,” Biden told Penn. “What’s happening in Florida is, as my mother would say, almost sinful.”

While Biden says he accepted same-sex marriage as a teenager, a 2006 video circulated during the 2020 presidential election shows then-senator Biden speaking out against same-sex marriage.

“Marriage is between a man and a woman and states should respect that,” Biden said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press at the time, defending the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act.

Biden, a longtime senator from Delaware before becoming vice president and then president, voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004 and in 2006, claiming the measure was not worth Congress’s time.