Judge Dismisses Florida Arrest Over Rainbow Chalk Art Near Pulse Nightclub

[struggle4progress]

Ron DeSantis’ administration has banned chalk art on roads and painted over a memorial to victims of the mass shooting at the Orlando LGBTQ nightclub

By Naomi LaChance
August 30, 2025

A judge tossed a case, finding no probable cause on Saturday after Florida police arrested a man as part of an ongoing standoff over art at a crosswalk memorializing the 2016 mass shooting at the LGBTQ Pulse nightclub in Orlando, WESH reported. The man has been released from jail.

Florida Highway Patrol arrested Sebastian Suarez during a protest Friday night outside the nightclub. He colored the bottom of his shoe with chalk and then left footprints as he crossed the street. He was facing a charge of defacing a traffic device.

“To come here and do something like this, and to be threatened with something so extreme as a felony charge for protesting and showing love to your fellow human, it’s just insane in my opinion,” Suarez told WESH.

“We came out here yesterday just to show our support, to come out and help with the chalking,” he said. He and his fiancée are visiting from Georgia ...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/judge-florida-arrest-rainbow-chalk-art-pulse-nightclub-1235419363/

[struggle4progress]

1. Florida crosswalk wars take DeSantis's 'war on woke' to street level

Richard Luscombe in Miami
Sun 31 Aug 2025 06.00 EDT


A battalion of transportation workers armed with cans of black paint has been deployed to open a new front in Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke”, while young students trying to make their schools safer have joined the LGBTQ+ community as targets of Florida’s Republican governor.

The saga began with the state moving in the dead of night to paint over a rainbow-colored crosswalk outside Orlando’s former Pulse nightclub, where 49 people were killed in a 2016 shooting. The city’s mayor, Buddy Dyer, called the erasure of the memorial to the mostly LGBTQ+ victims “a cruel political act”.

Since then, DeSantis’s crosswalk wars have spread across Florida. The governor has ordered the removal of about 400 “non-standard” pieces of street art, even though they all received state approval as a condition of installation. A growing number of municipalities has pledged to fight him.

The state’s declared intent, acquiescent to a national directive by the Trump administration last month, is to “keep our transportation facilities free and clear of political ideologies”, Florida’s transport secretary, Jared Perdue, wrote in a post to X ...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/31/florida-crosswalks-ron-desantis-lgbtq

[struggle4progress]

2. DeSantis seeks to blame Legislature for street-art crackdown.

Lawmakers tell different story.

By Anthony Man | [e-mail] | South Florida Sun Sentinel
PUBLISHED: August 30, 2025 at 10:00 AM EDT

Faced with backlash over the state ordering cities to remove LGBTQ+ rainbow crosswalks and other decorative street art, Gov. Ron DeSantis has repeatedly cited a new Florida law that he said requires those removals.

But legislators from both sides of the aisle said the law the governor is pointing to contains no explicit language banning roadway art ...

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/08/30/desantis-seeks-to-blame-legislature-for-street-art-crackdown-lawmakers-tell-different-story/

[Biophilic]

3. DeSantis is such a pissy little rat.

He just can’t help himself. I don’t even find him embarrassing. He just doesn’t warrant that level of attention. Now the people who voted for him, yeah, they are stupid shits. Especially the second time when they knew who and what he was.

[Deuxcents]

4. He's trying very hard to keep up with the big dogs..TSF, Abbott and it just makes him look even smaller.