This appeared on the website of the New York Times. It is about five minutes long.
Archives for category: Censorship
Recently, the power lines in Moore County, North Carolina, went down, damaged by gunfire, and officials suspect they were intentionally sabotaged, leaving 40,000 or so people without power. Some suspect that the power was shut down to prevent a drag show from happening.
Crooks&Liars points to domestic terrorism and mentions an activist who had loudly denounced the drag show. The activist, a former Army officer, had previously been questioned about her participation in the January 6 insurrection. She posted on Facebook that she knew why the power went out.
The Washington Post reported that the FBI is investigating.
At Sunrise Theater on Saturday night, drag queen Naomi Dix was about to introduce an act when the lights went out. Dix said that participants immediately suspected that the power outage might be connected to those opposed to the performance (Dix spoke to The Post on the condition that she be identified only by her stage name out of fear for her safety).
Dix, 31, said she tried to keep the audience of about 300 people calm and upbeat. She asked them to turn on the flashlights on their cellphones, then led the crowd in singing “Halo” by Beyoncé.
I am not sure when drag shows became popular (probably in Ivy League men’s colleges, where men played women’s roles, or in Shakespeare’s time, when women were not permitted to act on stage). But they seem to be popping up in small towns, suburbs, and big cities, not just gay bars. Recently the Washington Post reported on a city-sponsored Christmas parade in Taylor, Texas, that included floats with drag queens—and caused conservative ministers to launch their own parade, limited to floats with “family and Biblical values.”
I had intended to write a post about Billy Townsend’s latest post, where he declared his solidarity with the drag queens, but I could not help noticing stories about drag queens in other places. Recall that Club Q in Colorado Springs was holding a drag show when the killer burst in and murdered five people. The guy who jumped on the killer and stopped him was there with his wife and family to see the drag show. Evidently, drag queens are funny and make people laugh, and many straight people enjoy their performances.
For many years, audiences in New York City were entertained by the shows written and performed by Charles Busch. They were hilarious send-ups of traditional fare, and they attracted large audiences.
Millions of people love the Billy Wilder’s comedy “Some Like It Hot,” where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dress up as women to escape angry mobsters. To put it plainly, they pretended to be drag queens.
I remember attending Dame Edna’s Broadway performances, which were drag shows, and Dame Edna is not gay. The Australian performer has been married four times (to women) and has four children. His fourth wife is Lizzie Spender.
Yet despite the long tradition of drag shows, some states are now passing legislation to ban them or to ban children from attending them (whatever happened to parental rights?)
Billy Townsend wrote:
Drag performers are infinitely better, braver, and more productive human beings and citizens than the cosplaying Nazis stirred up by Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis and Kanye and Elon et. al to torment and/or kill them.
This is both obvious and surprisingly difficult for even decent people to say bluntly. I’m not sure that I’ve ever said it. Perhaps that’s because I’ve never perceived a real need to plainly state the obvious until now.
Our community needs to protect the people harassed and death-threatened while minding their own business and making their own joy on Saturday. And it should celebrate their creativity and courage.
I’ve only seen a handful of drag shows in my life. Those I’ve seen were less “sexual” than a Muppet Show number. So I won’t dignify any bullshit excuses anyone may offer for saying, “Yes, but …” when considering how to address out of town Nazis attempting to terrorize Lakeland citizens just days after a MAGA boy shot up a drag show in Colorado.
I don’t have much else to say.
The Ledger and Lakeland Now both have good accounts if you want to read them.
But I would avoid sharing the pictures. That’s what the Nazi boys want. Even if you share the pictures in anger and revulsion, you’re sharing their propaganda/transgressive recruitment value. Think about how you amplify them.
Also, I think it’s important to note that the drag event organizers praised the response of the Lakeland Police Department as fast and protective. It’s very important for institutions of power to do their jobs for all citizens. And we should definitely acknowledge/praise when they do.
This is a time that demands choices, both in rhetoric and deed. I thank Lakeland’s brave drag performers for reminding me of that.
The Nazis can fuck off.
That pretty much sums up my view.
Governor Ron DeSantis believes he should control everything, not just state government. He has made schools one of his top issues, by promoting a medley of policies.
He ridiculed mask mandates. He got the legislature to pass a bill banning “WOKE” activities and “critical race theory” in schools, colleges, and the workplace. Federal courts have already struck down parts of this law (e.g. demanding that college professors teach only the views approved by DeSantis). He got the legislature to pass a law called “Don’t Say Gay” that prohibits any teaching about gender in K-3 and throws into question the legitimacy of any mention of gender in other grades. He stands in opposition to any workplace training in diversity, equity and inclusion.
Have you ever heard of a state governor endorsing candidates in local school board elections?
At the last election, DeSantis endorsed 73 local school board candidates who share his hard-right views. More than half won. Most of the same candidates were endorsed by the fringe group “Moms for Liberty.” Where the DeSantis candidates won a majority, they wasted no time in firing the superintendent. Teachers in DeSantis-led counties must be very careful in teaching about race, racism, gender, American history or anything likely to offend the ideologues who control the board.
Politico reported on the swift actions taken by DeSantis-endorsed school boards:
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis put his weight behind dozens of conservative school board candidates across Florida during the midterms. Now they’re in office — and are purging some educational leaders who enforced Covid-19 mandates.
New board members in two GOP-leaning counties essentially sacked their school superintendents over the span of one week. The ousters were spurred by how the superintendents carried out local policies like efforts to support the rights of parents, an issue inflamed by schools imposing student mask mandates last fall in defiance of DeSantis.
And while not tied to the 2022 election, the school board in Broward County earlier this month fired its superintendent through an effort led by five members appointed by DeSantis. All combined, school boards with ties to DeSantis pushed out three superintendents in November alone — and each of them served over districts that implemented student mask mandates.
“We had a wave in school districts that spit in parents’ faces,” said state Rep. Randy Fine (R-Palm Bay), who earlier this year sought to punish schools with mask mandates. “And now the people who did that are gone.”
In Brevard and Sarasota counties, embattled school leaders have faced immediate pressure from newly-installed board members and offered to leave voluntarily rather than risk a vote on their terminations.
The boards in both counties now have conservative majorities who sought a change in leadership immediately after the midterms. Although school boards are nonpartisan posts, lines between Democratic and Republican candidates were drawn in many counties through endorsements from each party as well as outside groups. The newly-elected board members in these cases support parental rights while opposing critical race theory and teaching gender orientation in schools.
DeSantis in particular used his clout to endorse more than two dozen school board candidates during the 2022 election cycle, a rare move for a Florida governor that came with $1,000 cash contributions from DeSantis and other GOP lawmakers. Most of the candidates DeSantis endorsed won their elections and are now transforming the make-up of school district leadership and will have huge influence over policies affecting hundreds of thousands of students in the state.
Both Sarasota and Brevard’s school boards put the superintendents on the chopping block the same day that new members endorsed by DeSantis and conservative organizations like Moms for Liberty were sworn into office.
Sarasota board members called Superintendent Brennan Asplen’s job into question at a meeting Tuesday night specially called to discuss his contract. After fielding about four hours of public comment, mostly in support of the superintendent, board members vented criticisms over student performance in reading, how he handled masking students and a perceived lack of transparency from Asplen.
Understanding he may not have a job much longer, Asplen offered up his resignation on Monday night — the day before the board met to weigh his ouster. But the superintendent also fought at the meeting to keep his job by attempting to punch holes in the critiques from board members.
“I have a feeling I’m going to be fired after tonight because I just can’t hold this back,” Asplen told the board from as a preface.
Asplen said that some of the board’s comments were “ridiculous” given that he had been at the school since 2020, a timeframe that included the Covid-19 pandemic. And yet despite the coronavirus uprooting education, Sarasota earned “A” grades from the state both years. The superintendent also claimed he was being shut out by board members since the election and noted that he enacted a mandatory student masking policy for only three weeks, and that was due to Sarasota’s board voting 3-2 in favor of the mandate.
Here is an account of the firing in Sarasota, where the superintendent revealed that he is a “conservative Republican.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has a problem: he cannot tolerate dissent or what he sees as disobedience to his wishes. He seems to think that he can order or legislate complete subservience to his beliefs.
DeSantis fired Hillsborough County’s state attorney, Andrew Warren, who was twice elected to his post by the voters of the county. Warren has sued to have his position restored. The trial began this week.
The firing of Warren, like DeSantis’ firing of elected local school board members, suggests a man with an authoritarian temperament who recognizes no limits on his power.
The Miami Herald reported:
Lawyers will square off this week in a Tallahassee courtroom for a politically charged trial that’s expected to center on one question:
What was Gov. Ron DeSantis’ motive for yanking Andrew Warren from office? In a surprise move in August that made national headlines, Warren, Hillsborough County’s twice-elected state attorney, was suspended from his duties and escorted out of his office by a sheriff’s deputy. It happened as DeSantis held a rally-style news conference at the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office at which he and others lamented aspects of Warren’s progressive approach to criminal justice.
Warren is asking a federal judge to reinstate him. He says the suspension was political retaliation against his right to free speech. DeSantis says he did it because Warren refused to enforce state laws.
Warren is asking a federal judge to reinstate him. He says the suspension was political retaliation against his right to free speech. DeSantis says he did it because Warren refused to enforce state laws.
WHO WILL TESTIFY?
Warren’s lawyers in recent weeks have deposed nine witnesses. They include several members of the governor’s staff, among them his former press secretary Christina Pushaw, who famously tweeted the night before the suspension to prepare for the “liberal media meltdown of the year…”
The governor’s lawyers deposed five people. They include two Hillsborough prosecutors who may offer insight into Warren’s policy against prosecuting certain minor offenses — one of the reasons the governor cited in accusing Warren of neglecting his duties.
The actual written policy indicates individual prosecutors should use their discretion in deciding whether to pursue such crimes. Warren contends the policies were not a blanket refusal to enforce laws.
The local sheriff complained that Warren refused to prosecute homeless people who slept in business parking lots for trespassing. Warren said that prosecuting them would not solve the problem of homelessness.
Among a deluge of exhibits to hit the court file: a memo that the governor’s staff prepared before Warren’s suspension, noting that Warren was described in a news story as something close to a “social justice warrior.”
It mentioned his refusal to prosecute 67 protesters who were arrested on unlawful assembly charges during protests over the murder of George Floyd.
The memo seemed to express particular concern over Warren’s stance on abortion, and his having signed a pledge with other elected prosecutors to refrain from prosecuting abortion-related cases. (Warren signed a similar pledge against prosecuting transgender healthcare cases.) The memo included a legal analysis of how the governor could justify suspending him.
What seemed to anger DeSantis most was that Warren made clear that he would not prosecute people who defied the state’s abortion ban. To DeSantis, Warren was “woke” and, as the Governor likes to say, Florida is where “woke” goes to die.
How could Governor DeSantis ignore a state prosecutor who defied him? That’s why he fired him.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article269344527.html#storylink=cpy
David C. Berliner is one of the most honored researchers in the field of education.
He sent the following reflections on censorship. His thoughts reflect my views about censorship and abortion. If you are opposed to certain books, don’t read them. If you oppose abortion, don’t have one. Don’t impose your views on others.
Dr. Berliner wrote:
I was asked some time ago to write about censorship for the Horace Mann League. My explorations of the topic led me first to a personal statement:
“It is the right of people to not listen to, and not read, anything they find offensive. But this right is limited: it does not give them the right to limit what others choose to hear or read. It gives concerned citizens absolutely no right to forbid anyone else to listen to or read what they choose.
The only exception to this statement is with one’s own children. Parents do have both a right, and an obligation, to react to what their children are listening to and reading.
But that right and obligation is limited to their own children—not mine! I will make such decisions for myself. And I happen to trust school teachers, and librarians, to act for me, to act in “locus parentis.”
And I hope that every librarian and teacher is thoughtful enough to remember that merely avoiding certain discussions is itself a form of censorship!”
David C. Berliner
Some of the thoughts of others that I thought worth thinking about follow:
“The real heroes [in our society] are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.”
― Bruce Coville
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky
“Free societies…are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.”
― Salman Rushdie
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
― United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
“Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.”
― Clare Luce Booth
“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower
“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”
― Benjamin Franklin
“Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”
― Mark Twain
[I]t’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.”
― Judy Blume
“Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory… In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man’s freedom.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt
“If you can’t say “Fuck” you can’t say, “Fuck the government.”
― Lenny Bruce
“Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson
“All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession
“[Public] libraries should be open to all—except the censor.
[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]”
― John F. Kennedy
I
“Only the nonreader fears books. ”
― Richard Peck
“Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.”
― Eugene Gladstone O’Neill
“If there’s one American belief I hold above all others, it’s that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is “right” and what is “best” should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. … As a nation, we’ve been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn’t approve of them.”
[Bangor Daily News, Guest Column of March 20, 1992]”
― Stephen King
“When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn’t known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…”
― Christopher Hitchens,
“The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947
“Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series
“Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice.”
― Holbrook Jackson
“Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don’t even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that’s wrong.”
― Judy Blume
“The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.”
― Henry Steele Commager
“Our freedoms are vanishing. If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far more riskier — and much, much harder.”
― Suzy Kassem
“I also hold very strong personal convictions about censorship. I don’t believe in forbidden knowledge.”
― Andrea Cremer
Alan J. Singer writes about Missouri’s bid to be the state with the most censorship in schools and libraries.
He writes:
The State of Missouri may have to change its nickname from “Show-Me-State” to “It’s against the law to show me!” According to a report from PEN America, in response to a new state law, this fall Missouri schools removed almost 300 books from library…
The State of Missouri may have to change its nickname from “Show-Me-State” to “It’s against the law to show me!”
According to a report from PEN America, in response to a new state law, this fall Missouri schools removed almost 300 books from library shelves. They include Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus about the Holocaust,graphic novels based on George Orwell’s 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Bible, and the Gettysburg Address, art history books with naked subjects, and comic books about Batman and X-Men.Leviticus in the Old Testament has a lot of rules about sex and apparently the New Testament starts with too many “begats.” The new law establishes criminal penalties for exposing students to “explicit sexual material.” More than half of the books are about or written by LGBTQ+ people or people of color.
PEN America calls the Missouri book banning a “grave threat to the freedom to read.” It is the latest in a wave of “mass removals of books, new legislative proposals targeting publishers, and the passage of restrictive school district policies.” Nearly 100 books were recently pulled from Beaufort, South Carolina school libraries, a proposed Texas law would require publishers to create a rating system for school library books, and a number of states and school districts are afraid of any reference to gender fluidity.
Senate Bill 775, which went into effect in August 2022 was supposed to address the rights of survivors of sexual assault. However, an amendment pasted into the bill classified “providing explicit sexual material to a student” as a class A misdemeanor and subjects “any person affiliated with a school in an official capacity” to arrest. In response, at least 11 school districts starting purging books from the school library.
A spokesperson for a district that banned fourteen books was quoted in the St. Louis Dispatch. “The unfortunate reality of Senate Bill 775 is that, now in effect, it includes criminal penalties for individual educators. We are not willing to risk those potential consequences and will err on the side of caution on behalf of the individuals who serve our students.”
PEN America has posted an online petition addressed toMissouri School Boards and Districts. You can add your name at this link. A number of prominent authors have signed the letter. They include Laurie Halse Anderson, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Roxane Gay, Lois Lowry, and Art Spiegelman.
Please open the link to read the PEN petition and add your name.
This has been a banner year for book banning.
CBS News published a brief description of the 50 most banned books this years. Most, as you will see, are about sexuality, gender and race. Parents and activists fear that children will become what they read about. They worry that reading about gay students will turn their children gay. Why would they worry that their children become racist.
This surge in censorship is a testament of sorts to the power of the written word. The peculiar thing about this crusade to ban books is that far more explicit material about sexuality and race is readily available on the internet.
Censorship of books, textbooks, even standardized tests is not new. I wrote a book called The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. The pressure groups come from the right and the left and from groups claiming to represent the elderly, women, religious folk, and all sorts of others. Every publisher of textbooks and tests has “bias and sensitivity” guidelines, long lists of words, phrases, topics, and images that will never appear in a textbook or on a test. I have a list at the end of the book that includes more than 800 banned items.
Jack Hassard, a retired science educator, has watched Donald Trump’s actions closely and even written a book called THE TRUMP FILES.
Hassard, Jack. The Trump Files: An Account of the Trump Administration’s Effect on American Democracy, Human Rights, Science and Public Health (p. 65). Northington-Hearn Publishing LLC. Kindle Edition.
In this post, he links to an in-depth study by scholars at the Brookings Institution, who examine Trump’s efforts to overturn the Georgia election results.
Hassard prints an excerpt from the Brookings report:
The researchers who wrote the Brookings report of the Fulton County Investigation of Trump’s election interference conclude:
We conclude that Trump’s post-election conduct in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes. These charges potentially include: criminal solicitation to commit election fraud; intentional interference with performance of election duties; conspiracy to commit election fraud; criminal solicitation; and state Racketeer Influenced and
Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act violations.
Please open the link and read the rest.
The Texas Tribune reports that conservative school board candidates in some suburban districts failed with culture war issues.
School board elections: Even though school board races are nonpartisan, the Nov. 8 elections for Round Rock and Wylie independent school sistrict trustees drew high-profile endorsements from the Republican Party of Texas.
But in both districts, every candidate endorsed by the Republican Party of Texas, a total of nine, lost. In Round Rock, the races weren’t even close, with one candidate, Tiffanie Harrison, beating her opponent by 25 percentage points.
While Texas Republicans largely swept Tuesday’s elections and GOP-backed school board trustees made gains elsewhere in the state, the results in Round Rock and Wylie raise questions about the current conservative strategy in suburban school districts and the appeal of an agenda built on culture war issues.
One of the primary targets for conservatives running for school board seats has been critical race theory, a college-level discipline that examines racism within social and legal structures within the United States. It is not taught in elementary or secondary public schools in Texas, but Republicans have used the term to target how students are taught about race in schools.
Republicans leaned on a strategy modeled after one used in Tarrant County, where in May, a slate of 11 conservative, anti-CRT candidates won races in school boards. But the GOP was unable to mimic the occurrence in the midterm elections cycle.
Jill Farris, a Round Rock school board candidate endorsed by the Texas GOP who lost her race, attributed the results to a changing electorate that is more liberal than in previous years.
“Maybe we were all kind of relying a little bit on this red wave and thought that parents were just as angry as we were,” Farris said. “At least now, we know where the community stands and we can move forward.”
The Boston Globe wrote about the activities of a Dark Money group called Parents Defending Education, which has filed lawsuits against the public schools in Wellesley and Newton in their quest to ban books and cleanse the schools of teaching about racism and gender.
Maurice Cunningham wrote a letter to the Globe explaining the reason for the harassment. He thinks their goal is intimidation. He’s right. But there is more. I think their goal is to undermine confidence in public schools and build support for privatization.
He wrote:
LETTERS
In its challenges to schools, group’s object lesson is intimidation
Updated November 18, 2022, 2:30 a.m.
Re “Schools wary as nonprofit targets teaching: Right-leaning group’s complaints cite bias in lessons on gender, race, sexuality” (Page A1, Nov. 15): Parents Defending Education is an obedient franchise of right-wing interests, including Charles Koch and the Council for National Policy, that are working to destroy public education.
Legal actions such as Parents Defending Education’s civil rights complaint against the Newton Public Schools and its lawsuit against Wellesley Public Schools are meant to generate publicity and foster intimidation. As the Globe has reported previously, the group’s civil rights “complaints likely will go nowhere.” The lawsuit settled on terms favorable to Wellesley.
However, Parents Defending Education isn’t after legal recourse; it’s after harassment. Wellesley School Superintendent David Lussier said he has received “obscene” and “awful” e-mails from people connected to the group. In December 2021, the Globe reported that two Black school principals in Newton had received “racist and confrontational” messages after the right-wing publisher Breitbart published an article misrepresenting how the principals’ schools were handling lessons about the verdicts in the trials of Kyle Rittenhouse and the men convicted of killing Ahmaud Arbery. Breitbart’s story was framed by Parents Defending Education.
Racist and obscene messages menacing educators are not an unfortunate consequence of Parents Defending Education’s machinations; they are entirely foreseeable.
Maurice T. Cunningham
Cambridge
The writer is the author of “Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.” He is a retired associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a former state assistant attorney general in Massachusetts.
Diane Ravitch's blog 