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Lithwick and Ornstein: A Last Chance for Democracy?

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2024 //
88

Dahlia Lithwick and Norman Ornstein are lawyers and close observers of national politics. In this article, they urge us to take Trump’s threats seriously. They are not just campaign rhetoric or empty promises. He means what he says. As Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Most of the mainstream media (MSNBC is an exception) attempts to normalize Trump, as though he’s just another in a long line of conservative politicians. He is not. He is an autocrat who longs to have total control and to use that control to get vengeance for his enemies (no “loyal opposition” for him).

The first term was a warning. Trump tried in some cases to pick good people, but they didn’t last long. He won’t make the same mistake. He will demand loyalty, total loyalty. Anyone he appoints will have to agree that the election of 2020 was rigged and stolen.

He says he will take bold steps to reverse the progressive gains of the past 90 years, which he will attribute to “communists, socialists, fascists vermin, and scum”

Lithwick and Ornstein write at Slate about The dangers posed by Trump:

Most would-be dictators run for office downplaying or sugarcoating their intentions, trying to lure voters with a vanilla appeal. But once elected, the autocratic elements take over, either immediately or gradually: The destruction of free elections, undermining the press, co-opting the judiciary, turning the military into instruments of the dictatorship, installing puppets in the bureaucracy, making sure the legislature reinforces rather than challenges lawless or unconstitutional actions, using violence and threats of violence to cow critics and adversaries, rewarding allies with government contracts, and ensuring that the dictator and family can secrete billions from government resources and bribes. This was the game plan for Putin, Sisi, Orbán, and many others. It’s hardly unfamiliar.

Donald Trump is rather different in one respect. He has not softened his spoken intentions to get elected. While Trump is a congenital liar—witness his recent claim that he, not Joe Biden, got $35 insulin for diabetics—when it comes to how he would act if elected again to the presidency, he has been brutally honest, as have his closest advisers and campaign allies. His presidency would feature retribution against his enemies, weaponizing and politicizing the Justice Department to arrest and detain them whether there were valid charges or not. He has pledged to pardon the Jan. 6 violent insurrectionist rioters, who could constitute a personal vigilante army for President Donald Trump, presumably alongside the official one.

He has openly said he would be a dictator on Day One, reimplementing a Muslim ban, purging the bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash protests and take on opponents while replacing military leaders who would resist turning the military into a presidential militia with pliant generals. He would begin immediately to put the 12 million undocumented people in America into detention camps before moving to deport them all. His Republican convention policy director, Russell Vought, has laid out many of these plans as have his closest advisers, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, among others. Free elections would be a thing of the past, with more radical partisan judges turning a blind eye to attempts to protect elections and voting rights. He has openly flirted with the idea that he would ignore the 22nd Amendment and stay beyond his term of office.

The battle plan of his allies in the Heritage Foundation, working closely with his campaign via Project 2025, includes many of the aims above, and more; it would also tighten the screws on abortion after Dobbs, move against contraception, reinstate criminal sanctions against gay sex while overturning the right to same-sex marriage, among other things. His top foreign policy adviser, Richard Grenell, has reiterated what Trump has said about his isolationist-in-the-extreme foreign policy—jettison NATO, abandon support for Ukraine and give Putin a green light to go after Poland and other NATO countries, and reorient American alliances to create one of strongmen dictators including Kim Jong-un. Shockingly, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson violated sacred norms and endangered security by bypassing qualified lawmakers and appointing to the House Intelligence Committee two dangerous and manifestly unqualified members—one insurrectionist sympathizer, Rep. Scott Perry, who has sued the FBI, and one extremist demoted by the military for drunkenness, pill pushing, and other offenses, Rep. Ronny Jackson—simply because Donald Trump demanded it. They will have access to America’s most critical secrets and will likely share them with Trump if his status as a convicted felon denies him access to top secret information during the campaign. This is part of a broader pattern in which GOP lawmakers do what Trump wants, no matter how extreme or reckless….

We are worried about this baseline assumption that everything is fine until someone alerts us that nothing is fine, that of course our system will hold because it always has. We worry that we are exceptionally good at telling ourselves that shocking things won’t happen, and then when they do happen, we don’t know what to do. We worry that every time we say “the system held” it implies that “holding” equals “winning” as opposed to barely scraping by. We worry that while Trump has armies of surrogates out there arguing that Trump is an all-powerful God proxy, the rule of law has no surrogates out there arguing for anything because nobody ever came to a rally for a Rule 11 motion. The Biden administration has largely taken the position that the felony conviction is irrelevant because it’s proof that the status quo isn’t in danger. But the reality is that Republicans are openly campaigning against judges, juries, and prosecutors. Overt declarations of blowing up our checks and balances and following the blueprints to autocracy set by Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, meanwhile, are treated with shrugs by mainstream journalists and commentators. What’s more, Republicans in Congress have shown a willingness to kowtow to every Trump demand. The signals are flashing red that our fundamental system is in danger.

“The system is holding” is not a plan for a knowable future. It never was.

Please open the link and read the article in full.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Louisiana: Attacks on Librarians Intensify and Inspire Fear and Courage

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2024 //
4

Governor Ron DeSantis unleashed a rightwing barrage against school libraries and public libraries, and even he has backed off (a bit) as a small number of angry censors, led by groups like Moms for Liberty, have barraged librarians with demands for censorship. These “Moms” don’t want “Liberty”; they want to impose their views on others.

Sarah Ravits of the Gambit in Louisiana describes the intense attacks on libraries and librarians, by groups whose purpose is to restrict access to books they don’t like.

She writes:

Amanda Jones never thought of herself as a controversial person.

A beloved librarian in a small, tight-knit South Louisiana community, she’d earned numerous awards for her commitment to education over the years, including the coveted National School Librarian of the Year honor in 2021.

“I had a rock-solid relationship with my community, and I was in good standing,” she says. “I grew up here, and I devote so much time to my school, community and children.”

But her life took a sudden, bizarre turn in 2022 when she spoke at a public library board meeting.

During a heated discussion about whether a local library should restrict access to certain books for teenagers, Jones echoed what many educators have been saying for years.

Challenges to books are often “done with the best of intentions,” but frequently target the Black and LGBTQ communities, she said. Removing or relocating those books could be “extremely harmful to our most vulnerable — our children. Just because you don’t want to read it or see it does not give you the right to deny [it to] others.”

Jones certainly wasn’t the lone, dissenting voice that evening — she says at least 30 other people in attendance expressed similar sentiments.

But the next day she found herself being viciously targeted in a smear campaign by the ultra-conservative nonprofit Citizens for a New Louisiana, and the Facebook account Bayou State of Mind.

“They made memes about me and posted my picture and where I work,” Jones told Gambit. “They said that I advocate for teaching anal sex and that I want to give 6-year-olds pornography and erotica.”

As false and ridiculous as the claims were, they took off like wildfire across the internet and spilled over into everyday life as Jones, her family and her colleagues were bombarded with threatening messages and phone calls, including from people who said they were going to kill her.

Jones, terrified and suffering from severe mental distress, eventually took a medical leave of absence…

Right-wing activists have led efforts nationwide to attack books while targeting libraries and their workers. That, in turn, has led Republicans enthralled to these radical interests to push legislation forwarding their agenda in states across the country.

The war against libraries has been felt especially hard in Louisiana, where multiple parishes have become engulfed in legal and political battles centered around book censorship…

While some of the most egregious bills failed to even make it out of legislative committees, these efforts have nonetheless had a chilling effect on library workers.

One librarian in the New Orleans area, who spoke to Gambit under condition of anonymity, says they are “disillusioned and annoyed,” by the implication that librarians distribute obscene materials.

“I’m not a criminal,” the librarian says. “My job is to provide people with good information….”

Adding to librarians’ frustrations is the fact that book challengers often take passages wildly out of context, and it takes already-strained library board members and workers months to fully audit books after they’ve been challenged.

In St. Tammany Parish, for example, more than 150 books were challenged last year, according to the Louisiana Illuminator.

Going after so many books at once was a clear tactic to overwhelm librarians, who are required to produce reports on each book called into question. For every complaint, the library’s policy was to pull the book from circulation and refer it to a committee for review. Eventually, the number of challenged books was so high the library created a policy that it will not pull books from shelves while they are under review.

Many of the complaints came from just a handful of activists who don’t even have library cards or kids who use the library. In fact, in many states these complaints aren’t even coming from people who live in the state, let alone the local community…

Some of those involved passing legislation to bring criminal charges to librarians, which passed in fellow red states like Arkansas, West Virginia and Missouri.

The Arkansas law, for example, states school and public librarians can be sentenced up to six years in prison for distributing “obscene” or “harmful” material to students under 18.

That law, however, is currently blocked by a federal judge…

Then there are the ongoing attempts by the Legislature to discredit the American Library Association, considered to be the top professional library association, by blasting it as being too “woke” and “Marxist.”

One particularly shocking bill, authored by Livingston Parish Republican Rep. Kellee Dickerson, sought to imprison public librarians with hard labor and slap them with huge fines if they dared to get reimbursed for attending ALA conferences.

“If you’re going to put librarians in jail for even trying to associate with (their) profession’s national organization, that kinda gives away the game,” says one of the librarians Gambit spoke with…

Some of the more problematic bills, like throwing librarians in jail for attending the ALA conferences with public funds, died immediately in committee….

Then there are everyday citizens who have joined the fight to stand up for librarians and books.

Lisa Rustemeyer, a semi-retired mother of grown children in St. Tammany Parish, has become an activist in recent months.

Rustemeyer previously never thought she’d see public libraries being targeted, and said she felt a “gut instinct” to stand up when she saw they were under fire.

Lately she has found herself writing letters, making phone calls, attending public meetings and urging legislators to reconsider their bills.

Rustemeyer says she has always turned to libraries during “tough times,” while looking for answers, or simply for entertainment. “It’s where you meet other people and see your neighbors,” she says. “Libraries represent democracy and free speech.”

The way she sees it, dismantling and undermining public trust in libraries is a step toward dismantling and undermining trust in democracy itself.

“This doesn’t really come from a logical place,” she says. “(Lawmakers) are not scared of guns, but they’re scared of books? There’s no logic in it, which makes it infuriating. There’s no evidence that any kid has ever been harmed by a book. And here we are at the bottom of literacy, we’re at the bottom in (education) for as long as I can remember. We should not take award-winning books out of the hands of children. That is insane….”

Amanda Jones, meanwhile, has decided to double down on her advocacy work.

While the groups who targeted her expected Jones to be a shrinking violet, she says her commitment to literacy and free speech has only grown stronger.

“I was a hot mess for about a year, and then I decided to make lemonade out of lemons,” she says. “Screw them … No one wants to be famous for being defamed and called a groomer.”

Because she was already well-known in the library world, she says she has decided to share her story far and wide.

“I decided I wanted to tell my story, speak out and try to help other people know, they can also speak out,” she says.

What helps motivate her, she says, is that moment most librarians can probably relate to: when a book resonates with a new reader.

Jones calls it a “home run” moment.

“When you put a book in a kid’s hand, and it becomes their ‘home run’ book — it’s when you hook them into reading,” she explains. “And you know that because they read that book, they’re going to read one or two more, and then become a lifelong reader.”

She has seen it happen over and over throughout her career.

She says, “Every student deserves to see themselves reflected in the characters on our shelves.”

Categories Censorship, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy

Texas: School District Votes to Delete Textbook Chapters on Climate Change, Cultural Diversity, Vaccines

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2024 //
37

The school board of the Cypress-Fairbanks district (Cy-Fair) in Texas voted to delete chapters they didn’t like from textbooks in science. Science teachers in the district were taken aback.

Cy-Fair is located in the Houston suburbs and is one of the largest districts in the state.

Elizabeth Sander of The Houston Chronicle wrote:

The former science coordinator at Cypress-Fairbanks ISD was “appalled” as she watched the conservative stronghold on the school board vote to remove 13 chapters from science, health and education textbooks last month, scrapping in just minutes countless hours of work done by both state and local textbook review committees.

“Chapters are not independent entities. They’re put in an order purposefully, and they build off of prior knowledge, and they reference information in prior areas,” said Debra Hill, who has 40 years of experience in science education. “It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to take off the chapter on adding and subtracting, and we’ll just skip ahead to multiplication.’”

The material that was deleted will be covered by state tests.

One Cy Falls High School teacher, who served on the review committee for the earth systems course materials, has filed a grievance with the board that will be discussed at Thursday’s board workshop, according to information shared on social media by Trustee Julie Hinaman, the lone opposing vote on removing the chapters. Critics question whether students will get all the information the state intends — and will test for — in a last-minute effort to replace the materials. 

The earth science textbook had three entire chapters removed, titled, “Earth Systems and Cycles,” “Mineral and Energy Resources” and “Climate and Climate Change.”

Other content removed from the textbooks included chapters on cultural diversity, vaccines, COVID-19 and climate change. Courses impacted include education, health science, biology and environmental science.

Cy-Fair ISD’s Chief Academic Officer Linda Macias assured board members when they made the vote in May that it would be possible for their curriculum staff to make these changes, even as the staff has been slashed in budget cuts for the 2024-2025 school year. 

But Hill isn’t so sure it will actually be possible for Cy-Fair teachers to teach the required Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills next year, she said. 

Creating a new curriculum is hard enough, and the district must also provide students with materials that pertain to every single science TEK, she said. Cy-Fair’s curriculum staff and other educators may be responsible for creating their own textbook pages to replace the ones that were deleted, a process that could take countless hours outside of instruction that could drive teachers from the profession altogether, she said.

Plus, Hill hasn’t seen any clarity on who would approve the new instructional materials. The board could theoretically reject new chapters created by the district if it included too much of the type of climate change material that the deleted textbook chapters covered, Hill worried.

“If you want to drive teachers out of education, this is what you should do to them,” she said. “I am just very afraid that students are not going to get access to accurate, TEKS-aligned content.”

Last month, the school board voted to eliminate discussions of vaccines and other topics, while cutting the budget and eliminating 600 positions.

More than a dozen chapters including content on vaccines, cultural diversity, climate change, depopulation and other topics deemed controversial by conservative Cypress-Fairbanks ISD trustees will be removed from textbooks in the state’s third largest school system for the 2024-2025 school year.

Trustees voted 6-1 late Monday to omit the material, after an hourslong discussion about a $138 million budget deficit that is forcing the district to eliminate 600 positions, including 42 curriculum coaches, dozens of librarians and 278 teaching positions.

What were the school board members thinking? Did they think if you don’t teach about climate change, it doesn’t exist?

Who will remove the chapters? Will the publisher? Will teachers cut them out of the textbooks? Will they paste the pages together?

A big thank-you to Trustee Julie Hinaman, who believes in education, not censorship or indoctrination.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Environment, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, History, Ignorance, Stupid, Texas

Dahlia Lithwick: How Religious Zealots Gained Control of the Courts and the GOP

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2024 //
35

This discussion, led by Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, is the most important information you will read today, this week, this month. It explains the theocratic movement that is taking control of the seats of power, imperiling democracy. It describes who they are. You will learn about “dominionism,” about “the Seven Mountains,” about a distorted view of religion that seeks power. They play the long game, with the goal of controlling our society.

This is the only post today. We really have to focus on the root issue in American political life today, the one that makes it impossible to address any problems. Religious extremism is it.

Lithwick is a lawyer, journalist, and senior editor at Slate. She interviews Rachel Laser, the president and CEO at Americans United for Separation of Church and State—a nonprofit education and advocacy organization that works in courts, legislatures, and the public square to protect religious freedom—and Katherine Stewart, an author and journalist who has closely covered religious extremism for the past fifteen years; her latest book is The Power Worshippers: Inside The Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Her new book, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, will be published next February.

Please open the link to Slate to read the arntire discussion. It’s terrifying.

Dahlia Lithwick: So Katherine, I think we’re going to start with you, and we’re going to talk about this movement. I would love to define it, because we put a lot under this rubric of white Christian nationalism.

Katherine Stewart: Let’s talk about what Christian nationalism is and what it isn’t. Christian nationalism is not a religion—it’s not Christianity. I think of it as a mindset, and also a machine. The mindset is this ideology, the idea of America as essentially a Christian theocracy or a Christian nation whose laws should be based on the Bible, and a very reactionary reading of the Bible. It’s also a political movement that exploits religion in this organized quest for power. As a political movement, it is leadership-driven and it’s organization-driven. It has this deeply networked organizational infrastructure that is really the key to its power. There has been five decades of investment in this infrastructure, and it’s the leaders of this network who are really calling the shots.

We can group their organizations into categories. I’ll throw out a few names, but this is by no means comprehensive. There are these right-wing groups like the Family Research Council. You have networking organizations like the Council for National Policy, which gets much of the movement’s leadership cadre on the same page, and brings them together with these very deep-pocketed funders. There are think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. And there’s a vast right-wing legal advocacy ecosystem that includes groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, with its $100-plus-million-per-year budget; also, the Becket Fund, Liberty Counsel, First Liberty Institute, Pacific Justice Institute—and they align with the aims of the Federalist Society and related organizations that mobilize enormous sums of money to shape the courts.

Another feature of this movement that is often overlooked is the pastor networks like Watchmen on the Wall and Church United, or groups like Faith Wins, that draw together and then mobilize tens of thousands of conservative or conservative-leaning pastors as movement leaders. If you can get the pastors, you can get their congregations. Often pastors are the most trusted voices in their congregations. So they reach out to these pastors, draw them into networks, and give them tools to turn out their congregations to vote for the far-right candidates that they want.

And then, of course, there’s this information sphere—or propaganda sphere—of the type that the Alitos, with their “Appeal to Heaven” flag, are clearly tied into. It’s a kind of messaging sphere that outsiders often simply don’t know about, but it’s incredibly self-contained and repeats over and over again a certain core set of messages.

Rachel, I think we know about the ways in which these movements and groups have targeted Congress and targeted the executive branch. We have seen the laying on of hands of the clergy when Donald Trump assumed office. We know a lot about Mike Johnson, we know a lot about Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the ways in which these religious ideas have embedded themselves in the other two branches of government.

But it’s harder and murkier to understand how it intersects with the courts. I would love for you to explain when this movement really turns its attention to the courts, and how this movement manages to bring this sprawling network to making change at the federal judiciary.

Rachel Laser: I think we have to start with the Federalist Society, which was founded in 1982. That was around the time when all of the religious-right groups were getting active. They were intentionally shifting their focus from school segregation to abortion. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, we saw this shadow network of legal groups forming. That accompanied what the Federalist Society was doing with the judiciary. The Alliance Defending Freedom was founded in the early ’90s, the Becket Fund in the early ’90s, First Liberty in 1997, Jay Sekulow’s American Center for Law and Justice back in 1990, Liberty Counsel in 1989. So when we were seeing the “moral majority,” and this sort of burgeoning religious extremist movement in the country, they got really smart and decided to focus on the courts, and, boy, are we seeing the rewards of that today.

Stewart: And the movement is extremely strategic. Very patient. I think the key to their success is that long-range thinking and their strategy.

From the very beginning, they set about picking the right cases to bring to the right courts and they created these novel legal building blocks that would sideline, and in some cases obliterate, the establishment clause. They’ve turned civil rights law on its head, and expanded the privileges of religious organizations substantially, including the right to taxpayer money.

Katherine, you wrote a piece in 2022 describing how the movement gets supercharged. You flagged three things that happened after Dobbs: First, the rhetoric of violence among movement leaders appears to have increased significantly from the already alarming levels I had observed in previous years. Second, the theology of dominion—that is the belief that right-thinking Christians have a biblically derived mandate to take control of all aspects of government and society—is now explicitly embraced. And third, the movement’s key strategists were giddy about the legal arsenal that the Supreme Court had laid at their feet as they anticipated the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

Can you talk about how those three themes are playing out now? I mean, we live in that world. That’s mifepristone, that’s EMTALA, that’s the in vitro fertilization decision out of the Alabama Supreme Court.

Stewart: By acknowledging the legitimacy of a state interest in zygotes and blastocysts and fetuses, they really provide a legal system with a set of purely religiously grounded rights that can be used to strip women of all kinds of rights and basically turn our bodies and lives over to federal and state authorities.

But Dobbs is really just the inevitable consequence of this movement’s power. They’re not stopping here. The movement leaders are determined to end all abortion access everywhere. When they say abortion, they also mean some of the most effective and popular forms of birth control, as well as miscarriage care that’s necessary to save women’s lives and health. We’re seeing the consequences of this all over the country, where women are suffering devastating health consequences when they can’t get the miscarriage care that they need.

I’ve been attending right-wing conferences and strategy gatherings for 15 years for my research, and they tell us over and over again what they intend to do, and then they do it, and then they boast about what they’ve done. They’re really not hiding, and their aims are not hard to discern if you’re paying attention.

In the last 15 years, the rhetoric of violence has become more extreme. Fifteen years ago, the religious right sometimes wanted to portray itself as just wanting a seat at the table in the noisy forum of American democracy, saying, “We just want to have our voices heard and be counted.” But the calls for dominion, the calls for total domination, have become louder and more explicit. And part of that is a consequence of the rise of a spirit-warrior style of religion, embodied in movements like the New Apostolic Reformation, which is a sort of charismatic Christian evangelical movement. It’s a relational network, rather than a formal denomination, and it’s grown enormously in recent years. It has deep roots in Christian Reconstructionism and Calvinism, but it didn’t really get going until Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright, these two Christian-right leaders, both said they had a dream.

They both seemed to have the same dream that God told them that they needed to take over the seven “mountains,” or spheres, of culture, which they identified as things like government, education, business, media, and the like. They shared these ideas with some figures like Lance Wallnau and Peter Wagner. Wagner was a key figure in the “church planting” movement—a movement of establishing or planting new churches. Wagner ran with the idea of taking over the seven mountains as taking back dominion from Satan.

That notion of “Seven Mountains” dominionism has spread very quickly—not just among networks like the New Apostolic Reformation and other charismatic networks, but the language and style of “Seven Mountains Dominion” and this sort of spirit-warrior religion has spread to other sectors of the movement that are not remotely identified with the NAR or charismatic Christianity.

NAR churches often cite the Watchman Decree, a very theocratic prayer, which references the seven mountains. They often fly the “Appeal to Heaven” flag. Now you have people like Mike Johnson, who’s affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, displaying an “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his office and appearing on podcasts run by very overt “Seven Mountains” dominionists, and you have a lot of white-power and militia groups that were not particularly religious before—they were more focused on race—but now they’re adopting the language and style of “Seven Mountains” dominionism. So when you see Mike Johnson’s “Appeal to Heaven” flag, when you see the Alitos flying the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation, or that they’re members of these militias at all, but it really tells us who they’ve been talking to.

Most people in the mainstream, at the center right, really don’t know anything about this flag. They wouldn’t think to fly it. It’s like a relic of the revolutionary period. And it’s been revived now, and it’s being promoted by people on the extreme far right. So when they fly it, they’ve reinterpreted it as taking a stand for the idea of America as a Christian theocratic nation rather than a pluralistic democracy. They see it as a call for profound, and even violent, revolution. It’s really astonishing to see it flying over the Alitos’ beach house. Again, it doesn’t mean that they’re paid-up members of militia groups or charismatic Christian groups. It just means they spend their time in the same information and propaganda bubbles where this flag stands for God and country and armed insurrection.

Laser: If you believe that rights are God-given, instead of given by the people, then you can see how you can jump quickly to “and I can use violence to protect those rights.” That’s what has shown up in the polls.

PRRI [Public Religion Research Institute] did a poll on Christian nationalists, and they found Christian nationalists are about twice as likely as the rest of us to believe in political violence. That’s what we saw on Jan. 6 with the parading “Appeal to Heaven” flags that were at the insurrection. I think another important point to make here is the authoritarian nature of this Christian nationalist movement. This movement is rooted in the belief that America is a country given to European Christians, and that our laws and policies must reflect the same. If you believe that, you are antidemocratic, because democracy is rooted in equality. So the end goal of this Christian nationalist movement has to be the toppling of democracy to achieve their goal. And that’s why we saw so many of them fueling the insurrection.

The antidote to Christian nationalism is the separation of church and state, because it refuses to let Christian privilege into the law, it refuses to let conservative Christianity be the guiding principle in America. It insists that America keep to its promises that are embedded in our Constitution, of religious freedom as a basic human right. And that’s why Christian nationalists have gone after the separation of church and state, and that’s why their allies at the Supreme Court are on a crusade to eradicate church–state separation—because they are in lockstep with a movement that must get rid of church–state separation in order to accomplish its goals.

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My comment:

Will we be a theocracy or a society struggling to improve democracy? Please open the link. After reading this, you can understand why it is so important to the theocrats to destroy the separation of church and state and to funnel public money into religious organizations. That’s one of the crucial issues on the ballot in November. If you don’t want to be controlled by these power-hungry zealots, get active.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Funding, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Idaho: High School Graduate Offers Banned Book to Superintendent at Commencement

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2024 //
24

A high school student in Idaho peaceably performed a quiet but powerful protest against censorship at her graduation ceremonies. For her courage, her commitment to freedom to read, and her sheer chutzpah, I add the name of Annabelle Jenkins to the honor roll of this blog.

An Idaho high school graduate staged an unusual form of protest at her graduation when she offered a book to the school district’s superintendent, who had banned it months earlier.

Annabelle Jenkins was one of 44 graduates to have her name called during the Idaho Fine Arts Academy graduation ceremony on May 23.

After she shook hands with administrators on the stage, Jenkins paused in front of West Ada School District Superintendent Derek Bub and pulled out “The Handmaid’s Tale” from the sleeve of her graduation gown.

Bub stood firm with his arms crossed and declined the book, leaving Jenkins to drop it at his feet as she moved across the stage.

The graphic novel version, written by Margaret Atwood and Renee Nault, was one of 10 the school district banned from its libraries earlier in the academic year over its graphic imagery, deemed unsuitable for the student body.

I hope that Annabelle read the full text version of the book, in addition to the banned graphic novel.

Categories Censorship, Character, Citizenship, Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Ethics, Freedom to Read, Grit, Honor Roll, Idaho, Literature

Jessica Winter: The Looting of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2024 //
14

Writing in The New Yorker, Jessica Winter deftly connects the spread of vouchers with deep-seated racism, phony culture war issues, and the war on public schools. Winter is an editor at The New Yorker.

She writes:

In October, 2018, on the night of a high-school homecoming dance in Southlake, Texas, a group of white students gathered at a friend’s house for an after-party. At some point, about eight of them piled together on a bed and, with a phone, filmed themselves chanting the N-word. The blurry, seesawing video went viral, and, days later, a special meeting was called by the board of the Carroll Independent School District—“Home of the Dragons”—one of the wealthiest and highest-rated districts in the state. At the meeting, parents of Black children shared painful stories of racist taunts and harassment that their kids had endured in school. Carroll eventually convened a diversity council made up of students, parents, and district staffers to address an evident pattern of racism in Southlake, although it took nearly two years for the group to present its plan of action. It recommended, among other things, hiring more teachers of color, requiring cultural-sensitivity training for all students and teachers, and imposing clearer consequences for racist conduct.

As the NBC reporters Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton recounted in the acclaimed podcast “Southlake,” and as Hixenbaugh writes in his new book, “They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms,” Southlake’s long-awaited diversity plan happened to emerge in July, 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police brutality across the United States. It was also the same month that a journalist named Christopher Rufo published an article in City Journal headlined “Cult Programming in Seattle,” which launched his campaign to make “critical race theory”—an academic discipline that examines how racism is embedded in our legal frameworks and institutions—into a right-wing panic button. A political-action committee called Southlake Families pac sprang up to oppose the Carroll diversity plan; the claim was that it would instill guilt and shame in white children and convince them that they are irredeemably racist. The following year, candidates endorsed by Southlake Families pac swept the local elections for school board, city council, and mayor, with about seventy per cent of the vote—“an even bigger share than the 63 percent of Southlake residents who’d backed Trump in 2020,” Hixenbaugh notes in his book. Some nine hundred other school districts nationwide saw similar anti-C.R.T. campaigns. Southlake, where the anti-woke insurgency had won lavish praise from National Review and Laura Ingraham, was the blueprint.

“Rufo tapped into a particular moment in which white Americans realized that they were white, that whiteness carried heavy historical baggage,” the education journalist Laura Pappano writes in her recent book “School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education,” which also digs into the Southlake controversy. Whiteness could feel like a neutral default mode in many communities because of decades of organized resistance to high-density housing and other zoning measures—the bureaucratic backhoes of suburbanization and white flight. Today, the Carroll school district, though still majority white, has significant numbers of Latino and Asian families, but less than two per cent of the district’s students are Black.

In this last regard, Southlake is not an outlier, owing largely to persistent residential segregation across the U.S. Even in highly diverse metro areas, the average Black student is enrolled in a school that is about seventy-five per cent Black, and white students attend schools with significantly lower levels of poverty. These statistics are dispiriting not least because of ample data showing the educational gains that desegregation makes possible for Black kids. A 2015 analysis of standardized-test scores, for instance, identified a strong connection between school segregation and academic-achievement gaps, owing to concentrated poverty in predominantly Black and Hispanic schools. A well-known longitudinal study found that Black students who attended desegregated schools from kindergarten to high school were more likely to graduate and earn higher wages, and less likely to be incarcerated or experience poverty. Their schools also received twenty per cent more funding and had smaller classroom sizes. As the education reporter Justin Murphy writes in “Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York,” this bevy of findings “lends support to the popular adage among desegregation supporters that ‘green follows white.’ ”

These numbers, of course, don’t necessarily reflect the emotional and psychological toll of being one of a relatively few Black kids in a predominantly white school. Other recent books, including Cara Fitzpatrick’s “The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America” and Laura Meckler’s “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity,” have also considered how those costs have been weighed against the moral imperative of desegregation. This is the axial force of a lineage that runs from the monstrous chaos that followed court-ordered integration in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and the busing debacles of the seventies to the racist slurs thrown around at Southlake. As my colleague Louis Menand wrote last year in his review of Rachel Louise Martin’s “A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation,” “It was insane to send nine Black teen-agers into Central High School in Little Rock with eighteen hundred white students and no Black teachers. . . . Desegregation was a war. We sent children off to fight it.” To Rufo and his comrades, there was no such war left to be fought; there were only the bitter-enders who hallucinate microaggressions in the wallpaper and whose books need to be banned from school libraries. A mordant irony of Rufo’s imaginary version of critical race theory is that Derrick Bell, the civil-rights attorney and legal scholar who was most closely associated with C.R.T., eventually came to be skeptical about school-integration efforts—not because racism was effectively over or because legally enforced desegregation represented government overreach, as the anti-C.R.T. warriors would hold today, but because it could not be eradicated. In a famous Yale Law Journal article, “Serving Two Masters,” from 1976, Bell cited a coalition of Black community groups in Boston who resisted busing: “We think it neither necessary, nor proper to endure the dislocations of desegregation without reasonable assurances that our children will instructionally profit…”

In the years before Brown v. Board of Education was decided, the N.A.A.C.P.—through the brave and innovative work of young lawyers such as Derrick Bell—had brought enough lawsuits against various segregated school districts that some states were moving to privatize their educational systems. As Fitzpatrick notes in “The Death of Public School,” an influential Georgia newspaper owner and former speaker of the state’s House declared, in 1950, “that it would be better to abolish the public schools than to desegregate them.” South Carolina, in 1952, voted 2–1 in a referendum to revoke the right to public education from its state constitution. Around the same time, the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman began making a case for school vouchers, or public money that parents could spend as they pleased in the educational marketplace. White leaders in the South seized on the idea as a means of funding so-called segregation academies. In 1959, a county in Virginia simply closed down its public schools entirely rather than integrate; two years later, it began distributing vouchers—but only to white students, as Black families had refused to set up their own segregated schools.

Despite these disgraceful origins, vouchers remain the handmaiden of conservative calls for “school choice” or “education freedom.” In the run-up to the 2022 midterms, Rufo expanded his triumphant crusade against C.R.T. into a frontal assault on public education itself, which he believed could be replaced with a largely unregulated voucher system. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public-school distrust,” Rufo explained. He had been doing his best to sow that distrust during the previous two years.

Twenty states currently have voucher programs; five states launched universal voucher programs in 2023 alone. But reams of evidence show that vouchers negatively impact educational outcomes, and the money a voucher represents—around eight thousand dollars in Florida, sixty-five hundred in Georgia—is often not nearly enough to cover private-school tuition. In practice, then, vouchers typically act as subsidies for wealthy families who already send their children to private schools; or they pay for sketchy for-profit “microschools,” which have no oversight and where teachers often have few qualifications; or they flow toward homeschooling families. Wherever they end up, they drain the coffers of the public schools. Arizona’s voucher system, which is less than two years old, is projected to cost close to a billion dollars next year. The governor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and former social worker, has said that the program “will likely bankrupt the state.”

Back in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has become the Captain Ahab of school choice—he fanatically pursued a voucher program through multiple special sessions of the state legislature, failed every time to sink the harpoon, and then tried to use the rope to strangle the rest of the education budget, seemingly out of spite. Abbott’s problem is not only that Democrats don’t support vouchers but that they’ve also been rejected by Republican representatives in rural areas, where private options are scarce and where public schools are major local employers and serve as community hubs. (Southlake’s state representative, a Republican with a background in private equity, supports Abbott’s voucher scheme—a bizarre stance to take on behalf of a district that derives much of its prestige, property values, and chauvinism from the élite reputation of its public schools.) White conservatives in Texas and elsewhere were roused to anger and action by Rufo-style hysteria. But many of them may have realized by now that these invented controversies were just the battering ram for a full-scale sacking and looting of public education.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom to Read, Funding, History, Injustice, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, School Choice, Segregation, Texas, Vouchers

BREAKING NEWS: Federal Judge in New Hampshire Strikes Down “Divisive Concepts” Law

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2024 //
7

Good news in New Hampshire! Federal Judge Paul Barbadoro threw out the state’s “divisive concepts” law, which banned the teaching of anything that might be “divisive.” The same kind of law has been used in other states to ban the teaching of historical facts and literature about Blacks and gays. The judge declared it was too vague to be Constitutional and created confusion about what was and was not allowed in the classroom. In an ironic twist, the law that censors teaching and curriculum is titled “The Law Against Discrimination.”

Nancy West of InDepthNH.com wrote about the decision, which certainly must have upset State Commissioner Frank Edelblut and Governor Chris Sununu, as well as the state’s busybody Moms for Liberty.

West writes:

CONCORD – A federal judge on Tuesday struck down the state’s controversial ‘divisive concepts’ law, which had its roots in an executive order by former President Trump, that limited how teachers can discuss issues such as race, sexual orientation and gender identity with students.

The law, passed in a budget rider in 2021, created a chilling atmosphere in classrooms around the state with teachers unsure of what they could discuss about those issues without fear of being suspended or even banned from teaching altogether in the state.

The four banned concepts include:  That one’s age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, or color is inherently superior or inferior; that an individual, by virtue of age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color…is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; that an individual should be discriminated against  because of his or her age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color; and that people of one age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color…cannot and should not attempt to treat others without regard to age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color…., according to the judge’s ruling.

In New Hampshire it’s called the Law Against Discrimination and makes it unlawful for a public employer to “teach, advocate, instruct, or train” the banned concepts to “any employee, student, service recipient, contractor, staff member, inmate, or any other individual or group.”

U.S. District Court Judge Paul Barbadoro ruled the law is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment because it is too vague.

In the suit filed against Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and the Department of Education by the National Education Association of New Hampshire and the American Federation of Teachers of New Hampshire, Barbadoro sided with the teachers and granted their motion for summary judgment.

  “The Amendments are viewpoint-based restrictions on speech that do not provide either fair warning to educators of what they prohibit or sufficient standards for law enforcement to prevent arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement. Thus, the Amendments violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Barbadoro wrote…

The controversy escalated after Edelblut posted a page of the Department of Education website to file complaints against teachers for allegedly discriminating and a group called Moms for Liberty offered a $500 reward “for the person that first successfully catches a public school teacher breaking this law.”

Barbadoro wrote: “RSA § 193:40, IV provides that a “[v]iolation of this section by an educator shall be considered a violation of the educator code of conduct that justifies disciplinary sanction by the state board of education.

“An ‘educator’ is defined as ‘a professional employee of any school district whose position requires certification by the state board [of education].’ RSA § 193:40, V. Potential disciplinary sanctions include reprimand, suspension, and revocation of the educator’s certification.

“In other words, an educator who is found to have taught or advocated a banned concept may lose not only his or her job, but also the ability to teach anywhere in the state,” Barbadoro wrote…

Barbadoro was critical of Edelblut’s two op-ed pieces in the New Hampshire Union Leader.

“Despite the fact that the articles offer minimal interpretive guidance, Department of Education officials have referred educators to them as a reference point. For example, after showing two music videos to her class as part of a unit on the Harlem Renaissance, Alison O’Brien, a social studies teacher at Windham High School, was called into a meeting with her principal and informed that she was being investigated by the Department of Education in response to a parent’s complaint.

“Department of Education Investigator Richard Farrell recommended that Windham’s administrators consult Edelblut’s April 2022 opinion article to understand the context of the investigation against O’Brien, without otherwise explaining why O’Brien’s lesson warranted investigation. After witnessing her experience, O’Brien’s colleagues grew anxious about facing similar actions,” Barbadoro wrote.

What did she do wrong? She doesn’t know.

Edelblut, the state’s top education official, homeschooled his children. He was appointed by Governor Sununu. The governor likes to pretend he is a Republican moderate. Don’t be fooled.

Judge Barbadoro was appointed by President George H.W. Bush.

Open the link to finish reading the article.

.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Gender, History, Lies, Literature, New Hampshire

Washington Post: Putin Is Turning Russia into a Militaristic, Authoritarian Society

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2024 //
177

Robyn Dixon and other staff of The Washington Post wrote a stunning account of the “new Russia” that Putin is determined to create. It’s worth subscribing to read it in full. The “new Russia” is militaristic; dissent is forbidden; women are encouraged to have eight children; LGBT people and symbols are stigmatized; Stalin is revered.

Here are some excerpts from an important and upsetting article:

Vladimir Putin is positioning Russia as America’s most dangerous and aggressive enemy, and transforming his country in ways that stand to make it a bitter adversary of the West for decades to come.

Over more than six months, The Washington Post examined the profound changes sweeping Russia as Putin has used his war in Ukraine to cement his authoritarian grip on power.

The Russian leader is militarizing his society and infusing it with patriotic fervor, reshaping the education system, condemning scientists as traitors, promoting a new Orthodox religiosity and retrograde roles for women, and conditioning a new generation of youth to view the West as a mortal enemy in a fight for Russia’s very survival…

Russia’s leader-for-life is working to restore his country’s global power of the Soviet era — not as a Communist bulwark but as a champion of Orthodox Christian values and an opponent of liberal freedoms in permanent conflict with the West, in a world redivided by big powers into spheres of influence where authoritarianism is an accepted alternative to democracy. Flouting global norms and thumbing his nose at international institutions, Putin is forging military partnerships with other totalitarian regimes that also view the United States as a threat, including China, Iran and North Korea.

The new Russia claims to defend Orthodox values against Western cultural influences.

In November 2022, Putin signed a decree defining Orthodox values, puritanical morality and the rejection of LGBTQ+ identity as crucial to Russia’s national security. Putin has outlined a messianic mission to save the world from what he calls a decadent, permissive West, an approach he hopes will resonate in socially conservative nations in the Global South. The highly politicized judicial system and media heavily controlled by the Kremlin are being used to crack down on nightclubs and parties, and new patriotic mandates are being imposed on artists, filmmakers and cultural institutions.

The new Russia is militarizing society and indoctrinating a new generation of patriots.

Harnessing the war in Ukraine, Putin has engineered a deeply militarized society, rewarding war veterans and their children with places in higher education; introducing military training in schools; and elevating those involved in the war into leadership roles. Telegram channels tell women how to be good soldiers’ wives (by not complaining or crying); schoolchildren make drone fins, trench candles and custom socks for soldiers with amputed limbs. The education system has been imbued with patriotic fervor. Liberal humanities programs are shut down in favor of programs that promote nationalist ideology, and partnerships with Western schools have been canceled.

The new Russia is glorifying Stalin and rewriting history to whitewash Soviet crimes

Some people who had close contact with Putin in his early years as president described his fervent mission to rebuild Russia as a superpower and his admiration not only for imperial czars but also for the Soviet dictator and wartime leader Joseph Stalin, who engineered the Great Terror, the purges of the mid-to-late 1930s, sent millions to the gulag system of prisons and forced labor camps, and had about 800,000 people executed for political reasons. At least 95 of the 110 Stalin monuments in Russia were erected during Putin’s time as leader.

The new Russia is crushing all dissent and restricting personal freedoms.

Putin has squashed the political opposition in Russia making protests illegal, criminalizing criticism of the war, and designating liberal nongovernmental organizations and independent media, journalists, writers, lawyers and activists as foreign agents, undesirable organizations, extremists or terrorists. Hundreds of political activists have been jailed. Tens of thousands of Russians have fled in a historic exodus, with some worried they would be cut off from the world by sanctions, some afraid of being conscripted and sent to the front, and others fearing they would be persecuted for opposing Putin or the war.

Robyn Dixon goes into detail in another article that is part of the series “Remastering Russia.”

MOSCOW — As Vladimir Putin persists in his bloody campaign to conquer Ukraine, the Russian leader is directing an equally momentous transformation at home — re-engineering his country into a regressive, militarized society that views the West as its mortal enemy.

Putin’s inauguration on Tuesday for a fifth term will not only mark his 25-year-long grip on power but also showcase Russia’s shift into what pro-Kremlin commentators call a “revolutionary power,” set on upending the global order, making its own rules, and demanding that totalitarian autocracy be respected as a legitimate alternative to democracy in a world redivided by big powers into spheres of influence…

To carry out this transformation, the Kremlin is:

  • Forging an ultraconservative, puritanical society mobilized against liberal freedoms and especially hostile to gay and transgender people, in which family policy and social welfare spending boost traditional Orthodox values.
  • Reshaping education at all levels to indoctrinate a new generation of turbo-patriot youth, with textbooks rewritten to reflect Kremlin propaganda, patriotic curriculums set by the state and, from September, compulsory military lessons taught by soldiers called “Basics of Security and Protection of the Motherland,” which will include training on handling Kalashnikov assault rifles, grenades and drones.
  • Sterilizing cultural life with blacklists of liberal or antiwar performers, directors, writers and artists, and with new nationalistic mandates for museums and filmmakers.
  • Mobilizing zealous pro-war activism under the brutal Z symbol, which was initially painted on the side of Russian tanks invading Ukraine but has since spread to government buildings, posters, schools and orchestrated demonstrations.
  • Rolling back women’s rights with a torrent of propaganda about the need to give birth — young and often — and by curbing ease of access to abortions, and charging feminist activists and liberal female journalists with terrorism, extremism, discrediting the military and other offenses.
  • Rewriting history to celebrate Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator who sent millions to the gulag, through at least 95 of the 110 monuments in Russia erected during Putin’s time as leader. Meanwhile, Memorial, a human rights group that exposed Stalin’s crimes and shared the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, was shut down and its pacificist co-chairman Oleg Orlov, 71, jailed.
  • Accusing scientists of treason; equating criticism of the war or of Putin with terrorism or extremism; and building a new, militarized elite of “warriors and workers” willing to take up arms, redraw international boundaries and violate global norms on orders of Russia’s strongman ruler.

“They’re trying to develop this scientific Putinism as a basis of propaganda, as a basis of ideology, as a basis of historical education,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “They need an obedient new generation — indoctrinated robots in an ideological sense — supporting Putin, supporting his ideas, supporting this militarization of consciousness.”

Kolesnikov, speaking in an interview in Moscow, added: “They need cannon fodder for the future…”

As he fractures global ties and girds his nation for a forever war with the West, riot police in Russia are raiding nightclubs and private parties, beating up guests and prosecuting gay bar owners. Russians have been jailed or fined for wearing rainbow earrings or displaying rainbow flags. Dissidents who were imprisoned in Soviet times are once again behind bars — this time for denouncing the war.

The Kremlin has defended the crackdown as responding to popular demand…

“In Russian families, many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, and even more. Let’s preserve and revive these wonderful traditions,” Putin said in a November speech dedicated to “a thousand-year, eternal Russia.”

The emphasis is on a special and powerful state dominated by Putin, on centuries-old Russian self-reliance and stoicism, and the sacrifice of individual rights to the regime. Men give their lives in war or work. Women should give their bodies by birthing children.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, International

Iowa Mandates “Science of Reading”

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2024 //
31

The “Science of Reading” is the panacea of the moment. Iowa’s Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill requiring the use of SofR in the state’s classrooms.

ADEL, Iowa (Gray Television Iowa Capitol Bureau) – Governor Kim Reynolds signed a new law Tuesday meant to boost literacy rates for Iowa children. It requires schools teach a specific reading method, called the Science of Reading, and develop individual plans for students not at grade level.

Last year, more than 30% of Iowa’s third and 11th graders weren’t reading at their grade level. Travis Wilkins with the Adel DeSoto Minburn Community School District said, “As an educator and in this profession, I think it’s important we recognize and name the fact that we are not meeting our mission.”

But ADM Schools found success. Three years ago it had one in four students not meeting reading standards. Then, it implemented a literacy strategy called the science of reading. “Our third grade through 11th grade scores now show 90% of our students are proficient in reading and writing,” Wilkins said.

Now, the Science of Reading is the law in Iowa. Tuesday Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill mandating schools implement the strategy and must provide personalized instruction for students who fall behind. “And for those who continue to struggle, the bill also ensures parents are informed of their right to request that their child be retained to repeat a grade level if that’s necessary,” Reynolds said.

Categories Education Industry, Freedom to Read, Iowa, Literacy

Should Librarians Be Jailed for Handing Out a Banned Book?

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2024 //
15

This article in The Washington Post by Hanna Natanson and Anymita Kaye provides a national review of states that are trying to stop book censorship and protect librarians and states that not only ban books for sexual and racial content but threaten jail time for librarians who dispense such books. The state-by-state descriptions on the legal status of librarians is valuable. Open the link if you can to see where your state ranks and what actions it is taking to protect or threaten librarians.

Sam Lee, a leader of the Connecticut Library Association, heads to work these days torn between hope and fear.

She’s encouraged because legislators in her state proposed a bill this year making it harder for school boards to ban library books. But she’s fearful because Connecticut, like America, is seeing a sustained surge in book challenges — and she wonders if objectors will see the legislation as a reason to file more complaints.
“I would like to be optimistic,” Lee said. “But having been in my position for the last few years … I don’t know, it really feels like it’s been forever. And I am worried the book banners are just going to be emboldened.”

The bill in Connecticut, pending before an education committee, is one of a raft of measures advancing nationwide that seek to do things like prohibit book bans or forbid the harassment of school and public librarians — the first such wave in the country, said John Chrastka, director of library advocacy group EveryLibrary.

Legislators in 22 mostly blue states have proposed 57 such bills so far this year, and two have become law, according to a Washington Post analysis of state legislative databases and an EveryLibrary legislative tracker.

But the library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly red states that aim to restrict which books libraries can offer and threaten librarians with prison or thousands in fines for handing out “obscene” or “harmful” titles. At least 27 states are considering 100 such bills this year, three of which have become law, The Post found. That adds to nearly a dozen similar measures enacted over the last three years across 10 states.

Lawmakers proposing restrictive bills contend they are necessary because school and public libraries contain graphic sexual material that should not be available to children. Some books’ “sole purpose is sexual gratification,” said West Virginia Del. Brandon Steele (R), who introduced a bill that would allow librarians to be prosecuted for giving obscene titles to minors.
“It is strictly about pornography,” Steele said. “On that limited basis, this isn’t going to have the chilling effect people think it’s going to.”

But other lawmakers say bills like Steele’s are ideologically driven censorship dressed up as concern for children. They note that, as book challenges spiked to historic highs over the past two years, the majority of objections targeted books by and about LGBTQ people and people of color…

The protective library laws being pushed around the country run the gamut: From increasing funding to adding school librarians to campuses to forbidding “discrimination” in choosing which books to stock…

Some restrictive library bills give parents more power over book selection, for example requiring schools obtain parental sign-off before providing children sexually explicit content. Another common move is to require that libraries post lists of their books for parental review.

But the majority of the bills work the same way. They eliminate long-established exemptions from prosecution for librarians — sometimes teachers and museum employees, too — over obscene material. Almost every state adopted such carve-outs decades ago to ensure schools, museums and libraries could offer accurate information about topics such as sex education.

Removing the exemption means librarians, teachers and museum staffers could face years of imprisonment or tens of thousands in fines for giving out books deemed sexually explicit, obscene or “harmful” to minors. For example, an Arkansas measure passed last year says school and public librarians can be imprisoned for up to six years or fined $10,000 if they hand out obscene or harmful titles.

The law protects children and doesn’t harm librarians unless they’re doing something awful, bill sponsor Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) said at the time: “If they don’t knowingly violate [the law], they’re free and clear.”

Seventeen states are weighing some version of this measure, The Post found. That comes after at least eight states enacted such laws between 2021 and last year, although two were later vetoed and one was blocked by the courts.

The Post could not find an instance in which a librarian has been charged under these laws. But Peter Bromberg of the Utah Library Association pointed out several recent cases in which police were called to schools or launched investigations over books — in Missouri, Texas and South Carolina…

Tara White was appointed Elkhart Community Schools’ director of literacy in 2015. For the first several years, she never fielded a book challenge — until 2021, when community members objected to 60 titles, she said. When she defended the books, a conservative website claimed she was fighting for porn in school.

Then last year, Indiana passed a law declaring school employees can face criminal prosecution — leading to a possible $10,000 fine or 2½ years of jail time — for handing out sexual material that is “harmful to minors.”

White resigned.

“I loved being a librarian and … helping every student find themselves in a book,” White said. But while certain she wasn’t actually “breaking the law, nobody wants to go through that process.”

Nobody wants to go to jail, she said, for giving children books.

Categories Censorship, Courage, Cruelty, Disruption, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy
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