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Tune in! I Discuss “Slaying Goliath” Tomorrow with Tim Slekar

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2024 //
3

Tim Slekar is a fearless warrior for public schools, teachers, and students. I will be talking to him about Slaying Goliath and the struggle to protect public schools from the depredations of billionaires and zealots.

This Thursday on Civic Media: Dive Back into “Slaying Goliath” with Diane Ravitch

Grab your pencils—BustEDpencils is gearing up for a no-holds-barred revival of Diane Ravitch’s game-changing book, *Slaying Goliath*, live this Thursday on Civic Media. 

Launched into a world on the brink of a pandemic, *Slaying Goliath* hit the shelves with a mission: to arm the defenders of public education against the Goliaths of privatization. But then, COVID-19 overshadowed everything. Despite that, the battles Diane described haven’t paused—they’ve intensified. And this Thursday, we’re bringing these crucial discussions back to the forefront with Diane herself.

This Thursday at 7pm EST on BustEDpencils, we’re not just revisiting a book; we’re reigniting a movement. Diane will dissect the current threats to public education and highlight how *Slaying Goliath* still maps the path to victory for our schools. This isn’t just about reflection—it’s about action.

**It’s time to get real. It’s time to get loud. It’s time to tune in this Thursday at 7 PM EST on Civic Media.**

If you believe that without a robust public education system our democracy is in jeopardy, then join us. Listen in, call in (855-752-4842), and let’s get fired up. We’ve got a fight to win, and Diane Ravitch is leading the charge.

Mark your calendars and fire up Civic Media this Thursday at 7pm Central. 

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Courage, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Injustice, Privatization, Propaganda, Resistance, School Choice, Separation of church and state, State Takeover, Supporting public schools, Teachers, Unions, Vouchers

Florida: Ex-Judge Lambastes Supreme Court for Ignoring State Constitution

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2024 //
16

Barbara Pariente served on the Florida Supreme Court for more than twenty years and is now retired. She was astonished by that court’s recent decision to approve a six-week ban on abortion, because the state constitution explicitly protects privacy rights, which unquestionably—until now—included abortion decisions.

She recently wrote in Slate:

On April 1, the Florida Supreme Court, in a 6–1 ruling, overturned decades of decisions beginning in 1989 that recognized a woman’s right to choose—that is, whether to have an abortion—up to the time of viability.

Anchored in Florida’s own constitutional right to privacy, this critical individual right to abortion had been repeatedly affirmed by the state Supreme Court, which consistently struck down conflicting laws passed by the Legislature.

As explained first in 1989:

Florida’s privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman’s decision of whether or not to continue her pregnancy. We can conceive of few more personal or private decisions concerning one’s body in the course of a lifetime.

Tellingly, the justices at the time acknowledged that their decision was based not only on U.S. Supreme Court precedent but also on Florida’s own privacy amendment.

I served on the Supreme Court of Florida beginning in 1998 and retired, based on our mandatory retirement requirement, a little more than two decades later. Whether Florida’s Constitution provided a right to privacy that encompassed abortion was never questioned, even by those who would have been deemed the most conservative justices—almost all white men back in 1989!

And strikingly, one of the conservative justices at that time stated: “If the United States Supreme Court were to subsequently recede from Roe v. Wade, this would not diminish the abortion rights now provided by the privacy amendment of the Florida Constitution.” Wow!

In 2017 I authored an opinion holding unconstitutional an additional 24-hour waiting period after a woman chooses to terminate her pregnancy. Pointing out that other medical procedures did not have such requirements, the majority opinion noted, “Women may take as long as they need to make this deeply personal decision,” adding that the additional 24 hours stipulated that the patient make a second, medically unnecessary trip, incurring additional costs and delays. The court applied what is known in constitutional law as a “strict scrutiny” test for fundamental rights.

Interestingly, Justice Charles Canady, who is still on the Florida Supreme Court and who participated in the evisceration of Florida’s privacy amendment last week, did not challenge the central point that abortion is included in an individual’s right to privacy. He dissented, not on substantive grounds but on technical grounds.

So what can explain this 180-degree turn by the current Florida Supreme Court? If I said “politics,” that answer would be insufficient, overly simplistic. Unfortunately, with this court, precedent is precedent until it is not. Perhaps each of the six justices is individually, morally or religiously, opposed to abortion.

Yet, at the same time, and on the same, by a 4–3 majority, the justices—three of whom participated in overturning precedent—voted to allow the proposed constitutional amendment on abortion to be placed on the November ballot. (The dissenters: the three female members of the Supreme Court.) That proposed constitutional amendment:

Amendment to Limit Government Interference With Abortion:

No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion. 

For the proposed amendment to pass and become enshrined in the state constitution, 60 percent of Florida voters must vote yes.

In approving the amendment to be placed on the ballot at the same time that it upheld Florida’s abortion bans, the court angered those who support a woman’s right to choose as well as those who are opposed to abortion. Most likely the latter groups embrace the notion that fetuses are human beings and have rights that deserve to be protected. Indeed, Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz, during oral argument on the abortion amendment case, queried the state attorney general on precisely that issue, asking if the constitutional language that defends the rights of all natural persons extends to an unborn child at any stage of pregnancy.

In fact, and most troubling, it was the three recently elevated Gov. Ron DeSantis appointees—all women—who expressed their views that the voters should not be allowed to vote on the amendment because it could impact the rights of the unborn child. Justice Jamie Grosshans, joined by Justice Meredith Sasso, expressed that the amendment was defective because it failed to disclose the potential effect on the rights of the unborn child. Justice Renatha Francis was even more direct writing in her dissent:

The exercise of a “right” to an abortion literally results in a devastating infringement on the right of another person: the right to live. And our Florida Constitution recognizes that “life” is a “basic right” for “[a]ll natural persons.” One must recognize the unborn’s competing right to life and the State’s moral duty to protect that life.

In other words the three dissenting justices would recognize that fetuses are included in who is a “natural person” under Florida’s Constitution.

What should be top of mind days after the dueling decisions? Grave concern for the women of our state who will be in limbo because, following the court’s ruling, a six-week abortion ban—before many women even know they are pregnant—will be allowed to go into effect. We know that these restrictions will disproportionately affect low-income women and those who live in rural communities.

Categories Civil Rights, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Gender, Injustice

Democracy: How Florida’s Supreme Court Built an Escape Hatch on Abortion Referendum

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2024 //
16

I was thrilled when I learned that the Supreme Court of Florida decided to allow a referendum on abortion this fall. Many people, including me, feared that the Court would throw out the referendum on grounds that the term “viability” is vague, that the referendum should call for a certain number of weeks.

Shouldn’t the public have the right to judge its laws?

But our reader, self-named Democracy, says it’s too soon to celebrate. The Court ‘s decision. It turns out, on close reading, that the Court inserted a barely noticed escape hatch if the referendum passes.

DeSantis appointed five of the seven justices on the Supreme Court.

Democracy wrote:

The Florida Supreme Court didn’t just do a “two-step” on abortion, they did a three-step.

First, the conservative Republican Supremes ruled 6-1 that the state constitution’s privacy protection(s) did NOT apply to abortion. They cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) decision that REJECTED Roe v. Wade’s finding that “the constitutional right to privacy was broad enough to protect an abortion choice made by a ‘woman and her responsible physician.’ “ And, in so doing, the conservative Republican Supremes REJECTED what a previous state Supreme Court had found in interpreting Florida’s 1980 voter-approved Privacy Clause that “few decisions are more personal and intimate, more properly private, or more basic to individual dignity and autonomy, than a woman’s decision … whether to end her pregnancy.”

The conservative majority complained that when voters approved the Privacy Clause, they did not understand it to apply to abortion, an absolutely astounding claim.

As Justice Jorge Labarga wrote in dissent,

“I lament that what the majority has done today supplants Florida voters’ understanding — then and now — that the right of privacy includes the right to an abortion. The majority concludes that the public understanding of the right of privacy did not encompass the right to an abortion. However, the dominance of Roe in the public discourse makes it inconceivable that in 1980, Florida voters did not associate abortion with the right of privacy.” 

Second, the conservative Republican Supremes ruled 4-3 that a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights CAN be placed on the ballot in Florida in November. The per curiam ballot decision said this:

“We decline to adopt a standard that would effectively vest us with the power to bar an amendment from the ballot because of a supposed ambiguity in the text of the amendment.”

Republican governor Ron DeSantis and Republican Attorney General — who is a Trumper and a seditionist — were opposed to voters deciding the abortion issue. The Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion will need 60 percent of the vote to be passed.

Third, the conservative Florida Supremes hedged their bets. In oral arguments and in writing, several of the justices raised the issue of fetal personhood, questioning how an amendment protecting the right to an abortion would square with the state constitution’s guarantee that all “‘natural persons’ have a right to life and liberty.” The Chief Justice wrote that an abortion protection amendment “would constitutionalize restrictions on the people’s authority to use law to protect an entire class of human beings from private harm.”

Thus, the conservative Republican majority wrote, yes, voters CAN get to decide if they want to pass The Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion amendment, BUT it may well be in direct opposition to “personhood rights as applied to the unborn child.”

And guess who gets to decide THAT question?

As University of California-Davis law professor Mary Ziegler put it,

“They’re saying the constitution may still protect the fetus and unborn child, and that question is still alive.”

Categories Cruelty, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Gender, Injustice

Tom Nichols: Trump and the Cult of Violence

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2024 //
12

Trump claims to love “law and order,” but he continually incites violence. He incited the single most violent uprising in our history against the law and the Constitution on January 6, 2021. And he treated the Capitol police with contempt, those defending law and order.

He regularly attacks the judicial system—the bastion of law and order—because he is under multiple indictments.

He writes posts on social media intended to incite hatred, division, and yes, violence.

He recently paid a visit to the wake of a New York City policeman who was murdered by a criminal. It was performative politics.

The father and brother of Officer Brian Sicknick, who died after defending the U.S. Capitol, slammed Trump for playing politics. Trump did not pay a condolence call to the families of police officers who died after the riot that Trump incited. He didn’t visit any injured police officers in the hospital. Instead, he refers to those who beat up the police as “patriots.” This is sick and twisted. The people who menaced the Congress, threatened to kill the Vice-President, and damaged the seat of government are, to Trump, “patriots” and those who were convicted for their violence are “hostages.” Not the police who defended Congress. Not those who defended law and order.

Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic about Trump’s obsession with violence, about his encouragement of violence, about his threats and intimidation.

He wrote:

On Good Friday, Donald Trump shared a video that prominently featured a truck with a picture of a hog-tied Joe Biden on it. I’ve seen this art on a tailgate in person, and it looks like a kidnapped Biden is a captive in the truck bed.

The former president, running for his old office, knowingly transmitted a picture of the sitting president of the United States as a bound hostage.

Of course, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly began the minimizing and what-abouting: “That picture,” he said in a statement, “was on the back of a pick up truck that was traveling down the highway. Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”

I cannot recall prominent elected Democrats calling for hurting Trump or his family. The closest Biden got was when he once lost his temper six years ago and said that if he and Trump were in high school, he’d have wanted to beat him up behind the gym, a comment Biden later said he regretted. And there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Biden or his spokespeople ever promoted the idea that the 45th president should be taken hostage. Over the weekend, Trump’s defenders took to social media to keep raising the 2017 picture in which the comedian Kathy Griffin held up an effigy of Trump’s severed head. So let us all stipulate: Her stunt was ghastly. Griffin’s comedy—or parody, or protest art—was in bad taste and potentially a risk to a sitting president. She paid for it: The Secret Service investigated her, and her career at CNN was torched.

But Griffin is not a former president seeking once again to become commander in chief of the armed forces and the top law-enforcement authority in the United States. And Griffin did not incite a mob of rioters—some of whom were bent on homicide—to attack the Capitol. Donald Trump is, and he did.

Meanwhile, Trump also had words last week for the people trying to hold him accountable—or, more accurately, for their children. The day before he promoted imagery depicting the torture of the sitting president, Trump fired off a Truth Social post in which he mentioned the daughter of Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over his hush-money criminal trial: “Judge Juan Merchan is totally compromised, and should be removed from this TRUMP Non-Case immediately,” Trump wrote. “His Daughter, Loren, is a Rabid Trump Hater, who has admitted to having conversations with her father about me, and yet he gagged me.”

Then, on Saturday, Trump blasted out a New York Post article that included Loren Merchan’s picture to his followers.

Trump’s fan base will shrug off its leader’s condoning of violent fantasies and implied threats of violence as more harmless lib-owning. But what Trump is doing is dangerous, and the time is long past to stop treating support for his candidacy as just one of many ordinary political choices. As the historian of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted on Friday on X: “This is an emergency. This is what authoritarian thugs and terrorists do. Trump is targeting the President of the United States.”

Other Americans are well within their rights to wonder if this is what Trump supporters actually want to see in 2024.

Perhaps a thought experiment might help: Would today’s Trump supporters think it hilarious, say, to see Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter bound in the same way that Biden was depicted? Perhaps Bill Clinton or the Bushes tied up like hostages? (We can only begin to imagine what kind of ugly end the truck Rembrandts might have portrayed for Barack Obama.)

After seeing Trump post this video, I found myself wanting to ask his voters the questions that always occur after one of his outrages: Is this okay with you? Is this something you’d want your children to see?…

Unfortunately, we’re not getting much help in making those determinations from some of the media. On Sunday morning, for example, Kristen Welker of Meet the Press noted that Trump had “stepped up his attacks on the judge and his family in the New York hush money case” and is “falsely calling the criminal proceedings ‘election interference.’” Her verdict: “It is yet another reminder that we are covering this election against the backdrop of a deeply divided nation.”

Well, sure, that’s one way to put it. More accurately, however, we might say that a mostly coherent and decent nation is under electoral assault from a violent seditionist minority that has captured one of our two national parties, and its leader encourages and condones threats against officials at every level across the country, including threats of violence against the sitting president of the United States.

Every ardent Trump supporter should be asked when enough’s enough. And every elected Republican, including the sad lot now abasing themselves for a spot on Trump’s ticket or in his possible Cabinet, should be asked when they will risk their careers for the sake of the country, if not their souls. We have reached an important moment—one of many over the past years, if we are to be honest. After all we have learned and seen, and all of the questions we might ask of Trump supporters, perhaps only one simple and direct question truly matters now:

Is this who you are?…

In my view, Trump’s behavior towards others is vile, immature, narcissistic, and pathological. Anyone who is a critic or antagonist to Trump is treated with hatred and contempt. They deserve punishment. They should be hog-tied and beaten. They should be publicly shamed. They are not competitors, they are enemies. When Trump identifies them as such, they are certain to get death threats, threats of violence.

This is not normal. Trump has the mind of a mafia boss or a ruthless authoritarian.. He demands total loyalty. Those unwilling to embrace him and his lies and hatreds are cast out. This is not normal.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Evil, Fake, Hypocrisy, Injustice, Trump

Laurence Tribe and J. Michael Luttig: The Supreme Court Should Not Have Ignored the Constitution

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2024 //
67

Laurence H. Tribe, the eminent professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School (Democrat), and Judge Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge (Republican), co-authored a lengthy article in The Atlantic, condemning the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overrule the Colorado Supreme Court, which removed Trump from the 2024 ballot.

It seemed, after the Court’s decision, that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendnent had been excised from the Constitution. But just yesterday the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by a New Mexico man who was convicted for taking part in the January 6 insurrection.

Couy Griffin was convicted for his role as a member of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol. Because he previously served as a member of the Otero County board of commissioners, the courts in New Mexico said he was ineligible to hold office ever again. Griffin was a founder of Cowboys for Trump and an outspoken purveyor of lies about election fraud.

The Supreme Court concluded that states could disqualify persons from attempting to hold state offices, but Congress had to enact legislation to implement the disqualification of federal officials.

Since Congress is unlikely to muster a majority of both Houses—or 60 votes in the Senate to avoid a filibuster—oath-breaking insurrectionists will not be barred from seeking or holding federal offices.

One good thing: the Griffin decision implicitly agreed that the mob action of January 6 was an insurrection.

Last week, before the Griffin decision, Tribe and Littig wrote in The Atlantic:

The Supreme Court of the United States did a grave disservice to both the Constitution and the nation in Trump v. Anderson.

In a stunning disfigurement of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court impressed upon it an ahistorical misinterpretation that defies both its plain text and its original meaning. Despite disagreement within the Court that led to a 5–4 split among the justices over momentous but tangential issues that it had no need to reach in order to resolve the controversy before it, the Court was disappointingly unanimous in permitting oath-breaking insurrectionists, including former President Donald Trump, to return to power. In doing so, all nine justices denied “We the People” the very power that those who wrote and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment presciently secured to us to save the republic from future insurrectionists—reflecting a lesson hard-learned from the devastation wrought by the Civil War.

For a century and a half before the Court’s decision, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment was the Constitution’s safety net for America’s democracy, promising to automatically disqualify from public office all oath-breaking insurrectionists against the Constitution, deeming them too dangerous to entrust with power unless supermajorities of both houses of Congress formally remove their disability. This provision has been mistakenly described by some as “undemocratic” because it limits who may be elected to particular positions of power. But disqualification is not what is antidemocratic; rather, it is the insurrection that is antidemocratic, as the Constitution emphatically tells us.

In any event, all qualifications for office set by the Constitution limit who may be elected to particular positions of power. And no other of these disqualifications requires congressional legislation to become operative, as the Court now insists this one does. To be sure, the other qualifications—age, residence, natural-born citizenship—appear outside the Fourteenth Amendment, whose fifth section specifically makes congressional action to enforce its provisions available. But no such action is needed to enforce the rights secured to individuals by Section 1 of the same amendment, so deeming congressional action necessary to enforce Section 3 creates a constitutional anomaly in this case that the majority could not and did not explain. For that matter, no other provision of the other two Reconstruction amendments requires congressional enforcement either. As the concurring justices explained, the majority “simply [created] a special rule for the insurrection disability in Section 3.”

To read the rest of this brilliant article, open the link or subscribe to The Atlantic.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Injustice, Trump

Justice RBG’s Family Objects to Awards in Her Name as an Insult to Her Legacy

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2024 //
19

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s adult children objected to the selection of people chosen to receive an award named for her. The five honorees included four men, although Justice Ginsberg wanted the award to be bestowed on women who had made outstanding contributions.

The New York Times reported:

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of liberal causes whose advocacy of women’s rights catapulted her to pop culture fame, helped establish a leadership award in 2019, she said she intended to celebrate “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility.”

But this year, four of the recipients are men, including Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur who frequently lobs tirades at perceived critics; Rupert Murdoch, the business magnate whose empire gave rise to conservative media; and Michael Milken, the face of corporate greed in the 1980s who served nearly two years in prison. It has prompted family members and close colleagues of Justice Ginsburg to demand that her name be removed from the honor, commonly called the R.B.G. Award.

In a statement, her daughter, Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia University, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront to the memory of our mother.”

“The justice’s family wish to make clear that they do not support using their mother’s name to celebrate this year’s slate of awardees, and that the justice’s family has no affiliation with and does not endorse these awards,” Ms. Ginsburg said….

In the past, the award was called the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award. This year, the award will be bestowed by the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation on one woman and four men. The foundation said it wanted to honor gender equality.

The recipients, who also include the businesswoman Martha Stewart and the actor Sylvester Stallone, will receive the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award in April at the Library of Congress, where there is typically a ceremony and gala…

Reflecting on the awards, Justice Ginsburg’s son pointed to the timing of the announcement.

“Today would have been Mom’s 91st birthday,” said James S. Ginsburg, the founder of Cedille Records, a classical music recording company. “So it would be a perfect day to correct the record on this insult to her name and legacy.”

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Gender, Injustice, Stupid

Florida: Yes, You Can Say Gay! Legal Settlement Clarifies Limits of “Don’t Say Gay” Law.

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2024 //
8

Critics of Governor DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law reached a settlement with the State of Florida about the limits of the law, striking out its most hateful provisions. A spokesman for DeSantis declared “victory,” but he was trying to salvage the governor’s reputation. The reality is that the settlement is a sharp rebuke to DeSantis and his puppet legislature. Unless there are two lawyers with the same name, the litigants were represented by the same lawyer who represented E. Jean Carroll.

The purpose of the law was to make LGBT people disappear by pretending they don’t exist. DeSantis lost.

If you can open the article, it contains the language of the settlement.

Leslie Postal of The Orlando Sentinel reported:

TALLAHASSEE —  Students and teachers can discuss sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms under a proposed settlement reached Monday between the state and lawyers for LGBTQ advocates who sued over what they call the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Activists say the deal clarifies vague language about what the law allows, while lawyers for Gov. Ron DeSantis says it keeps the Parental Rights in Education Act on the books.

The settlement agreement says the state “restricts only classroom instruction on particular subjects — “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”  It doesn’t prohibit references to LGBTQ people, doesn’t discriminate against them or prohibit anti-bullying policies based on sexual orientation or gender identity, either.

“This settlement … re-establishes the fundamental principle, that I hope all Americans agree with, which is every kid in this country is entitled to an education at a public school where they feel safe, their dignity is respected and where their families and parents are welcomed,” Roberta Kaplan, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, told the Associated Press. “This shouldn’t be a controversial thing.”

It also protects the legitimacy of gay student groups, safeguards against hate and bullying and allows LGBTQ students and teachers to display pictures of their partners and families. It also says library books are not subject to the law.

Filed with the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, it requires the Florida Board of Education to send the agreement to all 67 school districts and make clear “the settlement reflects the considered position of the State of Florida on the scope and meaning of this law.”

The governor’s office, without offering any evidence, said the ruling was “a major win against the activists who sought to stop Florida’s efforts to keep radical gender and sexual ideology out of the classrooms of public-school children in kindergarten through third grade” because it kept the law intact.

“We fought hard to ensure this law couldn’t be maligned in court, as it was in the public arena by the media and large corporate actors,” said Florida General Counsel Ryan Newman. “We are victorious, and Florida’s classrooms will remain a safe place under the Parental Rights in Education Act.”

Despite arguing that the bill didn’t prevent people from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity in school, or even having materials that mentioned those topics, the law led to widespread confusion. Schools across the state banned gay-themed books, Gay Pride events, dances and LGBTQ support groups, even to the point of taking down rainbow stickers and other LGBTQ messages.

Central Florida school districts were among those that removed library books for fear they violated the law. The Seminole County school district, for example, last year decided “Jacob’s New Dress,” a storybook about a boy who wants to wear a dress to school, could not be available in primary grade libraries.

The Lake County school district removed three books from school libraries last school year, including “And Tango Makes Three,” a picture book based on a true story of two male penguins in Central Park Zoo who raised a chick together. That was “done in compliance with Florida state law, specifically 2022 House Bill 1557,” a district attorney wrote.

Lake schools reversed its decision on “And Tango Makes Three” after attorneys for the state, in another lawsuit, wrote that the law applied only to “formal” classroom instruction and not to library books. But that opinion, embedded in a memorandum filed in federal court in late 2022, was not necessarily widely known.

The deal came after two years of court hearings. U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor in Tallahassee twice threw it out on grounds the plaintiffs had no standing.

The plaintiffs appealed Winsor’s decision and agreed to a settlement because the appeals process would have taken years.

Under the deal, the law also doesn’t prohibit “incidental references in literature to a gay or transgender person or to a same-sex couple. Such references, without more, are not ‘instruction on’ those topics.”

References to gay or transgendered individuals are not instruction “on sexual orientation or gender identity any more than a math problem asking students to add bushels of apples is ‘instruction on’ apple farming,” the agreement said.

Typical classroom discussion and schoolwork don’t count as instruction, the settlement said, “even if a student chooses to address sexual orientation or gender identity.”

The statute allows teachers to “respond if students discuss their identities or family life … “provide grades and feedback” if a student chooses “LGBTQ identity” as an essay topic, and answer “questions about their families.”

It also doesn’t require the removal of safe space stickers or safe spaces for LGBTQ students.

It doesn’t prohibit Gay-Straight Alliances, book fairs that include LGBTQ+ focused books, gay-themed musicals or plays, or other extracurricular activities including dances, wearing gay-themed clothing, and non-conforming garb.

To say that opposite-sex attraction was the norm or that “heterosexuality is superior or that gender identity is immutable based on biological traits,” would be equally prohibited under the statute, the agreement states.

Staff writer Leslie Postal and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Categories Censorship, DeSantis, Fascism, Florida, Gender, Hypocrisy, Injustice

Paul Bowers: Reconciling/Resisting Christian Faith and Christian Haters

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2024 //
24

Paul Bowers used to be the education reporter for the Charleston News & Courier. I contacted him when I was trying to understand some issues that he wrote about. Paul left his newspaper job (I think someone in the local power elite complained about his honest reporting on the privatizers). After he left, he started a blog called Brutal South. Now he works as communications director for the South Carolina ACLU. As you can imagine, he’s always busy, always pushing back against book bans, attacks on voting rights, and more.

In this post, he wrestles with his Christian faith. He’s covered so many Christian faith leaders who espouse hateful views that he has had to question his own views. He feels sure that the Jesus he believes in would not agree with them.

I urge you to read the post. I’m quoting just the beginning and the ending.

He writes:

On weekday mornings the coffee shop is clustered with pods of the men. The men are holding forth — loudly — about the virtues of intermittent fasting, the meaning of the Egyptian plagues, and the Bible’s clear teaching on matters of human sexuality.

I used to be part of the pods, but now I sit alone. I eavesdrop. Some days when I listen to them reading from their Bible commentaries I hear an encouraging word, and I miss the feeling of spiritual fellowship. Most days I hear nonsense and remember why I’m in no hurry to return to church.

Last year the great Mississippi songwriter Andrew Bryant released one of my favorite albums, Prodigal, building on the theme that he’s “like the prodigal who never left at all.” He still lives in Mississippi; I still live in South Carolina. When he sings about living on the far side of the creek from the faith community that raised him, I understand him to mean it’s a walkable distance, a permeable barrier. I find myself similarly situated.

I’ve left two churches in my adult life, a theologically conservative one by choice and a theologically progressive one because its leaders left and the congregation ceased meeting. I still see people from both churches often. My family and I never intend to leave our town, so this will likely be the case for the rest of our lives….

I don’t have Christian fellowship anymore, but I do have solidarity. They’re not the same thing.

It would be fair for you to ask if I still believe in God at all. I do, though I would no longer try to convince you one way or the other. I find myself in the position the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan described once: “My problem is not that I dream I’m in hell … It isn’t that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn’t even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It’s that I love Jesus Christ.”

I do love Jesus, and I love the people I know who follow him. Lately I’ve seen Christians with the ash of mortification on their foreheads giving benedictions to the frightened families of trans kids; pledging to fight our Christian governor’s labor union-bashing tactics to the gates of hell; and speaking out against the death penalty — our modern crucifixion — even for people who murdered their family members.

Nietzsche called the way of Jesus “slave morality” and he wasn’t completely wrong, but I think he misread the faith of enslaved people. If the gospel narrative is true then I want to be on the side of Jesus and not the Roman empire, of Moses and not Pharaoh, of Harriet Tubman and not Robert E. Lee. I want to walk justly and love my enemies and fight for liberation always. I’m with the crucified people, as Ignacio Ellacuría put it. There are nonreligious people following this path just as well as the faithful, but for better or worse I will always have a religious impulse in me. A part of me will always seek the Spirit even if it never comes.

This coming Friday I’ll speak at an event hosted by faith leaders in Greenville, focused on how we can carry out the sacred work of hospitality by fighting for housing justice. We pursue this work in the heart of so-called Trump Country, in the shadow of the Moral Majority, amid the ferment of white Christian nationalism and even Christian fascism. We walk as believers, against other believers, ostensibly praying to the same god.

Categories Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Injustice, Religion, South Carolina

CNN: “Moms for Liberty” Is Encountering Stiff Resistance

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2024 //
69

When an education story is featured by a major media outlet like CNN, you can bet it’s captured mainstream attention.

Many educators have worried about the pernicious agenda of “Moms for Liberty,” which arrived on the scene in 2021 with a sizable war chest.

What is that agenda? Defaming public schools and their teachers. Accusing them of being “woke “ and indoctrinating students to accept left wing ideas about race and gender. Banning books they don’t like. Talking about “parental rights,” but only for straight white parents who share their values.

M4L got started in Florida, as do many wacky and bigoted rightwing campaigns, but it has been shamed recently by the sex scandal involving one of its co-founders, Brigitte Ziegler. The two other co-founders dropped her name from their website, but the stain persists.

CNN reports that this rightwing group is encountering stiff opposition from parents who don’t share their agenda and who don’t approve of book banning.

The story begins:

Viera, FloridaCNN —

In Florida, where the right-wing Moms for Liberty group was born in response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates, the first Brevard County School Board meeting of the new year considered whether two bestselling novels – “The Kite Runner” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” – should be banned from schools.

A lone Moms for Liberty supporter sat by herself at the January 23 meeting, where opponents of the book ban outnumbered her.

Nearly 20 speakers voiced opposition to removing the novels from school libraries. One compared the book-banning effort to Nazi Germany. Another accused Moms for Liberty of waging war on teachers. No one spoke in favor of the ban. About three hours into the meeting, the board voted quickly to keep the two books on the shelves of high schools.

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“Why are we banning books?” asked Mindy McKenzie, a mom and nurse who is a member of Stop Moms for Liberty, which was formed to counter what it calls a far-right extremist group “pushing for book banning and destroying public education.”

“Why are we letting Moms for Liberty infiltrate our school system?”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Gender, Hypocrisy, Injustice, Libraries, Literacy, Literature, Media, Parent Groups, Privatization, Racism

Watch Ruby Bridges on the Stephen Colbert Show

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2024 //
14

Ruby Bridges was chosen as the first child to integrate a public school in New Orleans. Six years old, she walked to school surrounded by federal marshals. After Norman Rockwell illustrated the photo, it became an iconic image as “The Problem We All Live With.”

Ruby Bridges was interviewed by Stephen Colbert, and it was a moving interview. He asked her if she was afraid when she saw the crowds of screaming white parents outside the school. She said, “No, I thought it was a Mardi Gras event.” When she entered the school, the crowd rushed in and withdrew their children, leaving her the only student in the school.

It’s a wonderful short interview, and she is a very impressive woman.

Categories Censorship, Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Libraries, New Orleans, Racism, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration
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