An atheist group wants the Greenville Public Schools to stop giving pastors veto power over books (screenshot via YouTube)
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The Board of Trustees for the Greenville County Schools in South Carolina wants clergy members to be able to review what books are appropriate for public school students, and they may face a legal challenge if they go through with it.
Recently, there’s been a push by conservative school boards to ban books deemed inappropriate for kids; their idea of what’s inappropriate boils down to books that mention LGBTQ people or sex unless fire and brimstone are included as a consequence.
Last May, for example, the Greenville County Schools Board of Trustees voted to ban a book called Melissa, about a trans girl, from all elementary schools in the district. Middle school students would need parental permission to check it out.
The people who make those kinds of suggestions to the board sit on a “Materials Review Committee.” The group judges the appropriateness of material across the curriculum, but the books are where all the action is at these days.
In August, the Board announced that it was accepting applications from anyone interested in joining that committee for a three-year term. But their announcement raised eyebrows because they specifically said clergy members would be included in the mix:
At the elementary school level, the committee will be comprised of three parents with children enrolled in Greenville county elementary schools, four district elementary school teachers from different grade levels, one district elementary school media specialist, one member of the clergy and two non-employees of the school district.
At the middle school level, the committee will be comprised of three parents with children enrolled in Greenville County middle schools, three district middle school teachers from different subject areas, one district middle school media specialist, one member of the clergy, and two non-employees of the school district.
At the high school level, the committee will be comprised of three parents with children enrolled in Greenville County high schools, three district high school teachers from different subject areas; one high school media specialist, one member of the clergy, and two non-employees of the school district.
What the hell would a clergy member add to the discussion? Who cares what pastors think about a particular book? Why is leading a church a prerequisite for a seat on this committee but not leading a non-profit that helps kids struggling with mental health?
“It’s a very clear violation of the establishment clause,” said Marcus Corder, parent of a student at Lake Forest Elementary. “It makes me wonder what type of clergy have had the power over the decision of taxpayers’ money over the years.”
Corder, who said he also attended Lake Forest as a child, wants clergy removed from the committees.
“It’s a further erosion of the separation of church and state,” Corder said.
According to the Greenville News, though, the inclusion of clergy members for these committees is mandated by the state:
Requirement of clergy on the advisory committees comes from the state’s Comprehensive Health Education Act of 1988, which was passed to assist in selecting curriculum components and materials, according to [executive director of academic innovation and technology Charlotte] McDavid. Every school district in South Carolina uses such a committee, McDavid said.
If that’s the case, then this isn’t a problem with the school board. It would be a problem with state law. But it turns out that’s not actually true.
In a letter the Freedom From Religion Foundation just sent to the Greenville County Schools, their decision to put clergy members on the Materials Review Committee is their choice, not a state law, because the law restricts the inclusion of clergy members to committees reviewing “reproductive health education, family life education, and pregnancy prevention education.”
So… not books. Certainly not books by or about LGBTQ people. To be clear, clergy members should not have a say in health education either. It’s an awful, potentially illegal, law as well. But it’s a separate issue that’s not currently up for debate.
The bottom line is that FFRF says this is the school board’s problem to fix if they want to avoid a lawsuit.
According to a local news source, the District claims the inclusion of clergy on the committees is required by South Carolina’s Comprehensive Health Education Act of 1988 (“CHEA”). However, the CHEA provides that material review committees “assist in the selection of components and curriculum materials” for “instructional materials addressing the subjects of reproductive health education, family life education, and pregnancy prevention education.” In contrast, the District’s committees are not assisting in the initial selection of curriculum materials nor are the committees focused on subjects related to reproductive health education, family life education, or pregnancy prevention education. Instead, the District’s Materials Review Committees address complaints, and these complaints may be about any and all District materials, not just materials regarding health education.
Since the law is specific regarding what materials they can cover, FFRF says the clergy members have to go in this particular case.
The District must eliminate the clergy member positions from each Materials Review Committee. It is inappropriate and unconstitutional for a public school district to create special positions for religious leaders.
The Greenville County Schools should take this seriously given that this isn’t their first run-in with the church/state separation crowd. In 2020, after a six-year legal battle over Christian prayers at their graduation ceremonies, the same school district lost the case and had to pay the American Humanist Association $187,000 in legal fees.
That’s going to be the outcome here as well. Clergy members, in and of themselves, have nothing of value to offer public schools when it comes to what books should be available to kids. If they have some kind of special knowledge in that arena, then that should be what they emphasize. That’s all that matters.
“A woman who calls herself “Patriot Barbie” dressed up as a cat and went to a school board meeting in a bizarre attempt to humiliate a transgender teacher.
“I am a cat,” Lindsey Graham – not the U.S. senator but the conservative host of the podcast Patriot Barbie – said at a Liberty Elementary School District meeting in Arizona, while licking her hand.
Agin an entitled Christian that not only is forcing his religion on his own children but demands to force it on all young people including your child. Please notice how this judge feels he needs to rule based on his right wing ideology including undoing or standing against anything Biden tried to enact. He felt that he could take the authority of the president to set border police from Biden when Biden ordered a change to a trump policy. His feeling was trump had the authority but Biden did not. The SC over ruled him but allowed his right wing ruling with no grounding in the law to stand for nearly a year. You have to ask why? About teens and sex. It is going to happen no matter if young people understand everything they are doing or just stumbling into what feels good. It is going to happen regardless of understanding parents and no matter how religious kids are. I attended a SDA Christian boarding school, the kids most into drugs and sex were the preachers’ sons. At this school boys and girls were not allowed to touch, hold hands, nor even to be within about a foot of each other. But the kids found ways and often snuck out even after lights out to meet and have sex. That doesn’t count the sex boys were having in the dorm. Dorm rooms and even pockets were searched for condoms and yet used ones were found in corners or out of the way places. So lets be real, by 16 most teens are sure what they want and able to consent, and teens should have control over their reproductive rights especially to get and use contraceptives. I used to hear the conservatives complain about underage girls have babies (mostly the complains claimed that black girls were encouraged to have babies so they could get welfare) So why not let young people have contraceptives? Hugs
In retrospect, it was inevitable that this particular judge would come for contraception.
A protester dressed as birth control pills rallies outside the Supreme Court in 2014. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, spent much of his career trying to interfere with other people’s sexuality.
A former lawyer at a religious conservative litigation shop, Kacsmaryk denounced, in a 2015 article, a so-called “Sexual Revolution” that began in the 1960s and 1970s, and which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”
So, in retrospect, it’s unsurprising that Kacsmaryk would be the first federal judge to embrace a challenge to the federal right to birth control after the Supreme Court’s June decision eliminating the right to an abortion.
Last week, Kacsmaryk issued an opinion in Deanda v. Becerra that attacks Title X, a federal program that offers grants to health providers that fund voluntary and confidential family planning services to patients. Federal law requires the Title X program to include “services for adolescents,”
The plaintiff in Deanda is a father who says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” He claims that the program must cease all grants to health providers who do not require patients under age 18 to “obtain parental consent” before receiving Title X-funded medical care.
This behavior is enabled, moreover, by the procedural rules that frequently enable federal plaintiffs in Texas to choose which judge will hear their case — 95 percent of civil cases filed in Amarillo, Texas’s federal courthouse are automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk. So litigants who want their case to be decided by a judge with a history as a Christian right activist, with a demonstrated penchant for interpreting the law flexibly to benefit his ideological allies, can all but ensure that outcome by bringing their lawsuit in Amarillo.
And so, last Thursday, the inevitable occurred. Kacsmaryk handed down a decision claiming that “the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.”
Kacsmaryk’s decision is riddled with legal errors, some of them obvious enough to be spotted by a first-year law student. And it contradicts a 42-year-long consensus among federal courts that parents do not have a constitutional right to target government programs providing contraceptive care. So there’s a reasonable chance that Kacsmaryk will be reversed on appeal, even in a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees.
Nevertheless, Kacsmaryk’s opinion reveals that there are powerful elements within the judiciary who are eager to limit access to contraception. And even if Kacsmaryk’s opinion is eventually rejected by a higher court, he could potentially send the Title X program into turmoil for months.
Kacsmaryk’s opinion is incompetently drafted and makes several obvious legal errors
Kacsmaryk’s opinion makes a number of legal errors, some of them egregious.
The Constitution, for example, does not permit litigants to file federal lawsuits challenging a government program unless they’ve been injured in some way by that program — a requirement known as “standing.” But Alexander Deanda, the father in this case seeking to stop Title X-funded programs from offering contraception to minors, does not claim that he has ever sought Title X-funded care. He does not allege that his daughters have ever sought Title X-funded care. And he does not even allege that they intend to seek Title X-funded care in the future.
Thus, this case should have been dismissed for lack of standing. As the Supreme Court held in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit must show that they’ve been injured in a manner that is “actual or imminent” and not “conjectural” or “hypothetical.” But Deanda has offered nothing more than conjecture that, if Title X continues to operate as it has for decades, one of his daughters might, at some point in the future, obtain contraception. Kacsmaryk nevertheless allowed his suit to proceed.
Additionally, Kacsmaryk places an astonishing amount of weight on a Texas state law which provides that parents have a right to consent to their child’s “medical and dental care.” But the Constitution states explicitly that federal law is “the supreme Law of the Land,” and when state laws prevent a federal law from operating as Congress intended — including the federal law creating the Title X program — then the state law must yield.
If the law worked any other way, then states would have the power to fundamentally alter federal welfare programs. Republican state lawmakers who believe that the Medicare or Social Security eligibility age should be 75 — or 125, for that matter — could pass a law imposing this new age requirement, thus destroying Congress’s power to create universal programs that benefit all Americans regardless of whether they live in a red state or a blue state.
Kacsmaryk attempts to weaponize the Constitution against birth control
The idea that parents have a constitutional right to shape their child’s upbringing — and that this right undermines government-funded contraceptive care — has been around for nearly half a century. It’s just never gained any real traction in federal court.
In Doe v. Irwin(1980), a federal appeals court case, the plaintiffs brought a similar challenge as Deanda against a state-operated family planning clinic that served both adults and teenagers. Doe acknowledged that a line of Supreme Court decisions stretching back to the 1920s establish that parents have a limited constitutional right “to the care, custody and nurture of their children.” At the same time, however, Doe held that “as with adults, the minor’s right of privacy includes the right to obtain contraceptives.” And so the plaintiffs’ claims in Doe placed these two constitutional rights in tension.
But the court found an easy way to relieve this tension. In each of the Supreme Court’s previous parental rights cases, “the state was either requiring or prohibiting some activity” — that is, the government used its coercive power to either require a child to take an action their parents did not like, or forbid the child from taking an action their parents wanted the child to take.
A program like Title X cannot violate this rule against coercion because there is nothing coercive about it. The federal government provides grants to health providers who voluntarily offer family planning services to their patients. And those providers, in turn, offer their services to patients who voluntarily seek out contraceptive care. No one is required to receive reproductive health care services funded by Title X.
This distinction between coercive government programs which compel certain behaviors, and welfare programs which merely fund voluntary activity, is implicit in the Constitution’s text. The Supreme Court (somewhat controversially) found the right of parents to shape their children’s upbringing in the Constitution’s due process clause, which provides that no one may be deprived of “liberty” without “due process of law.” But it’s impossible to deprive someone of liberty by creating a voluntary program that no one is required to participate in. “Liberty,” by definition, means the freedom to do as you choose.
To all of this, Kacsmaryk offers a hodgepodge of half-formed arguments that layer several additional pages onto his opinion without presenting much legal reasoning. One of his primary arguments rebutting Doe, for example, relies on the fact that the Supreme Court’s parental rights decision in Troxel v. Granville (2000) “does not rely on a heavy distinction between ‘voluntary’ and ‘compulsory’ programs.” But Troxel involved a coercive state law governing who is allowed to interact with a child against their parents’ wishes — so there was no reason for Troxel to discuss voluntary programs because such a program was not before the Court.
Similarly, he claims that “the common law held minors were incapable of giving consent to make important life decisions.” But English and early American law permitted minors to consent to sex as early as age 12, a fact that is simultaneously deeply upsetting and completely inconsistent with Kacsmaryk’s implication that 17-year-olds historically did not have control over their sexuality.
That leaves him with a policy argument against the rule announced in Doe. Kacsmaryk claims that limiting the scope of parents’ constitutional rights to cases involving actual coercion would lead to “absurd results,” such as preventing “parents from becoming aware of what books their children are reading in school and deny[ing] them the right to exempt their children from an offensive reading curriculum,” or preventing parents from intervening if a doctor provides care that is genuinely harmful.
But even if you assume that parents have a right to exempt their children from public school curriculums, a mandatory school assignment is a coercive act — so decisions like Doe are consistent with a rule allowing parents to exempt their children from certain school assignments.
Similarly, Kacsmaryk’s decision reaches far beyond the unlikely circumstances when a family planning clinic prescribes medically harmful treatments to teenagers. According to Kacsmaryk, “parental consent does not depend on the particular form of contraception or the environment in which the contraception is distributed.” So his decision would even prevent a public university from leaving out a basket of free condoms that anyone, including students who are not yet 18, can take from as they choose.
Obviously, questions about teenage sexuality are fraught. But the bottom line is that the people’s elected representatives in Congress debated these difficult issues, and they chose to enact a Title X program that provides funding that Kacsmaryk finds objectionable. It is simply not a judge’s job to short-circuit this democratic process of determining how the law should approach teenage sexuality. Nor is it Kacsmaryk’s job to impose his own well-documented prudishness on a federal program like Title X.
So what happens to Title X now?
Although Kacsmaryk claims that Title X “violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children,” he has not yet ordered the federal government to halt the program. His opinion concludes by requiring the parties in Deanda to submit proposals by this Thursday laying out just what action Kacsmaryk should take against the federal government.
But Deanda’s lawyers have already signaled that they want an aggressive injunction that could temporarily shut down Title X, and permanently harm teenagers’ ability to obtain reproductive care.
In their complaint, these lawyers ask Kacsmaryk to prohibit the federal government from “funding any family-planning project in the United States that fails to obtain parental consent before distributing prescription contraception or other family-planning services to minors.” Should Kacsmaryk issue a such a sweeping order, which he could very well do given his past record, that could force the federal government to hit pause on the entire Title X program. To comply with such an order, Title X could have to build systems to determine which reproductive health providers give parents a veto power over medical care provided to their teenaged children.
There is a decent chance that Kacsmaryk will eventually be reversed by the Supreme Court — among other things, the standing problem in this case is so glaring that it may be hard for Deanda’s lawyers to convince five justices that they are allowed to bring this case in the first place. But it may be a while before that happens. Kacsmaryk’s decision will appeal first to the exceedingly conservative Fifth Circuit, which has a history of rubber-stamping outlandish decisions handed down by Kacsmaryk and similarly minded judges.
In the short term, in other words, Kacsmaryk could create a great deal of chaos for reproductive health clinics, which may lose an important source of funding for months or longer.
How entitled and arrogant some Christians are. They will have their religion be the only religion in the US, the first amendment be damned. It is hard to tell if she stepped on the student’s hand or kicked it out of the way from the video, but she clearly was trying to interrupt the prayers by walking in, around, and over them. I love that she called their prayers magic I wonder what she calls Christian prayers? Hugs
“I believe in Jesus, so I’m interrupting the floor,” the teacher said in an incident caught on video
A teacher at Franklin Academy in Florida was fired after a video showed her stepping on a Muslim student’s hand during prayer and referring to his beliefs as ‘magic’ (screenshot via NBC News)
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Ateacher at Franklin Academy, a public charter school in Florida, has been fired after she interrupted three Muslim students in the middle of a prayer. She stepped on their hands during the sacred ritual and dismissively calling their worship “magic.” That’s especially ironic coming from a Christian, since the same faculty member said, “I believe in Jesus, so I’m interrupting the floor.”
Video of the incident was shared Thursday on TikTok, where it has over 1.3 million views so far:
Earlier today, a very troubling TikTok video was shared with our leadership team. At Franklin, we do not tolerate discriminatory behavior in any form.
While we do not discuss personnel matters, we can share that the teacher in question is no longer a member of the Franklin Academy staff.
We look forward to continuing our IB initiatives of creating a better and more peaceful world through intercultural & racial understanding and mutual respect.
That’s the right course of action since religious bigotry has no place in a public school. But many other questions have been ignored.
What would have happened if the incident wasn’t caught on film?
What is the school going to do to prevent incidents like this in the future?
Why don’t those students have a safe place where they can worship without interrupting anyone else?
Were the Muslim students in that office without asking or were they granted permission earlier? (According to a TikTok comment left by the student who posted the video, two teachers “allowed us into the room that we were in.” He added that everything was fine for the Muslim students until the teacher in question walked into the room.)
Why were the students filming this? (Is it because this has happened before?)
And the most important question of all: What would conservatives be saying if a Muslim was caught on camera interrupting a Christian student who was privately praying during the school day?
It’s irrelevant what you think of Islam. Muslim students have every right to worship as they wish and most administrators have no problem finding space for students to pray peacefully during school hours. It shouldn’t be that complicated. That’s not always the case, though:
Incidents like this are why it’s important for school staff to have religious awareness, according to Abdullah Jaber, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Florida chapter (CAIR-Florida).
“It is of utmost importance that school administrators and staff know basic faith practices to serve students practicing their faith, in this case, Muslims,” said Jaber.
Even now, days later, the school has not publicly said how it plans to address this matter. For an issue as simple as basic religious tolerance, this shouldn’t be complicated.
And the right wing maga cult and religious right eats this shit up. How utterly ridiculous. Yet they not only believe it, they will send their last dollar to the scamming republicans to stop it, but more they use it to attack the LGBTQI+ community. I hate it, what happened that removed thinking from our public. Hugs
“I think that there has, that a portal, a demonic portal opened above the White House around the time that the Bidens moved in.
“If you believe the Bible, and we do, then you believe Satan exists, and he does, and you believe there are demons and therefore a portal in which demons enter this realm is not such a crazy idea at all.
“That these demons populate the Biden administration — well, I mean, look at some of them. You can’t tell whether they are men or women. They don’t seem to know either.” – Roger Stone, speaking to Eric “Sucker Punch” Metaxas.
Stone claims there are dozens of photos of the portal.
Roger Stone: I think “a demonic portal opened above the White House” when the Bidens moved in and “demons populate the Biden administration … I mean, look at some of them. You can't tell whether they are men or women. They don't seem to know either." https://t.co/weZ7qQP4D0pic.twitter.com/6j1Eoe1lwm
I don’t think for a second that he believes any of that, but the crazies are his only hope now, so he’s speaking directly to them, as if he’s one of them.
Well, if anyone would know about demonic holes, it would be Roger.
Y’all know that after he touts this religious bullshit, he mutters “SUCKERS” under his foul breath. The guy who revels in couples swapping doesn’t believe in God, but believes himself to be the GOP’s Loki.
My dogs that love gravy these people are driven. They are loving the authority DeathSantis and the republicans have given them. It is not enough for them to keep their children from reading these books, they don’t want any kid to read them at any age. The guy has a 15 year old son and he comments he wants the boy to attend public school and not be destroyed by these books. I can assure him if the boy has a phone or other boys as friends he has heard and learned far more than a book with an LGBTQ+ character. I love how he is against any book that mentions boys holding hands or dating calling that promoting sex when he wants them to push abstinence but he is OK with books that have boy / girl dating, holding hands and so on. He is only against it when it is same gender / same sex. Plus he made them get rid of a book that told the story of a boy who wanted to dress up as a mermaid and go to a mermaid parade. He admitted there was no sex at all in the book but felt the message of the book was too dangerous for students. The message he claims is that you can be anything you want to be, and that is a dangerous thing to tell kids. Read through his objects and you see he is a bigot and a racist. He wants a nice “Leave It To Beaver” fantasy world for kids and schools. Again he is trying to force all the schools to revert to a 1950s mind set. I love that he claims he has nothing against gay people saying he can tolerate them unless they are the sexually aggressive type of homosexual. Really unlike himself who seems a sexually aggressive type of straight pushing a culture of straightness on everyone. . I know how important it is to find gay characters in a book or to be able to read up on subjects dealing with being LGBTQI+ as a kid. Think about what it would be like if you thought you were the only straight kid growing up, that all the books, movies, magazines, couples … the entire world around you were made up of gay and lesbian people. But you could go to the library and find books about being straight, how it was OK and normal for some people. Imagine reading about other straight people that were not the monsters that some people claimed they were. I was a gay kid and I needed those books. I was an abused kid who needed some comprehensive sex education classes also. The guy wanted one book removed because it was about a girl having romantic feelings for other girls and she holds hands with a girl and shares a kiss. That was it, but he made it seem like a sex manual for creating better lesbians. According to Friedman, the book promotes “promiscuity” and “pre-marital sex” when “we are supposed to be promoting abstinence.” He believes the library should carry books that “support sturdy nuclear families.” A story about a girl holding hands with another girl. But he wouldn’t have a problem with it had it been a boy the girl held hands with. He admits he doesn’t even read most of the books he tries to have removed. He wanted a book removed that told of a black persons struggle with racists and racism, and this guy wanted it removed because he claimed it supported BLM movement. Friedman says the book should be removed because it promotes “the Black Lives Matter movement” and “a sense of white guilt in its musings about ‘micro-aggressions’ as elsewhere defined in Critical Race Theory.” Anyway I will try to post the article, please read it, and understand the attack on our society, the entire LGBTQI+ community, and our education system. This guy is saying that just reading about and seeing gays, lesbians, or trans people is harmful and destroys kids. If anyone gets in his way, Friedman vowed to “run over them like a dead body.” Hugs
Bruce Friedman speaks at a June 30 meeting of the Clay County School Board
This year, at least 102 books have been removed from the shelves of school libraries in Clay County, Florida. Many of these books were pulled at the request of one man: Bruce Friedman. A conservative activist and longtime resident of New York, Friedman moved to Clay County this May.
And Friedman says he is just getting started. During a November 28 meeting of the Florida Department of Education Library Media Working Group, Friedman said he had compiled “a list of over 3,600 titles that I believe have concerning content,” including “porn, critical race theory, social-emotional learning, [and] fluid gender.” He said this list proves that “libraries have more than a little poison in them.” Friedman demanded that the Department of Education “clean up this mess.” If not, Friedman threatened to “perform 3,600 challenges and overwhelm your awful, awful procedures and policies.”
One of the books pulled from the shelves of school libraries this year in Clay County is The Girl From The Sea, an award-winning graphic novel. The book is about a 15-year-old girl who develops romantic feelings for another girl. The two girls hold hands and, at one point, share a kiss. There is no sex, no swearing, and no nudity.
In an interview with Popular Information, Friedman described The Girl From The Sea as a book for “slightly post-pubescent little lesbians.” Friedman says he objects to the book being available in Clay County libraries because students are “not in school to learn how to be better lesbians.” The book exposes students to “a land of girls making out with great illustrations.” According to Friedman, students should not be “focused on kissing, or petting or anything else in that general territory.”
The Girl From The Sea has been removed from Clay County school libraries because of a new policy, implemented in July, that requires books to be pulled as soon as a challenge has been properly filed. The books remain unavailable to students while the challenge is being considered by a District Curriculum Council.
Friedman has exploited this policy by flooding the district with challenges. Friedman told Popular Information that, since June 30, he has “investigated between 5 and 10 thousand” books available in Clay County school libraries on “a very cursory level.”
Popular Information has obtained dozens of Friedman’s challenge forms through public information requests. Friedman, and a few others he recruited to assist him, filled out these forms identically. The reason for the request is to “PROTECT CHILDREN,” the objectionable material is “INAPPROPRIATE CONTENT,” and the impact of a student using the material is “DAMAGED SOULS.” The answer to most other questions is “N/A.”
Friedman is the president and founder of the Florida chapter of No Left Turn in Education, a right-wing educational group. He continues to play a similar role for the group in New York. No Left Turn in Education was founded in 2020 by Elana Yaron Fishbein. “Public schools are starting to resemble re-education camps and our cities have turned into the killing fields,” the group wrote on Facebook. “It’s beginning to feel like Pol Pot’s Cambodia.” Fishbein says there are evil forces focused on “getting to our kids, brainwashing them, indoctrinating them, and making them [a] brownshirt.” Friedman said he learned about Fishbein when she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show.
Friedman gained some notoriety himself when he attempted to read aloud a rape scene from the book Lucky by Alice Sebold during a June 30 Clay County school board meeting. His mic was cut off. Friedman told Fox News he wants “his 15-year-old son to be in the public school system and come home unharmed.”
Friedman acknowledged that he filed challenges over the summer without reading the challenged books. Initially, Clay County accepted many of these challenges. But Friedman said he has already filed more than 350 challenges. Eventually, Clay County began to reject Freidman’s challenges as incomplete because they do not include any real explanation of the objection.
But Friedman is undeterred and, in the hopes of getting more challenges accepted, said he has changed his approach. According to Friedman, he has read “25 books in the last 10 days.” Friedman identified books to challenge by “scouring the internet” for lists of books that have been challenged elsewhere, including “a very conservative community” in Texas that “met with their superintendent” about “a couple of hundred books that concern them.”
Friedman acknowledged he is not aware of any children who were exposed to objectionable content at a school library and had it negatively impact their lives. But he claims that is irrelevant. “I don’t have to know them,” Friedman said. “It’s all of them. Any poor kid who had the misfortune of coming across this material.”
Stephana Ferrell, the co-founder of the Florida Freedom to Read Project, blasted Clay County’s policy of removing books from the library before any review. Ferrell told Popular Information that the procedure allowed a “singular viewpoint” to “control over what can and cannot be accessed or learned in the library.”
Legal confusion
According to Friedman, his challenges to books like The Girl from the Sea, are justified because it violates Florida law for the book to be available in school libraries. The relevant law is HB 1467, which was signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) last March.
The revised Clay County Procedures Manual for Library Media Services lays out the legal standard for library books under HB 1467:
● Free of pornography and material prohibited under s. 847.012
● Suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material presented
● Appropriate for the grade level and age group for which the materials are used or made available
Friedman said he did not believe The Girl From The Sea is pornographic. But, according to Friedman, it should be removed from the school library because it is “in very poor taste” and “sets a terrible example for our children, straight or gay.” According to Friedman, the book promotes “promiscuity” and “pre-marital sex” when “we are supposed to be promoting abstinence.”
Several of the books challenged by Friedman and others include LGBTQ themes but no sexual content. The Prince And The Dressmaker, for example, is about “a prince who likes to wear dresses.” The Prince falls in love with a young woman. The book features one kiss.
Friedman cited the “Parental Rights Act,” also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, to justify these objections. “You don’t want little children questioning their budding little bodies.” Friedman said. He says that the inclusion of these books is part of an effort by librarians to encourage children to get “surgery and hormones.” The Parental Rights Act, however, prohibits classroom instruction of elementary students about sexuality and gender. It does not apply to library books.
In the interview, Friedman said he is comfortable with “gay people” and “recognizes that they exist.” Friedman said he lived for years in New York City, and “on very rare occasions, I would meet a sexually aggressive homosexual person and have words with them.” But, for the most part, Friedman said he “got along fabulously with everyone.”
Friedman said he doesn’t have a problem with a book that has “gay characters” but “if the focus of the book is gayness, and it is still nonsexual, then I’d have to take it on a case-by-case basis.” He believes the library should carry books that “support sturdy nuclear families.”
Friedman also challenged Dear Martin, citing the Parental Rights Act. But Dear Martin does not have any LGBTQ content. Dear Martin is about “the story of an Ivy League-bound African American student named Justyce who becomes a victim of racial profiling.” Friedman says the book should be removed because it promotes “the Black Lives Matter movement” and “a sense of white guilt in its musings about ‘micro-aggressions’ as elsewhere defined in Critical Race Theory.”
Friedman may have been referring to the Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits instruction on Critical Race Theory in Florida classrooms. But, like the Parental Rights Act, the Stop WOKE Act applies to classroom instruction, not library books.
Despite this confusion about the legal standard, Friedman and others have already been able to permanently remove dozens of books from Clay County school libraries.
Tightening the screws on school librarians
Julie Miller, the chair of the Clay County Education Association Media Committee, has been the librarian for Ridgeview High School in Clay County for nine years. Miller told Popular Information she did not encounter a single challenge to a library book until November 2021.
Starting this year, groups like No Left Turn in Education began challenging library material en masse. School officials are fearful. Since March, Miller and other Clay County librarians have been prohibited from purchasing any new books or even new copies of books that are already on the shelves. According to Miller, no official explanation has been provided for the purchasing freeze.
Under Clay County’s July 2022 policy, any challenge should be reviewed by a District Curriculum Council, a rotating panel of school officials. But when the challenges from Friedman and others started flooding in, the leadership of Clay County schools handled things differently.
Before the District Curriculum Council considered a challenge, Miller and her colleagues were pressured to determine if the books were eligible to be “weeded” or “deselected.” Weeding and deselection are the standard processes that librarians use to remove books that are not in use, outdated, damaged, or not appropriate for students. The librarians were also reminded that, under Florida law, they could potentially be held personally liable for making “pornographic” material available to minors.
This process resulted in Clay County librarians agreeing to weed or deselect 52 books from school libraries. These included acclaimed titles like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Clay County schools have published a list of filed challenges, including those that librarians agreed to weed/deselect.
But it soon became clear that the challenges from Friedman and other activists were just getting started. As the challenges rolled in, Miller said she wanted to change her mind and put several books she previously agreed to remove back into circulation. Typically, a decision to weed a book is not irreversible. A damaged book, for example, could be replaced by a new copy. But she was told by district officials that challenged books that librarians agreed to remove were permanently banned from all libraries in the district.
In response, Miller and some of her colleagues resolved not to weed out or deselect any additional challenged books in Clay County because they believe the system is being abused.
Thus far, five challenges have been reviewed by a District Curriculum Council. These panels voted to keep four of the books in schools. One panel voted to remove Julian Is A Mermaid from all schools. Julian Is A Mermaid is about a little boy who wants to dress up as a mermaid and go and see a Mermaid Parade. The council wrote that the message of the book is that “you can be whatever you want to be.” According to the council, this is a “good message,” but they voted to remove the book because it is “maybe not the best way to do it.”
The council rejected Friedman’s challenge to Dear Martin, voting unanimously to allow the book to remain available in high school libraries. While the book does contain some coarse language, it was “realistic” and appropriate for teenagers.
Friedman has vowed to appeal all rejections to the district superintendent and, if necessary, to the Clay County School Board. He has reason to believe that his appeal may be successful. Friedman says that, during November’s election, we “got rid of two people” who opposed his efforts. He was “extremely supportive of two newly elected board members that I think sufficiently leaned towards protecting children.”
The goal, according to Friedman, is to use Clay County library to “set a good example for what a clean library looks like” for Florida and the country. If anyone gets in his way, Friedman vowed to “run over them like a dead body.”
1. This man moved from New York to Florida a few months ago
Now he wants to ban 3600 BOOKS from the school libraries
It is nice to see the people turn out to support the LGBTQI+ youth. I know there are far more people that are accepting of the gay, lesbian, and trans people than there are of the haters. The haters are just louder and willing to use violence. They wanted to mark the books so it would be easy for others to identify the kids who checked them out. A big old scarlet letter. It is the same for putting them in a different section all by themselves, nice big scarlet letter to paste on any kid who checks them out. Look at the gay kid, attack him, hurt him, making her cry. It was one kids who took a book home that had some LGBTQI+ subject material and one set of parents that complained so vigorously that an entire community was made to suffer, to be denied access to not just those books but the entire library. The school stopped sending the kids to the library because of the complaint of one parents. The school punished an entire school and all the kids to deny acceptability of the LGBTQI+ as one parent demanded. Hugs
The Crook County Library Board of Trustees voted Thursday night not to label LGBTQ-friendly children’s books or segregate them into a separate section.
In an unusual sight, people packed into the Crook County Library on Thursday night for a meeting of its board.
The topic at hand had drawn the standing room crowd: namely, whether or not to segregate LGBTQ-friendly children’s books into a separate section.
The Crook County Library Board of Trustees voted Thursday night not to label LGBTQ-friendly children’s books or segregate them into a separate section.
Adrian Vamanu
By the end of the night, the crowd had spoken overwhelmingly in support of keeping the books where they are, and the board voted 4-1 to not place the books in a special section of the library.
Library Director April Witteveen said the debate started in May when a group of local elementary school children visited the library. One student took home one of the library’s LGBTQ books. Soon after, with little to no explanation, the school stopped sending children to the library during school hours. Witteveen said the school does not have a library and students haven’t returned since.
Speaking at Thursday night’s meeting, former library board member and president ZueAnne Neal said she had started falling for the rhetoric around the books, as some community members called them dangerous for children.
Neal, appearing to be on the verge of tears, apologized to the crowd for at one point recommending the books be marked with a sticker or other identifying mark as a way to compromise between the sides.
“That was a sad, sad day,” she said.
Neal noted that after she did more research on the books, she found them to be age-appropriate and that placing the books into a separate section could create stigma, as well as potentially cost the library through lost funding and First Amendment lawsuits.
Some speakers pushed back on the notion that marking the books would ostracize people who wanted to check them out, calling such descriptions “misinformation.” Supporters of the move said marking the books would make it more clear for people who wanted to view the material, as well as those who wanted to avoid it.
Crook County is just one of hundreds of libraries across the country that have been targeted for allegedly making available LGBTQ books that contain child pornography. It comes amid a broader national debate over what educational materials should be available to children, especially those discussing racism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination.
Labeling queer people as pedophiles and dangers to children is a strategy used by anti-LGBTQ activists for decades.
One library in Jamestown, Michigan, found itself in a similar situation to Prineville in August, with residents there voting to block a tax levy on two separate occasions, meaning the small library lost 84% of its funding. The presence of LGBTQ books sparked the demand to cut the library’s funding, the Detroit Free Press reported.
Neal, the former library board president, said after looking into the issue, she ultimately came to see segregating books as a form of hate.
“If it roots here, it won’t end here,” she said. “It will just grow.”
The book issue in Crook County isn’t the first time Central Oregon has recently been roiled by misinformation involving LGBTQ people. In October, the Culver School District in nearby Jefferson County found itself in a controversy after pulling young students from a camp over false allegations about non-binary counselors.
Part I left out of this story was when one speaker read a Bible passage that described a man's genitals being like a donkey's, and then asked why that book was available in the library.
Shout out to that guy for doing homework for his testimony.
Just imagine being the poor kid that may have thought it was a good story, or that it applied to them. Then having your parents make such a fuss that your whole class can’t go back to the library. Religious indoctrination at it’s best.
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Scottie's Playtime 