Book banning and other school woes

A right-wing school board in Texas decided to warehouse all the new books they’d purchased in case some of them broke Texas school-censorship laws. Board member Morgan Calhoun claimed, when asked, that a book about a cat wanting to be a unicorn was trans propaganda.

A new app offers kids free access to banned books.

Moms for Fascism — oh, it’s Moms for Liberty, strange how I got confused — is spreading the book-banning gospel.

“We treat Moms for Liberty like the KKK. If you knew that a KKK meeting was happening in a church down the street from your house, everyone would be alarmed.”

“Simply mentioning sex or sexual assault, as many of the removed books do, is a far cry from pornography.”

Book-banning isn’t a culture war, it’s fascism.

One Alabama town refuses to remove LGBTQ books from the library. A group called Clean Up Alabama has a solution: make librarians legally liable for obscene books (which unsurprisingly seems to include anything gay-themed).

A Miami-Dade school board decides not to recognize LGBTQ history month.

Oklahoma, like Florida, is employing PragerU to provide instructional videos about how slavery’s not that bad. And that Ulysses Grant didn’t think slavery was bad (as noted at the link, he did).

While Republicans talk about how they only want to protect kids with their book suppression and anti-gay policy it’s not about kids: “Some central Florida lawmakers said they were considering “all legislative, legal and executive options available” to stop business owners in a small town from voluntarily displaying rainbow decals in their windows indicating that they are “safe place” for LGBTQ+ people who feel threatened.

Another Florida town has proclaimed itself an LGBTQ sanctuary city.

Four Republican lawmakers wrote a letter to officials in Mount Dora two weeks ago warning that the new, optional city-sponsored program could put the central Florida community outside Orlando “in the crosshairs of potentially detrimental and absolutely unnecessary economic harm.”

In a Clay county school board workshop meeting from last month, the chief academic officer Roger Dailey seemed to cast aspersions on the very utility of libraries, referring to them as glorified copy rooms, and admitting that his own teenage children have never checked a book out of their high school library because they “consume their literature in different formats, most of it digitally on their devices”, he says.