The Patriot Post® · Biden Joins Hard Left's War on School Libraries
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
So said Vladimir Lenin, the founder of Soviet Communism. But his bold guarantee is certainly transferable. When the American Left exerts ever-greater control over our children’s education, should we really be surprised that they grow up confused and fragile and filled with hatred for their country?
Actor and Christian activist Kirk Cameron, for one, gets it. “Whoever succeeds in telling the stories to the children,” he recently said, “gets to control the future.” This is why he’s joined the fight for our nation’s libraries. And it’s why his admonition, frankly, sounds so much like Lenin’s.
Cameron and his team are renting backroom space in libraries across the country, reading from his wholesome new children’s book, As You Grow. And he’s packing ‘em in despite not having the benefit of a taxpayer-funded story hour like those depraved and disgusting drag queens.
Yet there’s another battle taking place for our libraries, and its consequences will be far-reaching. It’s a battle over who gets to determine which books will be stocked in our school libraries — the local school districts themselves, or the federal government. And if it’s the latter, then we can be sure that the Biden administration will be taking orders from the hard-left pressure groups under the Rainbow Mafia umbrella.
Ground zero for this battle is the small Texas town of Granbury, where, as The Daily Signal reports: “Officials in the Civil Rights Division of President Joe Biden’s Department of Education said they’d received a formal complaint from the ACLU that the small community outside Fort Worth was somehow violating the government’s definition of 'sex’ by pulling books from school library shelves.”
It seems the ACLU — which used to be a free speech champion but is now merely an order-taker of the Left — became incensed when Texas Governor Greg Abbott urged the state’s association of school boards to “ensure no child is exposed to pornography or other inappropriate content in a Texas public school.”
Who could take issue with a directive like that? Doesn’t everyone want to keep porn and filth away from our kids, especially in our schools and libraries?
Granbury School Superintendent Jeremy Glenn certainly does, and he had a conversation with local librarians to that effect. “I don’t want a kid picking up a book, whether it’s about homosexuality or heterosexuality, and reading about how to hook up sexually in our libraries,” he said. “And I’m going to take it a step further with you. There are two genders. There’s male, and there’s female. And I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women. And there are women that think they’re men. And again, I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries.”
“I’m cutting to the chase on a lot of this,” Glenn continued. “It’s the transgender, LGBTQ, and the sex — sexuality — in books. That’s what the governor has said that he will prosecute people for, and that’s what we’re pulling out.”
And pull ‘em out they did for review — as many as 130 books.
As you might have guessed, Glenn’s school board and his community are solidly conservative. But at least one of his librarians isn’t. And, naturally, the conversation was leaked to the press. Soon, the superintendent was accused of anti-LGBTQ (or is it LGBTQIA+?) bias. Because this isn’t about tolerance; it’s about compliance, and it’s about grooming.
As The Washington Post reports: “These actions, attorneys for the Texas ACLU argue, violate Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination in public schools on the basis of sex. The Biden administration recently interpreted this law as forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity — a finding that is key to the ACLU chapter’s argument.”
“This isn’t the sort of civil rights issue that requires federal intervention,” said Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. “It’s a question about books in schools, not about individual rights being violated.” Books in schools, it seems, would be under the purview of locally elected officials, no?
No. At least not as far as John Chrastka is concerned. Chrastka heads the national political action committee EveryLibrary, and his leftist PAC, he says, plans “to repeat that contention in amicus briefs it will file in lawsuits against school book banning.”
But the Granbury case may be an outlier in that it involves a school superintendent who targeted the removal of books associated with a specific group of people: LGBTQIA+ people. Were they removed as part of a sweep of books with sexually inappropriate content of all kinds, we wouldn’t be talking about Granbury.
In any case, the groomers on the Left might want to be careful what they wish for. As Harvard’s Houman Harouni notes, “Religious minorities are also a protected class, but many schools don’t seem to have much of a problem limiting texts that promote a particular religion.” In other words, a win by the Rainbow Mafia in this gateway battle will likely open the door for those who’d like to see greater access and instruction on religious content. You know, content that insists marriage is between a man and a woman, or content that says only women can get pregnant.
Regardless of the legal outcome, however, Kirk Cameron says the war will be won elsewhere.
“I know why parents and grandparents are coming out of the woodwork,” he said. “They understand there is a war on children — and nobody’s going to stop it but us.”