The New GOP Witch Hunt: Books On Race, Sex and LGBTQ People

The Christofascists and white nationalist evangelicals who now comprise the backbone of the Republican Party base have long sought to censor and erase anything and anyone who challenges their fairy tale based belief system.  Increasingly, Republican elected officials has shown a willingness - indeed, they fall over themselves rushing to pander to ignorance and bigotry - to push this anti-knowledge and exclusionary agenda.  This is the main reason, in my view, why the Republican Party has gone from respecting science and knowldge decades ago to being the political party that celebrates ignorance and and wears ignorance as a badge of honor. All of which brings me to the new GOP push to ban books - one Virginia school board actually wants to burn books - that offend Christofascists sensibilities or undermine their whitewashed version of American history or admit that LGBT people not only exist but comprise a normal variation in human sexuality. Growing up as a pre-Internet era closeted gay youth there was literally nowhere I could find books that even mentioned gays much less depicted us as normal and productive members of society.   Today's GOP wants to take school libaries and cirriculum back to those "good old days" and good forbid that the brutality and cruelty of slavery and the Jim Crow era be honestly depicted.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this push to censor and ban books.  Here are highlights:

The scene in Spotsylvania County this week unfolded like many others — a parent stepped up to a microphone in a nondescript room, glanced at a sheet of prepared remarks and claimed the school board in this tiny slice of Virginia was exposing her children to pornography.

The woman took issue with two books in particular: “Call Me By Your Name,” an acclaimed novel that centers on a gay relationship, and “33 Snowfish,” about three homeless teenagers. The American Library Association listed “33 Snowfish” in its list of Best Books for Young Adults in 2004, but this parent called it “disgusting” for its discussion of sexual abuse and child pornography.

Searching the district’s online library catalogue, she added, she found 172 hits for books including the word “gay,” 84 hits for books with the word “lesbian” and just 19 hits for books with the word “Jesus” — “but half of them are about Muslims,” she said.

The board voted unanimously to remove all “sexually explicit” books from the district’s libraries for review. Now all 29 of the district’s librarians are searching tens of thousands of titles. “I think we should throw those books in a fire,” one board member declared.

Schools around the country are scrutinizing and sometimes pulling books from the shelves, as backlash to stories centering on race, sex and queer identities becomes part of mainstream Republican politics. Hailed as a winning message in the Virginia governor’s race this month, conservative rallying cries of “parental rights” have helped fuel a new wave of challenges and legal threats over even the most celebrated of titles, according to those who track book censorship.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) ramped up the rhetoric this week with orders for a statewide probe of potential “criminal activity” surrounding “pornography” in schools, days after calling out two LGBTQ memoirs recently pulled in some districts. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) called the same day for a similar investigation.

Among the titles put on pause: Decades-old classics such as Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” as well as a nonfiction account of the Ku Klux Klan.

“I find it profoundly disturbing that we’re accepting so easily the idea that books should be banned and burned and taken away,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. The virulence of the opposition in Spotsylvania County especially alarmed her.

“I thought we rejected that authoritarian impulse, you know, decades ago,” she said.

Conservative parents’ complaints have ranged in topic from vaccine mandates to teaching about racism. Latham, who is White and calls himself a “conservative-leaning independent,” said his parents group has a list of more titles they want to examine.

Caldwell-Stone from ALA traced an apparent rise in challenges to political outrage over topics such as LGBTQ sexuality and “critical race theory” — a college-level academic framework that examines systemic racism in America but has become a catchall for conservative concerns about the way schools discuss race.

Republican leaders have also sought to cut funding for schools that teach the New York Times’ 1619 Project, and they have advocated “patriotic education” instead of what they call an excessive focus on the United States’ past and present wrongs.

Richard Price, a political science professor who tracks book challenges in schools and libraries, said he views leaders’ recent embrace of these objections as “political opportunism.”

Republicans are “trying to make sure that these parents stay angry and attack their schools because they want to make sure that that energy is still there for next fall,” said Price, a professor at Weber State University.

[T]he ALA’s list of most-challenged books in 2020 is dominated by titles typically criticized by the right as “anti-police,” “divisive,” sexually explicit or immoral. An anti-racism book by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds drew complaints that it did not cover racism against everyone, ALA said. People said a novel about a transgender child did not reflect “the values of our community.”

[T]he kinds of books drawing ire underscore that those eager for restrictions represent the views of a largely White, straight and cisgender group, at the expense of other communities that long struggled to find their experiences in mainstream literature.

“I’m writing for my former students. I’m writing the books that they couldn’t find in our high school library,” said Ashley Hope Pérez, a literature professor and former Texas English teacher whose 2015 novel “Out of Darkness” — which delves into sex, sexual abuse and racism — was denounced this year as “pornography” not fit for students.

“Teachers come to us scared,” said Emily Kirkpatrick, executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English. “Scared about their job, scared about respect in their communities.”

The council used to get one or two contacts a month from educators seeking help with formal book challenges or worrying school board conversations, Kirkpatrick said. “Now it is not uncommon for us to receive, four, five or six requests for help a day,” she said.

In late 2019, a group of Loudoun County parents forced the school system to remove at least five books with LGBTQ themes from elementary schools over complaints of inappropriate content. And in Fairfax County, school officials in September removed two LGBTQ texts from high school libraries after parents denounced the books for sexually explicit content.

The texts are undergoing review from two committees of teachers, parents, administrators and students over the age of 18, according to Fairfax County Public Schools spokeswoman Helen Lloyd. She said the committees will recommend whether to put the books back in school libraries later this month.

The fight over “Beloved” reemerged in the final week of the Virginia governor’s race, when Glenn Youngkin released an ad featuring Murphy and slamming his opponent — McAuliffe — for his veto of the 2016 bill.

The ad quickly racked up more than a million views. Youngkin won the governor’s race this month, with experts ascribing his success to his ability to reach suburban parents.

Less than a week after Youngkin’s victory, two school board members in Spotsylvania County — Rabih Abuismail and Kirk Twigg — said at a meeting that they wanted to not only remove sexually explicit books, but also destroy them.

Rebecca Murray, a retired former school librarian in Spotsylvania County, foresees dire consequences if books are removed. “When we start allowing parents or general citizens to walk into a school’s library and pull books off the shelf, declare them pornographic or for whatever other reason,” Murray said, “then we no longer have intellectual freedom in our school library.”

Be very afraid for the future if this movement is not stopped. It's important to remember that the knowledge of ancient Rome was and Europe sank into the Dark Ages thanks in part to the Catholic Church opposing anything that ran counter to its dogma.  Todays evangelicals are the least educated of any religious group in America and want to inflict their ignorance and bigotry on all.