Tip O'Neill said that all politics is LOCAL and what we're witnessing is that the REPUBLICAN LUNACY & RACIST DOGWHISTLES begin at the LOCAL LEVEL with few questioning.
"R" VOTERS don't seem to like to THINK, RESEARCH or ASK QUESTIONS.
CRITICAL THINKING ABILITIES get lost with poor education and blindly following the KOCH/ALEC PROPAGANDA intended to destroy PUBLIC EDUCATION among those easily being led like sheep.
"Bills such as Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' bill are likely to have a chilling effect on comprehensive sexual education in schools." (photo: Oskar Poss/Getty)
Some pundits say that talking with little kids about sex and gender primes them to be taken advantage of. Sex-ed researchers say that the opposite is true.
The grooming charges lump together concerns that kids are being introduced too early to sexually explicit material, to the existence of transgender people, and to non-heterosexual sexual orientations. In March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed what critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a measure that discourages teachers from discussing gender identity or sexual orientation in classrooms. Versions of the measure have been proposed in at least a dozen other states. Referring to the bill, DeSantis’s spokesperson Christina Pushaw tweeted, “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” A pastor even organized an “anti-grooming” rally at Disney’s headquarters in California.
This type of rhetoric is damaging in its own right. As the commentator David French writes in his newsletter, “Throwing around accusations of pedophilia, sympathy for pedophilia, grooming, or sympathy for grooming is a recipe for threats and violence”—an assessment that some historians endorse. This latest pedophilia panic overlaps with the false beliefs of the QAnon movement, which fueled the Pizzagate incident in 2016.
But bills such as Florida’s are also likely to have a chilling effect on comprehensive sexual education in schools, with deleterious effects. Comprehensive sex ed doesn’t just help prevent bullying; it helps kids have healthier relationships of all kinds, improves their communication skills, and even boosts their media literacy. Compared with abstinence-only sex education or no sex education at all, comprehensive sex ed helps reduce teen pregnancy rates. One meta-analysis found that European countries, many of which offer comprehensive, mandatory sex ed, including for young children, tend to have the lowest rates of child sexual abuse in the world. Sex education is “the exact opposite” of grooming, says Nora Gelperin, the director of sexuality education at Advocates for Youth, a sex-ed nonprofit. “Sex education, even when started in the earliest grades, has shown to be protective for kids, especially around child sexual abuse.”
A 2020 study that examined three decades of research on sex education found that comprehensive sex ed that begins in elementary school can help prevent child sex abuse, among other benefits. “Stranger danger”–type language isn’t recommended these days; about 93 percent of child sexual-abuse victims know their abusers. Instead, these programs help children identify the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching, the difference between “tattling” and keeping unsafe secrets, and how to identify abusive situations. In other words, sex ed isn’t grooming—it helps protect kids from grooming.
Modern sex ed also seems to give kids a sense of empowerment, including by teaching them the correct names for their own genitals. “Predators are less likely to select a child who can accurately talk about those body parts,” Gelperin says, “than a child that is ignorant of what those body parts are actually called.” It also makes kids less likely to victimize one another: One program for eighth graders, called Safe Dates, was associated with lower rates of physical and sexual dating violence four years later, compared with a control group.
Experts recommend starting sex education as early as kindergarten and teaching it the way you would math. Five-year-olds don’t tend to learn geometry, but they do learn about numbers and shapes. Similarly, experts say kindergartners don’t need to be told about, for example, orgasms, but they are encouraged to understand what their body parts are and how to protect themselves from unwanted touching.
One of the best-regarded American sex-ed curricula is “Rights, Respect, and Responsibility,” or the “3Rs,” developed by Advocates for Youth and available for free online. For kindergartners and first graders, the lessons focus on preventing bullying, setting boundaries about touching, and learning what types of things make babies (elephants, but not pizza). The most explicit section covers the proper names of genitalia, including an explanation that most girls have a “hole” called “the vagina that is used when a female has a baby.” The use of correct anatomical terms is meant to ensure that kids are understood if they ever report abuse. But also, “this is your body and you have a right to know what the different parts are called,” the curriculum explains.
The first-grade lesson plans also include a section about gender identity, in which teachers are encouraged to say something like “You might feel like you’re a boy even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are ‘girl’ parts. You might feel like you’re a girl even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are ‘boy’ parts. And you might not feel like you’re a boy or a girl, but you’re a little bit of both. No matter how you feel, you’re perfectly normal!”
Though this message does not exactly comport with a socially conservative worldview, it hardly amounts to “grooming” children to be molested by pedophiles. The argument for providing information on sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary school is that children are likely to encounter these concepts in the wild. Between 2 million and 4 million American children are being raised by a non-straight parent. Some children might either be transgender themselves or have a parent who is. Advocates of this type of curriculum say these concepts can be explained more accurately in school, and help make kids who are not straight or cisgender feel welcomed.
But just because the “3Rs” curriculum is recommended doesn’t mean it gets taught. Far from it: Sex ed, like all lesson plans, varies dramatically by school district, and usually reflects the values of the surrounding community. For example, Texas, which has more children than almost any other state, does not require high schools to teach sex ed. As of 2017, most Texas schools districts took an abstinence-only approach to sex ed, and though the state has recently introduced some discussion of contraceptives in middle school, abstinence must be emphasized. Instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation is not currently offered in Florida from kindergarten to third grade, the ages targeted by the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Most European countries do provide comprehensive sex ed in every school, however. Experts link Europeans’ superior sexual-health outcomes—lower teen pregnancy rates, lower rates of sexual abuse, and lower STD rates among young people—to better, earlier sex ed. In Western Europe, sex ed tends to be mandatory and blunt, and start before kindergarten; it’s like the “3Rs,” but more graphic.
In the Netherlands, sex ed begins before many kids can read. “From age 5, children are taught about reproduction, about pregnancy and birth of a baby,” says Elsbeth Reitzema, the sexuality-education program officer at Rutgers, a Dutch nonprofit that helps run the country’s sex-ed programs. “They also learn the main physical differences between boys and girls, about the genitals and their functions. By the end of primary school, children have learned about reproduction, pregnancy, and birth. They know that a woman, if she is fertile, can become pregnant through sex in the manner of penis-in-vagina sex.” They also learn about being intersex, transgender, and nonbinary. When they’re 11, kids learn about masturbation.
One popular Dutch sex-ed curriculum explains to fourth graders that “the clitoris is a very sensitive place. Touching it can give a nice feeling,” according to Beyond Birds and Bees, a 2018 book in part about the Dutch approach to sex ed by Bonnie Rough, who has written on the same topic for The Atlantic. “It is not customary for parents to take their children out of the lesson,” Reitzema told me. “Should parents object to the lessons, then the school will explain what the content of the lessons is. This usually removes the parents’ resistance to the lessons.”
In Sweden’s mandatory sex-ed program, 7-to-9-year-olds learn “about all body parts, and discuss gender,” Hans Olsson, the country’s senior adviser on sexuality education, told me. “School has a duty to counteract limiting gender patterns, already at [the] preschool level.” Also in preschool, kids learn about bodily integrity and name their sexual organs. Rather than the proper terminology, though, Swedish kids use snopp, which is like “willy,” and snippa. (“Don’t know the equivalent word in English,” Olsson said.) Starting in fourth grade, Swedish kids learn about LGBTQ issues.
Sara Zaske, the author of the German comparative-parenting book Achtung Baby, told me that her 7-year-old daughter’s class in Berlin read the children’s book Mummy Laid an Egg without asking parents’ permission first. The picture book, which was originally published in English, features cartoon drawings of “Daddy’s tube” and “Mummy’s hole,” along with the ways “mummies and daddies fit together.” Unlike in the United States, Zaske writes in her book, “German kids learn much more about sex than conception.” German schools cover STD prevention, yes, but also masturbation, orgasms, and homosexuality. Zaske quotes one doctor in an article on the city of Berlin’s official website as saying, “Sex education cannot begin early enough.”
Rough and others don’t see these types of lessons as “giving children ideas” about sex and sexuality. After all, adults openly do things—drink alcohol, use the stove, drive—that kids can’t. Kids understand when an activity is for adults only. She and other advocates reject the notion that telling kids about different sexual orientations or gender identities “turns” kids gay or gender-nonconforming. “Teaching about the topics is not creating new LGBTQ students,” says Elizabeth Schroeder, a sexuality educator and co-author of the “3Rs” curriculum.
But most important, early sex ed opens up lines of communication between kids and responsible adults. “If we start giving off the impression that sex is a topic that when you ask me a question … that I’m going to start acting weird and funny and dishonest about it, they quickly pick up that this is something off-limits,” says Emily Rothman, a health-sciences professor at Boston University. “So they’re either gonna think, Well, I can go to my friends or I can go to the internet.” By which she means: to porn.
The larger point of this kind of instruction is what the Dutch call “sexual assertiveness”: “If somebody is saying or doing something that makes your body feel uncomfortable, you’ve been taught how to notice that and what to do next,” Rough told me. One aim of communicating freely about sex with a teacher or another trusted adult is the “development of a trusting, trustworthy relationship with a grown-up who has the child’s best interests at heart.”
Meanwhile, only a quarter of U.S. public schools report that students practice communication, decision making, goal setting, or refusal skills as part of sex ed, Rough writes in her book. Instead, some American children learn about sex through porn, through experimentation, or, tragically, from an abuser. Because so much of American sex education treats sexual activity as dangerous or shameful, kids who are victimized by adults may feel that they have to keep it secret. European children who learn about their body, and are warned about inappropriate touching, can better protect themselves. There, Rough writes, “those who prey on children can no longer benefit from their ignorance.”
Censorship Battles' New Frontier: Your Public Library
Bonnie Wallace speaks during a county commissioners meeting on in March. (photo: Sergio Flores/WP)
Conservatives are teaming with politicians to remove books and gut library boards
“It came to my attention a few weeks ago that pornographic filth has been discovered at the Llano library,” wrote Bonnie Wallace, a 54-year-old local church volunteer. “I’m not advocating for any book to be censored but to be RELOCATED to the ADULT section. … It is the only way I can think of to prohibit censorship of books I do agree with, mainly the Bible, if more radicals come to town and want to use the fact that we censored these books against us.”
Wallace had attached an Excel spreadsheet of about 60 books she found objectionable, including those about transgender teens, sex education and race, including such notable works as “Between the World and Me,” by author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, an exploration of the country’s history written as a letter to his adolescent son. Not long after, the county’s chief librarian sent the list to Suzette Baker, head of one of the library’s three branches.
“She told me to look at pulling the books off the shelf and possibly putting them behind the counter. I told them that was censorship,” Baker said.
Wallace’s list was the opening salvo in a censorship battle that is unlikely to end well for proponents of free speech in this county of 21,000 nestled in rolling hills of mesquite trees and cactus northwest of Austin.
Leaders have taken works as seemingly innocuous as the popular children’s picture book “In the Night Kitchen” by Maurice Sendak off the shelves, closed library board meetings to the public and named Wallace the vice chair of a new library board stacked with conservative appointees — some of whom did not even have library cards.
With these actions, Llano joins a growing number of communities across America where conservatives have mounted challenges to books and other content related to race, sex, gender and other subjects they deem inappropriate. A movement that started in schools has rapidly expanded to public libraries, accounting for 37 percent of book challenges last year, according to the American Library Association. Conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries’ governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures.
“The danger is that we start to have information and books that only address one viewpoint that are okayed by just one certain group,” said Mary Woodward, president-elect of the Texas Library Association.
“We lose that diversity of thought and diversity of ideas libraries are known for — and only represent one viewpoint that is the loudest,” said Woodward, noting that there have been an estimated 17 challenges leveled at public libraries in Texas recently and that she expects many more.
Leila Green Little, a parent and board member of the Llano County Library System Foundation, said her anti-censorship group obtained dozens of emails from country officials that reveal the outsize influence a small but vocal group of conservative Christian and tea party activists wielded over the county commissioners to reshape the library system to their own ideals.
In one of the emails, which were obtained through a public records request and shared with The Washington Post, Cunningham seemed to question whether public libraries were even necessary.
“The board also needs to recognize that the county is not mandated by law to provide a public library,” Cunningham wrote to Wallace in January.
He declined to comment for this story but said in a statement that the county was aware of citizen concerns and “is committed to providing excellent public library services to our patrons consistent with community expectations and standards, as well as operating within compliance of Texas and Federal statutes.”
Dissent over removing books
Cunningham, a two-term judge who was once part of the security detail for then-Gov. George W. Bush, acted quickly on the complaints. He strode into the main library a few weeks later and took two books off the shelves — Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen” — because some parents had objected to the main character in the story, a little boy, appearing nude — and “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health,” a sex education book for parents and children ages 10 and up, that includes color illustrations of the human body and sex acts.
He also ordered librarians to pause buying new material and to pull “any books with photos of naked or sexual conduct regardless if they are animated or actual photos,” emails reviewed by The Washington Post showed.
Texas school districts were already ablaze with book challenges in October, when state Rep. Matt Krause (R), chair of the General Investigating Committee, asked school districts for information on his own list of 850 books, most of them gender- and race-themed, that “might make children feel discomfort, guilt or anguish.” Gov. Greg Abbott (R) jumped into the fray, calling for an investigation of “pornography” in school libraries. One school district removed more than 100 books, although most were reviewed and returned.
EveryLibrary, a national political action committee for libraries that tracks such challenges, said it has seen “dozens of new attacks” on libraries, their governing bodies and policies since the first of the year — in Texas as well as ongoing cases in Montana and Louisiana. In some cases, the challengers are being assisted by growing national networks such as the parental rights group Moms for Liberty or spurred on by conservative public policy organizations like Heritage Action for America, the ALA has said.
At the county’s main library in Llano, director Amber Milum said in an interview that she had already taken it upon herself to put some books away in a file cabinet in her office as early as August, including two popular read-aloud picture books aimed at amusing kids: “I Need a New Butt!” and “Freddie the Farting Snowman.”
The moves circumvented the library’s established practices on objectionable content — including a challenge form to be reviewed by librarians. Isolating or removing books because of subjective or personal opinions — finding the content offensive or distasteful, for example — could open up a library to a First Amendment challenge, experts said.
“We didn’t fill out a form, everyone just came in and talked to me personally,” Milum said. “I took notes on everything that everybody was saying, and that’s how it happened.”
Meanwhile, Baker, head librarian at the library branch in the unincorporated community of Kingsland, about 23 miles from Llano, continued to push back. An Army veteran whose grandfather fought in World War II and who has a son in Afghanistan, said she is a firm believer in the Bill of Rights.
“I don’t think we should give in. If we give them even an inch, they will think they can do whatever they want,” she wrote in an email to Milum.
Then in December, the commissioners voted to suspend the county’s e-book system, OverDrive, because, they said, it lacked sufficient parental controls, which also cut off access to the elderly, people with disabilities or those otherwise unable to visit a physical library. Officials say they plan on replacing the system. They also shuttered the libraries for three days just before Christmas to review and reorganize the teen and children’s collections.
“God has been so good to us … please continue to pray for the librarians and that their eyes would be open to the truth,” Rochelle Wells, a new member of the library board, wrote in an email. “They are closing the library for 3 days which are to be entirely devoted to removing books that contain pornographic content.”
Green Little said little is known about what administrators did during the time the libraries were closed. The book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” a work about systemic racism by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson, has mysteriously vanished, and the fate of several other works remains unknown, she said.
“When I heard books were being taken out of the library, that was a big-time problem for me,” she said. “For others it was the fact that the county was not operating transparently. A small group of private citizens had an inordinate amount of control over county workings.”
Green Little, a mother of two who lives with her family on an 1800s-era cattle ranch outside of town, said it was not easy to take a stand in conservative Llano County, where nearly 80 percent of the majority-White population voted for President Donald Trump in 2020. A Confederate flag still flies at the Civil War memorial.
Some friends stopped returning her calls. Social invitations dried up. Green Little recently threw a Beatrix Potter-themed fundraiser at a park to raise money for the library foundation — complete with a petting zoo with baby lambs. For counterprogramming, Wallace, the wife of the town’s hospital board president, hosted an “adults only” showing of a video of pedophile chasers. It was held at a hall next door to the park at the same time as the garden party. Wallace declined to comment.
A new library board
In January, commissioners voted to dissolve the existing library board — whose members came from Friends of the Library groups and the Women’s Culture Club — and created a reconstituted board of mostly political appointees, including many of the citizens who had complained about books. A retired physician, Richard Day, a Democrat, was denied a seat despite having a master’s degree in library science and experience managing the rare books collection at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, he said.
Cunningham said in a statement that the restructuring of the library board was in keeping with Texas law and past practices to allow for “citizen participation from different perspectives.” The all-female board is overwhelmingly White and Republican, records show.
And the new board was ready to start focusing on its top priorities, including adding content of “academia, educational value and character building” and consulting with a local Christian school about their needs, Wells wrote in one email. Wells, a member of the local tea party who home-schools her six children, did not return calls for comment.
But she had one more complaint: “There were 3 or 4 patrons present taking notes,” at the group’s meeting, she wrote to one of the commissioners. “That surprised a few of us. Would you be able to persuade Judge Cunningham to keep the meetings closed?”
Last month the board voted to close meetings to the public, which could violate the Texas open meeting laws, experts have said. Panel members often stop to pray over questions brought up in meetings, and until the Lord answers, they can’t resolve them, according to county officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions.
The county has argued that although the board will now approve all book purchases going forward, it is operating in an “advisory capacity” only, which means it is not subject to open meeting laws. But if the commissioners simply rubber-stamp the recommendations, they could be, legal experts say.
John Chrastka, executive director of EveryLibrary, said library boards are designed to be independent to protect records, serve the entire community and protect patrons’ First Amendment rights.
“When boards become politicized, there are problems because they either favor one group over another or start to spend taxpayer money in less-than-transparent ways,” Chrastka said. “If a board is motivated by political ideology or a religious agenda, it stops being a public institution because it does not serve the whole public.”
Fired
Baker, who had been head librarian at the Kingsland branch for a year, continued to wage her own resistance. Inspired by a recent book-burning in Tennessee, she created a display in the library with banned titles like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and changed the letters on the variable message board out to front to say “We put the ‘lit’ in literature.” Milum told her to take down the display, then began ignoring her emails, she said.
On March 9, when Milum and the director of human resources appeared at the door of her library, Baker was ready. She knew she had caused waves. With a quaking voice, a visibly nervous Milum read Baker’s alleged offenses: “insubordination,” “creating a disturbance” and “allowing personal opinions to interfere with job duties and procedures.”
Baker was being fired.
After Milum finished reading her termination notice, Baker handed over her timecard and began packing up her belongings — books, supplies for the art class she taught and a small plaque that said, “Your beliefs don’t make you a good person, your behavior does.” A co-worker burst into tears. Baker said goodbye and walked out into the warm spring day, leaving the place that had been a refuge since she left a troubled marriage in Colorado and moved back home to Texas in 2016.
She was sad, but has no regrets about defying the board’s orders, she said.
“You’re taking away people’s freedom to read books and that’s not right,” Baker said. “Your intellectual freedom, your mind, is one of the only things you ever truly own. You can’t go against that.”
‘Things I feared already came true’
One recent spring day, an overflow crowd packed the Llano County commissioners meeting as the panel debated the new library advisory board’s bylaws.
Many who spoke praised the commissioners for their recent work “saving the children of Llano County” from “pornography” and “pedophiles,” often breaking into enthusiastic applause and shouts of “Amen!” Tension erupted when latecomers stuck in the hallway attempted to speak. “I’d like to speak in the name of Jesus!” one man yelled.
When Cunningham spoke, he evoked past trials that the county had weathered — a historic flood, a historic freeze, a historic pandemic — and he sounded tired.
“This has gone way too big and way too heated,” he said. “Both sides need to take a breath. We’re going to get to a solution together.”
Throughout the debate, the commissioners deferred to Wallace, who showed up with an giant binder full of papers, including what appeared to be a color copy of an illustration from one of the offending books. Ultimately, each side scored a small victory — the head librarian would now be a member of the board, as the anti-censorship camp wanted, but the meetings would still be closed to the public.
Baker and Green Little were in the audience, but neither wanted to speak. Baker said she is exploring her legal options with an attorney. Cunningham declined to comment on personnel matters or potential litigation.
Green Little’s group is also consulting attorneys from the ACLU and elsewhere to see if there is any “legal accountability” for the commissioners’ actions.
She said they will keep fighting, but “the things I feared already came true. I expect more of the same — more censorship, more opacity, a library for all curated by the few.”
REPUBLICANS BLINDLY FOLLOW WITHOUT QUESTION:
1980 KOCH AGENDA
“We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”
Florida Continues Attack On Education After Rejecting 54 Math Textbooks Due To 'CRT'
Sebastian Murdock
Florida officials continued their war on education this week after rejecting more than 50 proposed math textbooks that allegedly “included references to Critical Race Theory.”
The Florida Department of Education announced Friday it would not include 54 of the 132 ― or 41% ― of math textbooks on the state’s adopted list, citing “CRT” as one of the main reasons.
“Reasons for rejecting textbooks included references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” the statement said. “The highest number of books rejected were for grade levels K-5, where an alarming 71 percent were not appropriately aligned with Florida standards or included prohibited topics and unsolicited strategies.”
The state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said without evidence that the math textbooks “included indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students.”
DeSantis has been an outspoken critic of CRT, which has become a catchall term ― stripped of its original academic meaning ― for having discussions about racism in the classroom. Since last July, there have been more than 200 instances of public school districts in Florida banning books, the third highest number of incidents of any state in the U.S.
Democratic state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith said in a tweet that the governor “has turned our classrooms into political battlefields and this is just the beginning.”
Public school textbooks in Florida are reviewed by subject every five years. The next subject up for review will be social studies textbooks next month.
Republican resolution on critical race theory is nothing more than a racist dog whistle
MIDDLEBORO REPUBLICANS: YOU ARE AN EMBARRASSMENT!
WILL MIDDLEBORO REPEAT BOURNE'S MISTAKE WITH ERIC MACHADO?
MIDDLEBORO: ARE YOU LISTENING? Why Conservatives Want You To FEAR Critical Race Theory
JUST ANOTHER STUPID REPUBLICAN REGURGITATING LIES FOR VOTES!
"So critical race theory," said former state Rep. Geoff Diehl, who's now running for governor. "Is anybody a fan of that? No!' "
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