I was planning on writing up a summary of the Chesapeake, VA School Board meeting this past Monday, where four *candidates* for school board gave speeches on books they wanted banned, including a list of 27 that they seem to have just copy-pasted from a group in Utah. I wanted to focus on the very real, very local concern in my city (especially as a candidate for School Board this year who vehemently opposes censorship and book banning).
But it’s so hard to keep up with all the news on book banning and censorship running rampant throughout the country right now in Republican controlled legislators.
But now, in a clear case of “saying the quiet part out loud”, Tennessee (who has really been trying hard to show that Florida and Texas are not the biggest bunch of authoritarians out there today) takes the proverbial cake. During a discussion on a bill that would allow Tennessee to “pull a Florida” and let politicians dictate the content of textbooks for students, Rep. Jerry Sexton was asked a simple question by Rep. John Ray Clemmons:
“What are you going to do with them? Are you going to put them in the street? Light them on fire? Where are they going?”
His answer: “I don’t have a clue, but I would burn them.”
And here we go. Let’s ignore the semantics of the fact that he immediately followed “not having a clue” with a very clear and concrete clue as to what he wanted done with these books and focus on the fact that these GOP legislators aren’t even trying to be subtle anymore.
We’ve been over and over and over this again in this country, from the Satanic Panic of the 1980s to Pico in 1982 (the Supreme Court case that, theoretically, settled this debate 40 years ago) to the release of Mortal Kombat in the early 1990s to Harry Potter bans in the 2000s because of witchcraft.
We keep having this fight. And, yes, free speech keeps winning for now, but we need to combat this on a stronger level, especially locally. This is why we need people on local school boards, especially in these GOP-governed states (Virginia included, even though our Democrat-controlled Senate has been the brick wall saving us from being the next FL, TX, or TN… for now).
That is why I am running for School Board in Chesapeake, VA. But we need help to win these fights in red states. Please consider donating to my campaign if you want to help us fight this nonsense on a local level! Or consider purchasing some merchandise, including this “I’m With The Banned” art donated to my campaign by a local comic book artist!