People who want to ban books never admit that’s their goal, because they know it’s unpopular. It also hypocritically goes against the values of freedom and liberty they publicly claim to cherish and protect.
Opinion
Instead, they often hide their true intent by calling for something that sounds more reasonable: giving parents more control over what books their children read, so innocent young minds are not polluted by obscene material.
But it’s turned out to be a very slippery slope in Cheyenne, one that opponents of a policy change in Laramie County School District 1 last year warned could lead to full-fledged book banning.
Now it’s happening. Cheyenne’s public school system is on the verge of passing the strictest policy in the state against buying books with any passages that meet the vague standard of “sexually explicit” content.
To be clear, these are not books judged under federal or state laws as pornographic or obscene, which are illegal in school library collections.
In several Wyoming communities, including Casper, Gillette, Lander and Sheridan, some members of the public have turned typically staid school board meetings into chaos by clamoring to have all LGBTQ-themed or sex-related books — even textbooks — pulled from shelves.
In Cheyenne, it began when the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based extremist group, demanded Laramie 1’s board of trustees change the “opt-out” policy that allowed parents and guardians to select certain books their children were not allowed to access in school libraries.
It would be replaced by a four-tier system: no access to sexually explicit materials, parent-limited access to such content, open access to all materials, or no access to the library at all.
Despite widespread opposition — about 77% of 1,500 public comments were against the new policy — the board passed it by a 4-2 vote in December. So far about 60% of parents have chosen open access.
Cheyenne attorney George Powers filed a public record request that showed 29 of the first 33 books challenged under the policy were made by one person, the treasurer of Moms for Liberty in Cheyenne. The idea this policy resulted from a groundswell of community support for more parental control over books for kids is laughable. (National data backs this up. The Washington Post performed a nationwide analysis of thousands of book challenges and found that 11 people were responsible for a whopping 60% of challenges in the 2021-2022 school year.)
“The district’s new policy simply gave her a tool to promote the agenda of her national organization,” Powers wrote in a Wyoming Tribune Eagle op-ed.
But Moms for Liberty wasn’t satisfied. In April, the group pressed for another change to the district’s library purchasing policy.
Although no books with explicit sexual material were identified in elementary school libraries, the proposal needlessly states none can be bought. Meanwhile, junior high and high school libraries would be “encouraged” not to buy them. Would they be punished for allegedly violating this unspecified rule?
“This is a book ban, period,” Marcie Kindred of Cheyenne, co-founder of Wyoming Family Alliance for Freedom, told me. She’s absolutely right. Challenged books would simply not be bought.
“If there’s a silver lining, it’s getting people to wake up and realize we have some dishonest politicians at every level,” Kindred said.
If the name of her organization sounds similar to the far-right Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which has proposed House bills to jail librarians who stock books it finds morally offensive, it’s intentional. I’m glad someone finally dared to take defending “freedom” back from a group that tries to censor and restrict others’ views.
Taking stock of the capital city’s school library situation, I wondered what’s happening in Gillette, where anti-LGBTQ censorship gained traction in 2021. Two years later, a new library board with a majority appointed by Campbell County commissioners cowardly fired Terri Lesley, then-director of the county library.
Lesley, whose lawsuit for wrongful termination is pending, suggested anyone challenging a book should follow an established process and put the burden on the board to name books it wants to “weed” from the system, instead of making the staff do it arbitrarily.
“It was just fraught with uncertainty, and an impossible task all the way around,” Lesley told me then. “There are no books to my knowledge in our collection that are obscene. What are they talking about?”
I called Nick Jessen, a 77-year-old retired car salesman who recently made a national splash when HBO’s John Oliver show, “Last Week Tonight,” played a video of him memorably chastising the board before it fired Lesley. Jessen, like the former librarian, is one of my heroes.
“When you start outlawing books because of your personal religious and moral beliefs in this country, you’re going against the Constitution, you’re going against what we were founded for, and you’re personally an affront to me and most of the people I know,” Jessen testified. “This is a shit show, and I’m embarrassed for this board.”
The host had some good-natured fun at Jessen’s expense when his studio audience finished applauding. “Wow! I have to say, usually when I see a white guy with a bushy mustache holding a microphone at a town meeting, you get worried,” Oliver quipped. “But he proved my expectations wrong, so kudos to you, white guy who otherwise I’d assume stormed the Capitol.”
Jessen didn’t take offense because he said Oliver nailed the censorship issue on its head. “These guys who challenge library books don’t even read them,” Jessen noted. “If they’re really worried, they wouldn’t let their kids have cell phones.”
He said the library board still wants books removed without a review, but so far the new director has resisted.
Jessen, a lifelong Republican, said Wyoming politics remains a “shit show.” He will spend the summer campaigning against candidates who support banning books. He doesn’t think the Freedom Caucus represents the prevailing attitude in Campbell County, though its members keep getting elected to the Legislature.
“There are two or three people with big [church] congregations, and they get people out to vote,” Jessen said. “But we have to get religion out of politics.”
Kindred said she also plans to campaign this summer, backing a slate of candidates running against Moms for Liberty members. She said the Wyoming Family Alliance for Freedom already had a victory in a “coffee war” last week.
Moms for Liberty asked a coffee shop to co-sponsor an event to give Cheyenne teachers a free coffee. Kindred said when the group announced the event on Facebook, the community’s reaction was swift and negative.
Teachers called the coffee franchise owner to complain and educate her about what Moms for Liberty stands for, Kindred explained. The owner backtracked, pulled the plug on the joint venture and decided to host it by herself.
Kindred said it was a good lesson for their rival.
“Educators, librarians, everyone was like, ‘What? You’re going to buy us coffee after you’ve been calling us pedophiles for the past two years!” she exclaimed.
Not wasting the opportunity to score some political points of its own, the Wyoming Family Alliance for Freedom joined forces with another shop to offer free coffee to teachers.
Meantime, the public has until Thursday to comment on the proposed changes to Laramie 1’s book policy. The school board is scheduled to make its final decision on June 3.
Kindred lamented that the library book issue was manufactured by a national group that doesn’t understand Wyoming values.
“Our biggest concern with high school is to get students to pick up a book,” she said. “What Moms for Liberty does is such lunacy.”
It’s a waste of time. Time that Kindred rightfully says “should be spent on actual things, like literacy and graduation rates. Our real problem is that our kids aren’t even going to high school libraries.”
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