DeSantis drives Democrats crazy on school libraries
Washington Examiner
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The Left and its media allies are now issuing a continuous stream of falsehoods about Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). Most recently, in a kid-gloved interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, NBC News’s host Andrea Mitchell claimed in contradiction of all reasonable evidence that DeSantis had banned the teaching of “slavery and the aftermath of slavery” in Florida schools. This is 180 degrees at odds with the truth. Florida’s state history guidelines specifically require slavery and continued racism through the Jim Crow South to be taught in all public schools.
If Florida’s history guidelines are online for all to see, why is Mitchell misrepresenting them? The story begins with a Florida law enacted last July requiring schools to vet all the reading materials in their libraries and to publish a list of books to which students have access — the law that led to what has been dubbed “the Great Florida classroom library freakout of 2023.” Such a policy would not have been needed if the Left did not display a disturbingly persistent desire and determination to introduce completely inappropriate sexual topics to children at younger and younger ages. That persistence and determination led activists to shout down or persecute anyone who tried to protect childhood innocence.
WHERE EVEN THE WALMARTS ARE CLOSING
This problem is not confined to Florida by any means. It is common in several states. Parents have been thrown out of school board meetings for merely quoting out loud pornographic and obscene passages from books that ideologues keep trying to foist on young children in public school libraries.
The new Florida law does not prescribe criminal penalties if schools have appropriate books. It simply says inappropriate materials should not be in school libraries. There is no good reason why citizens’ taxes should be expended to expose children to sexual deviancy, let alone to pornography and even pornography involving children. Such stuff is in some books being championed by the Left as appropriate for children under the age of 10.
School districts have been properly informed about the new safeguards since at least October, so they had plenty of time to clean up what their libraries proffer to very young children. But the militants rarely pass up a chance to turn sensible conservative governance into a crisis.
Cue the Manatee County School Board, which apparently took no steps to prepare for the law taking effect. In what looks like deliberate obtuseness, which sits ill on educators, the school board informed teachers that all the books on their shelves must be vetted and that — here’s the important part — if they neglected to remove books for vetting, they risked a felony prosecution. The Duval County School District explicitly advised that teachers “temporarily store books until they are reviewed.”
This appears to refer to a much older and entirely sensible law from before DeSantis became governor, and to similar laws in most other states, that makes it a felony to distribute pornographic materials knowingly to minors. But as Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. tweeted, “A teacher (or any adult) faces a felony if they knowingly distribute egregious materials such as images which depict sexual conduct, sexual battery, bestiality, or sadomasochistic abuse. Who could be against that?”
As the word “knowingly” indicates, this sensible criminal law applies only to adults who deliberately push such materials on children.
Some teachers nevertheless reacted to the Manatee and Duvall boards’ poorly worded notice with what might be called “malicious compliance.” Abandoning common sense and choosing “Literacy Week” for their disingenuous display of pique, they removed books that were obviously unobjectionable such as several by Dr. Seuss and others about baseball greats Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente, who were black. None of these could be thought offensive by reasonable people, but they were seen by the recalcitrant teachers as useful to turn public opinion against a commonsense ban on pornography in schools. As one maliciously complying teacher put it to CNN, “I think it is a stronger statement to cover [the books] up” than just to comply with the obvious spirit of the law, vet books that might fall into a gray area, and disclose to parents what books are on school library shelves. The Florida teachers’ propaganda effort worked as intended by triggering a sympathetic freakout.
One lesson from this is that some people want students exposed to the grubbiest sexual deviancy. Another, more hopeful lesson is that some politicians have the spine to stand up against them, even in the face of pressure from left-wing corporate media and smear campaigns by activists.
DeSantis has successfully removed odious critical race theorists and left-wing indoctrination from K-12 schools. He is also challenging leftist hegemony over Florida’s colleges and universities. This will work because parents, even Democratic parents, love their children more than they love left-wing ideology.