Hillary Clinton said the quiet point out loud, saying “At some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the (MAGA) cult members.” I’m pretty sure that the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who are very, very upset that some parents do not want their children exposed to groomer material, agree!

Book bans have no place in a free society | Editorial

Pennsylvania ranks among the top states for book bans in schools. Legislators in Harrisburg must take a stand against censorship.

by The Editorial Board | Saturday, October 7, 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel about a firefighter who burns down houses that own books. The 1953 novel, which some have tried to ban over the years, is set in an unnamed city in the distant future.

In many ways, that disturbing future doesn’t feel too far removed from what’s happening right now.

By one count, there were more than 3,300 instances of banned books in public schools across the country during the last academic year — a 33% increase compared with 2021-22. Efforts to challenge and take books off the shelves have overtaken school boards and local libraries nationwide, dividing towns and pitting neighbor against neighbor.

The Philadelphia suburbs are ground zero for many of the book bans in Pennsylvania, which ranks among the top states for book bans in schools. It is a shameful distinction for a state founded by William Penn as a haven for religious freedom for fellow Quakers.

You know, I agree with the article headline: “Book bans have no place in a free society.” But what the Editorial Board have missed is that, when it comes to the public schools, we are not talking about a free society! Pennsylvania, like every other state, has a compulsory education law, requiring that youngsters between certain ages attend school! While parents do have the option of sending their kids to a private school or to homeschool them — if they follow government regulations — they are also required to pay property taxes to support the public schools anyway.

The median annual property tax paid by homeowners in Bucks County is $5,282, which ranks as one of the highest amounts in the state. It’s also around double the national median, which is $2,795.

The same source gives the median property taxes for all of the collar counties surrounding Philadelphia. Perhaps the Editorial Board don’t understand this, but not every family can afford to send their children to private schools, or have the tools to home school their kids. Their kids are, in effect, a captive audience!

These counties are hardly bastions of conservatism: every county bordering Philly — Philadelphia County is the deepest blue county shown — in which 81.44% of voters cast their ballots for Joe Biden — was carried by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Back to the Editorial Board:

The Central Bucks school officials made national news after a conservative majority gained control of the board and began pushing book bans and prohibiting Pride flags in classrooms. Similar book ban efforts have popped up at the North Penn and Wissahickon School Districts in Montgomery County, the Pennridge School District in Bucks County, and the Downingtown Area and Oxford Area School Districts in Chester County.

And there you have it: the Board are concerned that the books being removed from public school libraries are books which promote homosexuality and transgenderism!

The book bans are fueled by a network of conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, which the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled “extremist.” Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021 in the wake of pandemic shutdowns and mask mandates, says its mission is to defend parental rights at all levels of government.

But it only defends the rights of parents who agree with its extreme views.

We have, of course, previously noted the designation of Moms for Liberty as an “extremist” group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Robert Stacy McCain has done a lot of reporting on the Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC, and pointed out, in an article asking “What counts as hate?“, writing:

by continually expanding the definition of “hate” and “extremism,” and by encouraging censorship and suppression of anyone who dissents from their liberal agenda, the SPLC compels people with more or less mainstream beliefs to engage in the kind of activism practiced by Moms for Liberty. Furthermore  (and, again, I think SPLC staff are too stupid to grasp this), by denoting mainstream groups as proponents of “hate,” the SPLC undermines its own credibility and causes people who are not remotely “extremist” to question the whole rationale of this type of “hate”-hunting enterprise. Like, why should we even care if someone is prejudiced against gay people or black people or Jews or whatever? So long as they are not engaged in any actual criminal behavior, or advocating violence against others, people are free to form their own opinions. This whole business of “exposing” people as holding allegedly dangerous beliefs — which is to say, acting as Thought Police — is antithetical to liberty. And I think more Americans are beginning to reject the type of Thought Police agenda that SPLC pursues.

Of course, in heavily Democratic Philadelphia, where so many seem to despise freedom of speech for the people they oppose, the staff at the American Revolution Museum in Philadelphia, a revolution against the British government spread by freedom of speech and of the press, don’t support allowing the Moms being allowed to speak.

We managed to survive, and thrive, as a country for 200 years without the ‘need’ for the public schools to teach students about sex. Then, for some cockamamie reason, the education establishment decided that there was a need for such, to reduce unmarried pregnancies, don’t you know, but let’s be honest here: you cannot teach about sex without concomitantly teaching about morals. What morals did they teach? The answer is in the numbers:

In 1980, some 18 percent of all women in the United States who gave birth were unmarried. As of 2021, the percentage of births to unmarried women has increased to 40 percent.

Whatever morals the schools were attempting to teach, they sure didn’t reduce bastardy!

The book ban efforts mainly target books about race, racism, and those with LGBTQ themes and characters. Book ban backers — including Republican presidential candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — talk about “woke indoctrination,” whatever that means.

“Whatever that means”? Indoctrination does have a very specific meaning:

the act of indoctrinating, or teaching or inculcating a doctrine, principle, or ideology, especially one with a specific point of view

What the Moms for Liberty and other concerned parents do not like, and which gives total angst to the Editorial Board, is that the public schools, in promoting ‘diversity,’ have been teaching the acceptance and normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism. Is it any surprise that parents, who are by any biological definition, heterosexual, don’t want their kids to be interested in, or try, homosexual activity? Is it extreme for parents not to want their kids questioning whether they are really boys or girls, something which could lead to a lifetime of misery and botched medical procedures?

The book bans essentially boil down to censorship. Who are these self-appointed zealots who want to decide what books are available in schools and libraries?

And here’s where the Board truly foul up. All libraries have to take decisions on what they will and will not carry, due to the limitations of space and money. If the Board are going to define censorship as a particular library not carrying a specific work, then all libraries are engaged in censorship.

But it’s more than that. If the library at Central Bucks High School does not carry “Heather Has Two Mommies”, or “Daddy’s Roommate”, they’re still inexpensively available on Amazon.^[1]I checked, to make certain, but refuse to provide hyperlinks to those books. Some of the books which normal parents want out of public school libraries depict, sometimes with illustrations, homosexual fellatio and homosexual anal sex. These works seek to normalize that behavior, and it’s unsurprising that normal parents don’t want their kids ‘experimenting’ with such. The newspaper’s fawning coverage of the murder of “openly queer and HIV-positive journalist” Josh Kruger shows us all how professionally-approving they are of abnormal behavior.

There are professional educators and librarians who review age-appropriate books in schools. If parents don’t want their child to read a certain book, they can let the school know. But a vocal, politically driven minority should not tell others what they can or cannot read.

Ahhh, of course: the Board are telling readers that there are “professional educators and librarians” who know better than parents what students should read. But, as the Board choose to ignore, neither Moms for Liberty nor any other conservative group can ban books; they can only state that they do not want the public schools to provide certain books to their captive audiences. And would these be the same “professional educators” who have achieved an 8% grade-level proficiency in reading, and whopping 1% grade-level proficiency in math at Edward T Steel Elementary School in Philadelphia?

But I’ll be clear about one thing: conservative parents have gone along with all of this, when they quietly accepted the notion that the public schools should have sex education classes in the first place, to prevent teenaged pregnancies, of course, and what a marvelous job the schools have done with that! Sex education, however it began, metastasized into instructions on how to have sex, from condoms stretched over bananas to oral sex. Is it any surprise that education about how to have homosexual sex would wind up as part of that?

The Board are right about one thing: books should not be banned . . . as far as the general public are concerned. But the public schools are not a free society; they are the state-mandated sources of education for the vast majority of our nation’s children.
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