100 Year Old Lady At Florida School Board Better Patriot Than All Book Banners Put Together
Julie Marshall, the Mom for Purity who lodged the complaints, told the Washington Post by email, "At this point, we believe we have challenged the most obscene and age inappropriate books," but didn't specify what her issues with The Storyteller were. Apparently there's sex, including depictions of Nazi guards committing sexual assault, so maybe we wouldn't want kids thinking Nazis were rapists.
The removal of all those books meant that Tuesday night's Martin County school board meeting was packed, with about 200 people there. Many of the 40 who spoke at the meeting called for the books to be restored, although a few also worried about all the nasty sex in books available to high school readers, giving the very laziest local news stations an excuse to present one quote from each side and call it good coverage.
Marshall was there, in a Wonder Woman T-shirt, to explain that while she filed almost all the complaints, she works with many many concerned parents both locally and nationwide, and sadly she didn't actually say "There are dozens of us! Dozens!" But she did say
"If you guys want to continue making me out to be the sole parent in all of this and give me the power that I can have all these books removed and make me out to be Wonder Woman, so be it ... Persecute me for standing on morality, I really don't care."
We really do hope someone lets her know that Wonder Woman is a queer icon, that Lynda Carter thinks bigots suck, and that the character was created in the first place by William Moulton Marston, who lived very happily in a throuple and deliberately included a LOT of bondage references in the comic, what with that Lasso o' Truth and all. (He was also a lie-detector crank who always looked for a way to cash in on his dubious inventions, so there's that.) Marston included this illustration, by Harry G. Peter, of what a real Wonder Woman believes, in his article "Why 100,000 Americans Read Comics" in American Scholar (1943-44):
Image: Harvard College Library via NPR
Happily, among the many folks calling for freedom to read, there was a real wonder woman at the school board meeting, 100-year-old Grace Linn, who knows far too well why fascism has to be nipped in the bud whenever it arises. Her husband was killed in action fighting them in WW II, and by god she's not going to allow any book burners in her America, thank you very much.
Linn brought along a quilt she had made to honor books and ideas that the current round of fascists are trying to snuff out; in January, as America's censorship crusade was well under way, she had shared a photo of her quilt with MSNBC's Ali Velshi for his show's "Banned Book Club" feature.
The quilt includes censored titles like Beloved,Maus, Fahrenheit 451, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gender Queer, Two Boys Kissing, and more. Linn told Palm Beach TV station WPTV — one of the non-lazy ones! — "When I showed this to adult women, they'll say, 'Oh, no they didn't do that to The Color Purple.'"
Now, let's get out of her way and listen:
A few highlights (full transcript of Linn's remarks at AlterNet):
Good afternoon folks. I am Grace Lynn. I am a hundred years young. I'm here to protest our school district's book-banning policy. My husband Robert Nichol was killed in action in World War II, at a very young age, he was only 26, defending our democracy, Constitution, and freedoms.
One of the freedoms that the Nazis crushed was the freedom to read the books they banned. They stopped the free press, banned and burned books. The freedom to read, which is protected by the First Amendment, is our essential right and duty of our democracy. Even so, it is continually under attack by both the public and private groups who think they hold the truth.
Linn noted she'd made the quilt last year in reply to the Right's mania for book banning, and urged her fellow citizens not to knuckle under to today's fascists, who seek power by trying to make us afraid of other Americans:
Banned books, and burning books, are the same. Both are done for the same reason: fear of knowledge. Fear is not freedom. Fear is not liberty. Fear is control. My husband died as a father of freedom. I am a mother of liberty. Banned books need to be proudly displayed and protected from school boards like this. Thank you very much. Thank you.
And that's what we all need to be saying at every school and library board meeting in America, the end.
UPDATE: Well silly me, I didn't include anything about the school board's reactions to the two hours of public comment. According to the local paper, the board didn't take any action on the banned books at Tuesday's meeting, and no board members responded to the comments.
[PEN America / Daily Beast / WaPo / JTA / NPR / AlterNet / TC Palm]
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Li'l Nebraska State Sen Lady Machaela Cavanaugh Sets Up Early Bid For BADASS OF THE YEAR!
Although Republicans' supermajority in the state Senate increased to 32 from 17 in 2020, they need 33 votes to end a filibuster. So kudos to Cavanaugh's colleagues for supporting her and not folding because of yadda, yadda, norms, yadda, yadda, business of the people.
She's now reached an agreement with Speaker of the Legislature John Arch of La Vista to pause her filibuster long enough to have a true debate on the anti-trans bill.
Unfortunately, state Sen. R. Brad von Gillern of Elkhorn offers a sample of the quality of debate we can expect:
As I considered this debate, I constantly reminded myself that this bill is about protecting kids and in truth protecting themselves from their own young and immature minds. There’s testimony today that seeks to imply that loving the individual is impossible if we disagree with them. I just want to say out loud: I hate that. Not everything that a child wants for themselves is good for them. We don’t let a kid eat candy every meal because we know it’s harmful. We don’t let them choose whether to attend school or not. We don’t let them jump off the roof because they think they’re a superhero.
This fool's argument is beneath the dignity of a Dr. Beverly Crusher gif because we doubt he would support legislation preventing parents from feeding their kids candy or hamburgers. "The state has decreed that all children must adhere to a strict vegan diet!"
Press coverage has framed Cavanaugh's filibuster as a "protest," which I don't think is quite accurate. Protesters ideally are demanding action from those empowered to make change. Cavanaugh has demonstrated that she's far from powerless. She's using the tools at her disposal as a member of the minority party. Her filibuster has blocked five other anti-trans bills, as well as a POS bill banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
Most importantly, it's believed that Cavanaugh only paused the filibuster because she now has enough votes to kill the bill dead. That's how you filibuster, folks.
Now, you might say, "How you can you support Cavanaugh's filibuster when you've consistently decried Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema's continued supported for the US Senate filibuster?" and that's a valid point for an idiot to have. Manchin and Sinema high-five each other while Republicans use the filibuster to block voting rights legislation and codify abortion rights. They also seem oblivious to how Republicans have killed the filibuster when it stood in the way of their agenda and would do so again without a thought.
Manchin and Sinema, despite their highly prized bipartisanship, never reached any grand filibuster-proof bargains on voting or abortion rights. That's because they're chumps. Cavanaugh is not a chump. She's a badass.
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