West Virginia House Gonna Put Those Obscene Teachers And Librarians IN JAIL

Think of the children, etc., etc.

Feb 20, 2024

In an 85-12 vote, the West Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill that would amend its 1931 obscenity code to authorize felony charges and $25,000 fines for librarians, museum curators and teachers who intentionally display “obscene matter” to minors.

What is “obscene matter”? Why, anything an average person believes “depicts or describes sexually explicit conduct, nudity, sex or certain bodily functions.” Sound vague? That’s the point!

Would a diagram of lady parts in a textbook count? A graphic novel about fully clothed and accessorized vampires who are lesbians in love? Twilight? A cartoon spokesbear attending to the hygiene of his bodily functions in the woods? And would you wanna risk jail to find out, given how smart the average citizen of West Virginia is, and knowing that half of them are dumber than that?

The bill is a victory for a small-but-vocal WVA group, the Mid-Ohio Valley Citizens Action Coalition, who marched into their local police station with four titles that they deemed obscene last July, demanding that police go arrest somebody. When that didn’t happen, they pleaded with their state delegate to save the children from this porn!

Republican Delegate Brandon Steele rode to the rescue! That he even listened to these fruitcakes for one second is a credit to a national “parents’ rights” push, primarily led by “grassroots organization” Moms for Liberty, AKA the Proud Boys women’s auxiliary, which emerged in Broward County, Florida, (where else?) in January of 2021, seemingly fully formed from the mind of Zeus.

The Proud Boys’ brand was rather tarnished after January 6, after more than a dozen of its members got arrested. But for right-wing groups that are chapter-based and dwelling in basements in multiple states, it was only a small setback. “The plan of attack if you want to make change is to get involved at the local level,” PB Jeremy Bertino told the New York Times, announcing a new quiet push to take over school boards and local governments.

Dudes who strung up a noose for Mike Pence and crapped in the Capitol are a hard sell to school board voters, however. So the PBs and their far-right “western civilization” promoting “frens” pivoted to hiding behind the skirts of the M4L ladies, and started doing their culture warrior-ing by harassing school boards, librarians and drag shows and anyone who will listen with the old “won’t somebody please think of the children?!” arguments.

The Gippers lapped it up. Within weeks of M4L’s formation, it was featured on The Rush Limbaugh Show and Breitbart, within months it was getting millions in donations from nonprofits like the Heritage Foundation, and in a year founder Bridget Ziegler was standing by Florida Governor Rhonda Sandtits as he signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill M4L had lobbied for. M4L now has about 103,000 members in 285 chapters in 44 states, including in Kanawha County, WV, near the state capital.

Bridget’s husband Christian, former Florida state GOP chair, crowed in 2021 that he’d “been trying for a dozen years to get 20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic. But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me!” It’s like a Cinderella tale, but without that disgusting shoe fetish!

Even getting labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center did nothing to damper GOP enthusiasm for M4L and book bans, as they’re quite hate-curious themselves.

“When they mentioned this was a terrorist organization, I said, ‘Well then count me a Mom for Liberty!’” Nikki Haley cheered last June from the stage of the Moms for Liberty summit in Philadelphia.

Since then, though, the ban-brand has taken some hits. Last November, M4L-endorsed candidates got a drubbing in school board elections. Recently even Ron DeSantis has been trying to find the guy who made these crazy book bans, and asking the Florida legislature to amend his own law to limit the number of books people can challenge, because it was starting to get a little embarrassing as counties like Escambia removed encyclopedias and dictionaries for being too sexy.

Still, the push for book bans has been overall pretty successful, with 3,362 instances in 2022. That’s a lot of smut! And M4L continues to run candidates for school boards, though now their list of endorsements is secret, and candidates don’t like to name-check them any more, either. Their wholesome image got a bit tarnished after an Indiana chapter published a Hitler quote in its newsletter, which its founders defended before trying to walk it back a day later, a “both sides” fan dance they learned at Daddy Trump’s knee.

And, of course, co-founder Bridget’s husband Christian — again, the former Florida GOP chair — was accused of filming himself raping her lesbian lover.

The Moms know stuff like this gives the normies the ick, and that their brand of moral-scold hypocrisy, racism and anti-Semitism is not so easy of a sell. But who could disagree with “parent’s rights?” Who are you to say that “being a mom” isn’t enough of a primary qualification for a school board? (Looking at you, Bethany Mandel, Clarice Schillinger.)

What are you, some kind of elitist?