Just how are school libraries a federal issue? A useless government bureaucracy has gotten into another non-issue.
A few years ago a lesser-known NASCAR driver named Bubba Wallace found a garage door rope with the end tied into the shape of a hangman’s noose. This became the latest cause celeb, proof of American racism (including anyone who had never watched NASCAR), in spite of the Mr. Wallace’s relative success and wealth in the sport.
The FBI sent in, ready, 15 agents to investigate the latest uprising of the KKK. Fifteen agents. Good lord, they didn’t put that manpower to look into the Hunter Biden laptop showing our current POTUS was/is taking bribes. All that money, manpower, and excitement to learn it was not the only rope tied like that, and it had been so for months before anyone knew Wallace would use that garage. To borrow a phrase, it was much ado about nothing.
Not to be outdone, we now have federal authorities investigating a school library in Texas for LGBTQABCDEFG books.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has opened what appears to be the first-of-its-kind investigation into the Granbury Independent School District after it banned school library books dealing with sexuality and gender.
First question, why does the US Department of Education have an Office for Civil Rights? I looked up the “mission” of this agency:
The mission of the Office for Civil Rights is to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation through vigorous enforcement of civil rights…
The Office for Civil Rights enforces several Federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance from the Department of Education. Discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin is prohibited by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; sex discrimination is prohibited by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972; discrimination on the basis of disability is prohibited by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973; and age discrimination is prohibited by the Age Discrimination Act of 1975…
Forgive me, but doesn’t the US government have a Department of Justice already? Isn’t its job to enforce the federal laws of this nation? Doesn’t this include the civil rights laws of the federal government? Not sure which is a bigger waste, this or the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General?
The U.S. Education Department’s civil rights enforcement arm has launched an investigation into a North Texas school district whose superintendent was secretly recorded ordering librarians to remove LGBTQ-themed library books.
Education and legal experts say the federal probe of the Granbury Independent School District — which stemmed from a complaint by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and reporting by NBC News, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune — appears to be the first such investigation explicitly tied to the nationwide movement to ban school library books dealing with sexuality and gender…
“…I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women and there are women that think they’re men,” Glenn told librarians in January, according to a leaked recording of the meeting obtained, verified and published exclusively by the news outlets. “I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries.”
And they don’t. At least not in elementary school libraries. I can see this being appropriate for high school libraries, and maybe junior high, but not for elementary schools. Now the article is does not make clear if this was all school libraries, or just a particular grade level.
More to the point, this is not a federal issue. The libraries are paid for by the taxpayers (particularly the property owners through their taxes), and if they want to have a say in how their schools are operated, that is their business.
Also, nothing is being banned. From the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of banned:
: to prohibit especially by legal means
ban discrimination
Is smoking banned in all public buildings?
also : to prohibit the use, performance, or distribution of
ban a book
ban a pesticide
“By legal means? This was administrative, not legal, so no. Is the “use, performance, or distribution” of these books prohibited? Not at all. You can go to your local bookstore and buy them, or you can get on Amazon.com and order them. If little Jane or Johnny want to read them at school on their lunch break, no one is stopping the kid.
Last week I wrote on an article on Congress passing a ridiculous bill funding “de-escalation” training for local law enforcement. It gave an average of $4,000 a year per agency for training most agencies are doing to one degree or another. A point is federal money always comes with strings attached. The bigger point is Democrats want to federalize local law enforcement.
Now we see another example of the federal government trying to stick its nose into a local issue. If the parents and taxpayers of the Granbury Independent School District want to control what books are available to their children at their schools, that is, get this, their business. Not the business of a bureaucrat in a completely worthless agency in the District of Columbia. Hopefully this school board tells the feds and ACLU (six of one, half dozen of the other) where they can stick this complaint. Maybe Mitch McConnell can look at deleting this Civil Rights division of the Department of Education as a “priority” of the Republicans in the senate.
Michael A. Thiac is a retired Army intelligence officer, with over 23 years experience, including serving in the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the Middle East. He is also a retired police patrol sergeant, with over 22 years’ service, and over ten year’s experience in field training of newly assigned officers. He has been published at The American Thinker, PoliceOne.com, and on his personal blog, A Cop’s Watch.
Opinions expressed are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of current or former employers.
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Other than the Library of Congress, every library takes decisions on what it will, and will not, carry; it’s a matter of money to buy material, and room to store it. The library doesn’t somehow ‘ban’ a book it doesn’t choose to carry, because the library has no authority over what other libraries, bookstores or amazon.com carry.
But there’s more of an issue here than just that. Education of children is compulsory in the United States, meaning that the students in the Granbury Independent School District are, in effect, a captive audience, and unless parents have the money for private schools or the time to homeschool, the attendance at the public school is required by law.
Think about this: if some student reads material about transgenderism, and decides that he’s really a she, that student’s parents would have a realistic tort action against the school for providing material which could have encouraged their child to
go batguano insanethink he’s the opposite sex. Carrying such materials in a public school is a potential legal liability.My best friend past last year, and he was the director of the Washington Parish Library in Louisiana. We would spend many hours talking about books, and he mentioned how he never had enough money for what he wanted to get, and space was always an issue, plus there were always the old ladies who told him, “Mr. Barron, you really need to spend 300 a year on this online subscription so I don’t have to…”
And people wondered why he drank. A present he gave me a few years ago was an original volume of Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command. All three books had seen their better day, but what an awesome read.
FYI, in Texas parents, by law, have to support their kids until they graduate high school. Legally, the day after graduation, they can tell junior, “Get the f%^& out,” (slight simplification), but the state wants the kid to at least have a HS diploma.
But many people miss the point, a publicly supported library is not required to provide stuff like this. I had to correct a friend who believed the lie on the FL law about sex ed for elementary school. She said, “Don’t say gay…” and I had to explain to her it applied to K-3 grade, not to the entire school career. She was surprised, and I was shocked she didn’t know.
And really for children who don’t (or shouldn’t) know about sex changes, etc, we have no purpose providing it. A HS junior is one thing, but a 4th grader who has no idead what the various sexual positions are should not be encouraged to mutilate thair body.