Nicki Neily, founder and president of Parents Defending Education, ripped into the left’s narrative about book bans in schools during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Left-wing activists and politicians have claimed Republicans are trying to ban harmless books in public schools and libraries. Some of the individuals who’ve claimed this, such as president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Randi Weingarten, have been forced to retract their assertions. PEN America, a nonprofit advocating for freedom of expression, put out a list of banned books in May that contained material that is no longer banned or was never banned in the first place. (RELATED: Kamala Harris Says ‘Book Bans’ Make LGBT People ‘Afraid’ For Their Lives)
“Headlines and research papers by activist organizations have intentionally muddied the waters between World War II book burning and what’s happening in America’s K – 12 schools” Neily said. “If you hear one thing today, know this, family’s concerns about books in schools are not book banning.”
“While it may seem politically convenient to scapegoat parents, I ask you to read some of these explicit paragraphs, and look at these sexual images with your children or your grandchildren, and then tell your constituents whether you consider that content educational. As a society, we don’t put Playboy in Kindergartens. This isn’t considered a book ban, but common sense.”
🚨The “book ban” narrative is a manufactured crisis to distract from families’ valid concerns about the quality of their children’s education and age-appropriate material in the classroom.
WATCH my full opening remarks to the @SenJudiciaryGOP exposing it. pic.twitter.com/FtoZywjQhu
— Nicki Neily (@nickineily) September 12, 2023
Several books banned by school districts are sexually graphic and explicitly detailed.
Lawn Boy contains graphic descriptions of 10-year-old boys performing oral sex on each other. The book’s author, Jonathan Evison, says he never intended for the book to be available to children. A Fairfax County mom read the book aloud at a school board meeting. Board members tried to get her to stop, saying there were children in the room. Another book, Gender Queer, depicts masturbation, sexting and oral sex using a “strap on.”
A writer for Slate shared how she checked one of the most controversial banned books, “It’s Perfectly Normal,” out of her library. She found out that what she had labeled hysteria was warranted concern at the content.
“I’d heard nothing but glowing reviews from sex-ed pros about the child-friendly language in the book. But flipping through the book’s pages finally, I was a little shocked. I had an involuntary reaction to seeing the nude cartoons, like I needed to make sure I was alone and hide the book. I skimmed ahead to look at the rest of the book briskly. On virtually every page I stopped to examine, I was confronted with detailed drawings of genitals. It felt like every page had a cartoon of a naked body.”