When Alison Hair began to read an excerpt from a sexually explicit book found in her child’s school library at the local school board meeting, she was abruptly cut off.
“We have other people that are younger in this and I, we understand your point,” said Forsyth County Schools Board of Education Chairman Wesley McCall at the Feb. 15 meeting.
“My son’s a minor, and this book that you all have copies of is in my son’s middle school,” Hair replied before being told her time was up.
She was cut off again trying to read on March 15 and notified via a letter from McCall on March 17 that she was banned from future meetings. Board policy prohibits “profane, rude, defamatory remarks and personal attacks.” Hair and Cindy Martin, another Georgia mother and the chairwoman of the group “Mama Bears of Forsyth County,” are now suing the board for violating their First Amendment rights.
The lawsuit’s aim is not to determine which books should be allowed in the school library, but rather to address “unlawful attempts to sanitize how parents speak about those books in the presence of elected officials and other adults.”
“The First Amendment guarantees Plaintiffs’ rights to speak out and petition the government about which books belong in school libraries, and to do so by reading from those books during board meetings,” the lawsuit reads. “The school board may find this language offensive, but the law is clear: giving offense is a First Amendment-protected viewpoint.”
That the Mama Bears have to sue for their right to speak at meetings should be a huge embarrassment for every person on the board. It’s a clear-cut First Amendment violation: These mothers have a right to criticize public officials and the content they have allowed children to access in school.
Hair and Martin aren’t the only parents whom school boards have attempted to silence for simply reading aloud from school library books. A Florida father was muted at a June 30 Clay County School District board meeting after reading excerpts from a book called Lucky by Alice Sebold, found in two of the district’s school libraries. The board’s attorney told him he could not read “pornography into a public television set.”
Another Georgia mother in the Cherokee County School District was silenced while reading a passage from Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. A spokesman for the board later told Fox she was stopped because “she was reading a high school-level book” when younger children could access the meeting’s livestream or recording the next day.
Martin says that the Mama Bears, which formed “spontaneously” after district mothers began discovering explicit books in the schools, will “not back down.” They see the board’s hypocrisy.
“When Chairman McCall and the board censored us from reading the explicit language in these books because children were in the room, they proved our point,” Martin said.
These parents are not choosing to be obscene in their comments. The offensive comes directly from the books that the schools themselves have approved. Common sense dictates that if a book is too obscene to be read in a public forum, then it has no place in a school library where children can readily access it.
Katelynn Richardson is a summer 2022 Washington Examiner fellow.
