The people who insist that we mustn't do anything to keep guns out of our schools are now on a crusade to get books out of our schools instead.
Specifically any books that touch on issues of race or sexual orientation.
Whipped up by the usual right-wing media agitators, Republican targets include Beloved by Toni Morrison, All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto by George M. Johnson, and Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe. And literally, by which I always mean literally, 847 other books.
I will grant that some of these books contain passages that aren't suitable for second graders — but then, so does the Old Testament. And high school libraries can't be limited to second-grade material.
You can't discuss race in this country without acknowledging racism, including the institutional racism that well outlasted slavery, forcibly destroyed African-American attempts to enjoy prosperity, legally assaulted Asian-American liberties, and stole the country from its original inhabitants.
Nor can you discuss sexuality without discussing sex. This idea that you can limit sex education to "when a man and a woman really love each other, the man plants his seed in the woman and nine months later there's a baby" is how you get dudes who fetishize farm equipment.
Our radicalized Republican party and their base, of course, don't want anybody discussing race or sexuality in the first place.
Or science. Or plutocracy. Or economics. Or public health. Or justice. Or logic.
Or arithmetic.
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