Upcoming Subcommittee Meeting on "Combating Graphic, Explicit Content in School Libraries"

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She’s the editor/creator of (DON’T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/creator of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her subsequent e-book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen.

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Another federal-level committee will meet this week to take on the subject of books in college libraries. This follows a number of prior e-book ban associated committee conferences in, together with the 2022 House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties on e-book bans and censorship and a fall 2023 Senate Subcommittee on the Judiciary holding a listening to on how e-book bans restrict liberty and literature. The Senate assembly opened the chance for Senators like Robert F. Kennedy to go viral for studying passages of so-called “explicit” books out loud, perpetrating the precise techniques utilized by far proper e-book banners on the college board stage.

Tomorrow’s assembly can be totally different–and doubtlessly way more fiery than both of the earlier hearings. It can be hosted by the Committee on Education and the Workforce’s Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education Hearing. The title of the listening to tells every thing it’s good to know in regards to the spin on it: “Protecting Kids: Combating Graphic, Explicit Content in School Libraries.” The echoes to the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency, which helped gas the panic round comics in the late Nineteen Forties and all through the Nineteen Fifties are plain.

As of writing, little info is out there about who can be testifying earlier than the subcommittee. It will embody opening statements from Republican Chairman Aaron Bean from Florida, who has parroted a number of of the identical speaking factors about childhood innocence we’ve seen from teams like No Left Turn in Education and from Moms For Liberty–the designated Hate Group who’ve turn into welcome into the legislative workings of Florida.

Moreover, Bean disagrees with the labeling of his mates at Moms For Liberty as a “Hate Group”:

Will we see representatives from the group with super monetary backing from darkish cash sources and connections all through state and federal politics testifying? It’d be fairly stunning in the event that they weren’t given area to proceed spewing their lies, inaccuracies, and misrepresentations of books out there in college libraries. This is the group that, with none experience in childhood improvement, literacy, or schooling, created a home-grown e-book evaluate system that they’ve tricked college districts throughout the nation to implement. They lie when it fits their agenda.

“Parents are rightly concerned about the kind of content their children are consuming at the K-12 level. It’s time that we have a conversation that’s grounded in reality and focused on how to create an environment that is in the best interest of children’s educational development,” mentioned Chairman Bean in the announcement for the subcommittee listening to.“It’s parents, not the Biden administration or the Left, who should have a say in this matter. This hearing is focused on empowering parents to enact the change they want to see at the state and local level.”

Of course, which dad and mom he refers to is blatantly apparent.

Bean is a staunch supporter of faculty alternative, which have been central to lots of the e-book banning debates. As we’ve mentioned from the start of this e-book banning wave, though books are a goal, they’re removed from the tip recreation. Right wing politicians and their supporters are angling for the chance to defund public establishments like colleges and libraries. By pointing to “inappropriate material,” teams like Moms For Liberty inform folks to take away their youngsters from the general public colleges and enroll them in non-public establishments or homeschools. They then flip round and demand taxpayer cash to ship their youngsters to those establishments, a lot of that are rooted in white, cishet, Christian fundamentalist philosophies. Book challenges by teams like these steal important quantities of cash (in some instances, $30,000 or extra!) from public colleges and their taxpayers, once more used as “proof” for why colleges are poorly performing.

To say this subcommittee listening to is angled with bias is an understatement.

That mentioned, everybody who cares about democracy, the First Amendment, and the foundational proper to learn and entry info ought to tune into the hearings tomorrow, Thursday, October 19, beginning at 10:15 AM Eastern time.

You can stream the assembly at this hyperlink. The livestream will even be out there under as quickly because it begins: