An explosion set by white men killed four black girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. White men beat and murdered black activists and their white allies during the civil rights era. Police sometimes gave the beatings in broad daylight. Later, white men beat up hippies for having long hair. Two white men in Wyoming pistol-whipped a gay student, Matthew Shepard, beating his face in before tying him to a fence post in freezing conditions and leaving him to die.
Some men cannot abide the idea that fellow citizens from marginalized — or just different — groups want to be treated like the rest of us. In the minds of easily threatened men, there’s a place for those people, and it is out of sight. There is no closet too deep.
Writing for Iowa’s The Gazette, Todd Dorman sees the Republican Party fully supporting that view while banning books:
Next year, don’t be surprised if you receive a mailer from a Republican lawmaker or GOP candidate espousing their support for public schools. We’ve seen them in recent years, with happy photos of politicians posing in schools, talking to teachers. Heartwarming.
But they’ll probably leave out the part about wanting to put teachers and administrators in jail.
Why? Because there are books in circulation portraying marginalized people like Matthew Shepard with humanity his murderers lacked.
“My warning to all the teachers and the administrators is you’re going to be in jail. Because this is distributing pornography,” Iowa state Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Brad Zaun told the conservative website The Iowa Standard. He’s promoting legislation to make it a felony offense for educators to permit what he considers obscene material.
Some of the books at issue are by LGBTQ authors sharing their difficult life experiences, hoping to help LGBTQ kids navigate their own lives. And yes, there are portions that discuss sex. Their target audience doesn’t include middle-aged white guys who serve under the Golden Dome of Wisdom.
“Sadly, book banning is as American as racism and demonizing immigrants,” Dorman laments.
But this new salvo in the culture wars is different. It’s hateful, vengeful and authoritarian. These lawmakers are essentially demanding that educators adopt their rigid worldview and antique understanding of human sexuality or maybe go to prison.
This sounds more like the World War I proclamation threatening to throw Iowans in jail for speaking German, among the darkest chapters in Iowa history.
But it checks two boxes on the national Red State Trailblazer to-do list.
It gives conservative lawmakers a chance to continue trashing LGBTQ Iowans, transgender kids in particular. Lawmakers have already prohibited public funded health insurance from paying for the medical needs of transgender Iowans. They’ve also filed numerous anti-transgender bills, including legislation barring transgender girls from playing sports, preventing the discussion of gender identity in classrooms and removing gender identity as a protected class in the Civil Rights Code.
I had to look up “Red State Trailblazers.” They include Mississippi’s Governor Tate Reeves, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts.
Naturally, the business community finds this ritual bad for business, so Iowa’s bills are on hold until 2022 when political pressures will build for Republicans to get tough on anyone not white, straight, or conservative.
Reynolds cited “failing schools” when she called for giving state-funded vouchers to parents who want to leave public schools. She’s the first governor in decades with no agenda for improving public schools.
Republicans have pressured university professors to toe the political line or potentially face legislation eliminating tenure. Professors who are too outspoken might draw the ire of lawmakers. Ames school officials were called before the House Oversight Committee where outraged Republicans demanded they explain a one-week Black Lives Matter curriculum.
The times conservatives have accused schools of “indoctrination” are too numerous to count.
Book banning, threatening to throw teachers in jail, using state power to punish a minority group and undermining the public education system are not the sort of actions you would expect from democratic institutions. Instead, our institutions are being used to impose one unyielding political and cultural perspective through lousy laws, disinformation and intimidation.
Because there’s no closet too deep for people who don’t conform. In parts of this country, that’s called freedom. For somebody.