I'd propose we call them "read-ins." Maybe in 60 years, school children will be studying and learning about them the way they study and learn today about the famous "sit-ins" of the Civil Rights Movement 60 years ago.
To highlight the dangerous injustice of black citizens being denied access to lunch counters throughout the segregated south, heroic college kids in Greensboro, as well as young people from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) across several states, staged the famous peaceful protest. And it was brilliantly conceived.
Five black students would sit at the counter, and when arrested, they would go peacefully. As they departed, another five black students would come and sit in their place. Soon, the jails and paddy wagons were overflowing with calm, well-spoken, otherwise law-abiding citizens. Rational people nationwide were exposed to the injustice, hastening a quicker end to the injustice.
And that's why I think it's time that groups like Moms for Liberty and other moral watchdog organizations around the country employ a "read-in" strategy at school board meetings whenever they are forced to fight lewd and perverse material being welcomed into elementary and junior high libraries in the name of inclusion. Note what happened just a few days ago at the Indian River County school board meeting in Florida:
[Warning: Sexual Content]
The black minister in the video was escorted out of the meeting, but the question uninvolved parties like me were left with was, "Why?" What did he do that was so wrong? He wasn't over his time limit. He was talking about an issue germane to the school district. He wasn't disrespectful or using profane language. The only infraction he committed was not being quiet when told to stop. But it was a public meeting, during public comments, and he had every right to be heard.
Unless.
Unless what he was saying could be deemed offensive, vulgar, or out of place in polite company.
Bingo. Apparently the school board found what he was reading to be offensive. Too offensive to be read aloud at a public meeting. Is that not the point that these watchdog groups were making in the first place? If adult school board members blush at the sound of those words and don't want to be exposed to them, then why on God's green earth would they permit elementary and junior high kids to be a captive audience to them?
The school board didn't allow him to finish his reading, and had him escorted by the police out of the meeting like he was a potential threat. And that's exactly when it needed to happen. Right as the man was being escorted away from the microphone, another patron should have approached, taken the text from his hand, and continued reading the perverse text right where he left off. And when they were escorted out, another should have stepped up to keep going, and going, and going until all the paddy wagons were overflowing again.
That's how this has to be done. Because just like 60 years ago, the media is complicit in the injustice and will do nothing to help. Down in Florida, the local NBC affiliate in West Palm Beach reported how school board members "received threats" after the meeting where they dismissed the minister. The intent of the media was to blame Moms for Liberty as the culprits responsible for threats and intimidation.
Never mind that Moms for Liberty explicitly condemned all threats to board members or school officials.
Never mind that at this point they don't know but that the threats were concocted by those in league with the school board, in order to generate sympathy, distract people's attention, all while giving the illusion that the people who don't want offensive literature in their kids' library books are dangerous whack jobs.
Apparently on board with sexualizing kids in schools, media like NBC of West Palm Beach are more than happy to favorably quote the board's chair, Peggy Jones, who lectured the angry patrons, "If you don't think it's appropriate, please don't read it."
No, she doesn't see the irony. No, she doesn't realize that's not how this works. How it works is: "If you, Peggy, do think it's appropriate, why object to it being read at your meetings?"
Until there is some kind of answer to that question, the line of parents ready to read the content aloud to amplify the embarrassment of the board should back out the door.
But will it work? Read the second to last line of the West Palm Beach NBC story, and then you tell me:
The day after the meeting school administrators removed 20 books in question from county school libraries.
