Mediaboss Marketing

A bill making its way through Florida's Legislature would expand the state's censorship of discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity all the way up through eighth grade and, in addition, would specify that charter schools are included in the ban.

This attack on educational freedom comes just days after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law H.B. 1, which expanded school choice to all Florida students. It's a reminder that when some (but not all) conservatives and Republicans talk about "school choice" and "parents' rights," they have a limited view of what those choices should be and which parents should have rights.

H.B. 1069, which passed the state's House on Friday, would staple some new rules onto H.B. 1557, the law passed in 2022 that censored any discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade and restricted it in other grades. H.B. 1069 expands the censorship from pre-K all the way up to eighth grade. And while proponents of this type of legislation have insisted that this is all about giving parents control over their children's education, one simple line of text will undermine that entire argument if this bill is signed into law: "This subparagraph applies to charter schools."

All of this is in addition to the latest move by the state's Department of Education to implement regulations that apply a greater level of censorship to all discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in all grades.

What makes charter schools so valuable is that they give families the freedom to pursue education that meets their children's needs and is free from overly restrictive, one-size-fits-all lesson plans. Families can find charter schools that cater to special needs children or that only focus on certain subjects. There are also a small number of charter schools designed for families with LGBT parents or children.

H.B. 1069 essentially declares that certain types of families will be denied the educational freedom offered by charter schools by censoring which topics can be taught. Politicians who actually believe in "parents' rights" and school choice should be very much opposed to this ban. If parents want their children to learn about LGBT issues in schools, it should not be for a group of conservatives in Tallahassee to tell them no.

In a similar vein, another part of H.B. 1069 undermines the educational choices of families by amending the process of objecting to and removing books from schools. The bill requires that any book or material that is the subject of a removal request by a parent be removed and unavailable to students within five days for an investigation. This means the allegedly objectionable material will be unavailable to all students, not just those of the parents who object. The bill also adds a lengthy appeals processthat involves bringing in a special magistrate that the school district has to pay for if a parent continues to object. As Reason has pointed out before, these aren't "parents' rights" bills at all. These are "parents' veto" laws that allow some parents to control what other parents' kids have access to. And since the school district will have to pay to bring in a magistrate to fight against these objections, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the easiest thing for a school district to do is just remove anything any parent objects to.

H.B. 1069 passed the House easily Friday by a vote of 7735, and the Senate version is currently being reviewed by the Fiscal Policy Committee. If the bill passes, it will be a test of DeSantis' actual commitment to school choice. If he signs it into law, he's giving credence to any Democratic or progressive critic that says "school choice" is really a conservative plot to undermine public schools and school unions as a mechanism of control, not freedom. It is taking power away from parents and concentrating it in the hands of conservative lawmakers.

Continued here:
Conservative Florida Lawmakers Want LGBT Censorship Expanded ... - Reason

Karmayogin [Sage]. This was a weekly magazine started by Aurobindo Ghose in June 1909. A single copy was available for two annas, and subscription could be had for five rupees. Peter Heehs has recounted the story of how the first issue itself reached Viceroy Minto within a fortnight of its publication. The letter To My Countrymen published in the 31 July 1909 issue gave the Government of Bengal an opportunity to prosecute Ghose.

By that time he was in Pondicherry, a French territory, and therefore it was difficult for the British Government to arrest or prosecute him. Instead, they prosecuted the printer, Monmohan Nath Ghose, who was sentenced to six months rigorous imprisonment under charges of sedition. The officiating Chief Presidency Magistrate at Calcutta, D. Swinhoe, held the article to be seditious because it imputes repression, dishonesty, partiality and base motives to the government in its administration of this country and appeals to the people of India to abandon moderate methods and to join the nationalist and with their aid coerce the Government and compel it to alter its present policy of which the writer strongly disapproves.

The conviction was set aside in October by the High Court upon appeal. Aurobindo Ghose began the article with a criticism of moderate politics, exemplified by Gopal Krishna Gokhale (18661915) and Pherozeshah Mehta (18451915). Excerpts are reprinted in the following pages:

25 December 1909

To My Countrymen

The period of waiting is over.We have two things made clear to us, first, that the future of the nation is in our hands, and, secondly, that from the Moderate party we can expect no cordial co-operation in building it.Whatever we do, we must do ourselves, in our own strength and courage. Let us then take up the work God has given us, like courageous, steadfast and patriotic men willing to sacrifice greatly and venture greatly because the mission also is great. If there are any unnerved by the fear of repression, let them stand aside.If there are any who think that by flattering Anglo-India or coquetting with English Liberalism they can dispense with the need of effort and the inevitability of peril, let them stand aside.If there are any who are ready to be satisfied with mean gains or unsubstantial concessions, let them stand aside.But all who deserve the name of Nationalists, must now come forward and take up their burden.

The fear of the law is for those who break the law.Our aims are great and honourable, free from stain or reproach, our methods are peaceful, though resolute and strenuous.We shall not break the law and, therefore, we need not fear the law.But if a corrupt police, unscrupulous officials or a partial judiciary make use of the honourable publicity of our political methods to harass the men who stand in front by illegal ukases [a decree issued by the Russian Tsar], suborned and perjured evidence or unjust decisions, shall we shrink from the toll that we have to pay on our march to freedom?Shall we cower behind a petty secrecy or a dishonourable inactivity?We must have our associations, our organisations, our means of propaganda, and, if these are suppressed by arbitrary proclamations, we shall have done our duty by our motherland and not on us will rest any responsibility for the madness which crushes down open and lawful political activity in order to give a desperate and sullen nation into the hands of those fiercely enthusiastic and unscrupulous forces that have arisen among us inside and outside India.

So long as any loophole is left for peaceful effort, we will not renounce the struggle.If the conditions are made difficult and almost impossible, can they be worse than those our countrymen have to contend against in the Transvaal? Or shall we, the flower of Indian culture and education, show less capacity and self-devotion than the coolies and shopkeepers who are there rejoicing to suffer for the honour of their nation and the welfare of their community? What is it for which we strive?

The perfect self-fulfilment of India and the independence which is the condition of self-fulfilment are our ultimate goal.In the meanwhile such imperfect self-development and such incomplete self-government as are possible in less favourable circumstances, must be attained as a preliminary to the more distant realisation.What we seek is to evolve self-government either through our own institutions or through those provided for us by the law of the land.No such evolution is possible by the latter means without some measure of administrative control.

We demand, therefore, not the monstrous and misbegotten scheme which has just been brought into being, but a measure of reform based upon those democratic principles which are ignored in Lord Morleys Reforms, a literate electorate without distinction of creed, nationality or caste, freedom of election unhampered by exclusory clauses, an effective voice in legislation and finance and some check upon an arbitrary executive.

We demand also the gradual devolution of executive government out of the hands of the bureaucracy into those of the people.Until these demands are granted, we shall use the pressure of that refusal of co-operation which is termed passive resistance.We shall exercise that pressure within the limits allowed us by the law, but apart from that limitation the extent to which we shall use it, depends on expediency and the amount of resistance we have to overcome.

On our own side we have great and pressing problems to solve.National education languishes for want of moral stimulus, financial support, and emancipated brains keen and bold enough to grapple with the difficulties that hamper its organisation and progress.

The movement of arbitration, successful in its inception, has been dropped as a result of repression.The Swadeshi-Boycott movement still moves by its own impetus, but its forward march has no longer the rapidity and organised irresistibility of forceful purpose which once swept it forward.

Social problems are pressing upon us which we can no longer ignore. We must take up the organisation of knowledge in our country, neglected throughout the last century.We must free our social and economic development from the incubus of thelitigious resort to the ruinously expensive British Courts.We must once more seek to push forward the movement toward economic self-sufficiency, industrial independence. These are the objects for which we have to organise the national strength of India.

On us falls the burden, in us alone there is the moral ardour, faith and readiness for sacrifice which can attempt and go far to accomplish the task.But the first requisite is the organisation of the Nationalist party.I invite that party in all the great centres of the country to take up the work and assist the leaders who will shortly meet to consider steps for the initiation of Nationalist activity.It is desirable to establish a Nationalist Council and hold a meeting of the body in March or April of the next year.It is necessary also to establish Nationalist Associations throughout the country.When we have done this, we shall be able to formulate our programme and assume our proper place in the political life of India.

This excerpt from Devika Sethis Banned & Censored: What the British Raj Didnt Want Us to Read has been published with permission from Roli Books.

View original post here:
British-era censorship did not spare Aurobindos letter from being circulated in his magazine - ThePrint

To the Editor:

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Franklin Roosevelt said this at his inauguration in 1933. Today we have a clear example of this.

A vocal minority, driven by fear, is attempting to suppress the publics access to knowledge. This minority wants to ban books from the local library and our schools that they think are a threat to their beliefs, their ideology and their view of American culture.

Most people would agree that parents are the most important influence on shaping a childs thinking as he/she grows up. That is how it should be. However, these book banners seem to fear that their influence in not enough. They want to remove all reading material that doesnt agree with their way of thinking. This is an attempt by a minority to dictate what the majority of readers should have access to. Exposing people to a variety of ideas is the way we develop critical thinking skills. Parents who dont want to expose their children to different points of view should home school them.

America is a multicultural country. A minority of Americans are fearful of what they see as a threat totheir view of what constitutes American culture. Any attempt at censorship of the printed word by a minority is an attack on our First Amendment freedom of speech. Whether it is written or spoken, speech is speech.

In his book On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder says, It is institutions that help preserve our democracy. They need our help. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. He suggests that we each pick an institution and work actively to defend it.

Book banning is a double-edged sword. Book banners are motivated by a fear of knowledge. People who disagree with them often remain silent out of fear of retaliation. We live in a society today where some people view violence as a legitimate form of self-expression.

President Roosevelt was right.

Margery Abel

Franklin

See more here:
The road to tyranny starts with censorship - Smoky Mountain News

Years before Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a "no-limits" partnership and the Kremlin launched a wide-ranging censorship campaign following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Beijing and Moscow were sharing methods and tactics for monitoring dissent and controlling the Internet.

That growing cooperation between the two countries is shown in documents and recordings from closed door meetings in 2017 and 2019 between officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), its chief Internet regulator, and Roskomnadzor, the government agency charged with policing Russia's Internet, that were obtained by RFE/RL's Russian Investigative Unit (known as Systema) from a source who had access to the materials. DDoSecrets, a group that publishes leaked and hacked documents, provided software to search the files.

Beijing and Moscow have been deepening their ties for the past decade and controlling the flow of information online has been a focal point of that cooperation since Xi's first trip to Russia as leader in 2013. Over the ensuing years that cooperation expanded through a number of agreements and high-level meetings in China and Russia between top officials driven by a shared vision for a tightly controlled Internet.

President Vladimir Putin (right) and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Moscow in March 2013 during Xi's first foreign trip as leader.

The files give a behind-the-scenes look at some of those discussions -- the content of which has not been previously reported -- and offer a window into the practical level of cooperation under way between China and Russia when it comes to monitoring and restricting their respective Internets.

Among those deliberations -- which are cataloged through meeting notes, audio recordings, written exchanges, and e-mails that have been verified by RFE/RL -- Russian officials are seen asking for advice and practical know-how from their Chinese counterparts on a range of topics, including how to disrupt circumvention tools like VPNs and Tor. They are also seeking ways to crack encrypted Internet traffic as well as seeking tips from China's experience in regulating messaging platforms.

In turn, Chinese officials sought Russian expertise on regulating media and dealing with popular dissent.

In a 2019 exchange, officials from the CAC also made requests to Roskomnadzor to block a variety of China-related links to news articles and interviews that they had deemed to be "of a dangerous nature and harmful to the public interest."

In another instance in July 2017, Aleksandr Zharov, who served as the head of Roskomnadzor until 2020, asks a Chinese delegation led by Ren Xianling, then-deputy minister of the CAC, to help arrange a visit for Russian specialists to China, where they could study the operations of the Golden Shield Project -- the all-encompassing Internet censorship and surveillance system that helps make up what is colloquially known as China's Great Firewall.

A Russian delegation led by then-head of Roskomnadzor Aleksandr Zharov meets with a Chinese delegation led by Ren Xianling, then-deputy minister of the Cyberspace Administration of China, on July 4, 2017.

The outcome of that visit is not outlined in the files RFE/RL received and Roskomnadzor and the Chinese Foreign Ministry did not respond to questions about the contents of the material.

A Decisive Period

While not conclusive, that request highlights how Russia has sought to emulate China in exerting control over its people in the social-media age, says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and co-author of the Red Web, a recent history of Moscow's attempts to control the Internet

"2017 was a crucial time that decided what direction to take Russia's Internet towards," Soldatov told RFE/RL. "It was this period when Russia was looking at how to build the more sophisticated system that it now has in place and it looks like the Russians learned something about how to do this from the Chinese."

For years, the Russian government has been putting in place the technological and legal infrastructure to smother freedom of speech online. Many of those measures have stumbled in practice, including a clumsy attempt to ban the Telegram messaging app in 2018, while other tools like VPNs and Tor also mostly eluded Russian censors.

But in 2019, those efforts reached a zenith when a controversial "sovereign Internet" law went into force that allowed Moscow to tighten control over the country's Internet by routing web traffic through state-controlled infrastructure and creating a national system of domain names.

While many of Russia's measures are still a far cry from those inside China, they have continued to be more technologically advanced and restrictive, a process that has accelerated since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Behind Closed Doors

The first closed-door meeting RFE/RL obtained records from is on July 4, 2017, in Moscow, where a Russian delegation led by Zharov met with a Chinese group led by Ren. Aleksandr Smirnov -- the head of the Kremlin's public relations department, which oversees information policy on behalf of the president -- invited Zharov to a Russian-Chinese media forum that took place in conjunction with an official visit by Xi.

In addition to attending the official part of the event, Smirnov told the Roskomnadzor chief in a letter to meet with CAC to "exchange experience in regulating the Internet sphere." The discussions, according to the letter, came about after a request from the Chinese.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet in the Kremlin on March 21.

According to documents and audio recordings examined by RFE/RL, the talks lasted more than two hours and involved Zharov with two deputies and one assistant, along with Ren and three CAC officials, plus translators for each side.

The discussions quickly turned to practical requests for expertise, with Zharov asking about Chinese "mechanisms for permitting and controlling" mass media, online media, and "individual bloggers," as well as Chinese experience regulating messenger apps, encryption services, and VPNs.

Zharov would go on to suggest that the CAC send a team of specialists to Russia to study the technical aspects of Russia's system for blocking content online, which he said took place with a "high efficiency" inside the country. The Roskomnadzor chief then requested that they be permitted to send a team to China to study the operations of China's vast Internet censorship and surveillance system, the so-called Great Firewall, because "more than 95 percent" of prohibited content in Russia is "foreign-produced."

The Chinese side asked for more details on the types of information blocked in Russia and how it monitors online discussions and processes personal data. Ren also asked for specifics and methods for Russia to use the Internet to "form a positive image" inside and outside the country. Zharov responded that image control was outside the purview of Roskomnadzor and that it should be raised with the Putin administration.

The Chinese delegation also asked about protests organized by opposition figure Aleksei Navalny a few months prior in March 2017 that coincided with the release of a documentary detailing alleged corruption by then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and wanted to know what tools Roskomnadzor used to regulate media coverage of the nationwide rallies.

Police detain Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny (center) during an anti-corruption rally in central Moscow on March 26, 2017.

"These high-level exchanges have been going on for some time and they've always been focused on understanding what the other side is doing in one area, where they see the other falling short, and what they might learn from each other," Andrew Small, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, told RFE/RL. "Internet censorship has been a big part of it because it relates to political stability at home and the shared view that outside forces are meddling from abroad."

Zharov said that protests in some cities took place with proper permits from the authorities, so information about them was not restricted online, and that a decision to let them take place was made because they were deemed relatively small-scale and enthusiasm for them would fade within "a few days." He added that the decision to let the protests take place was influenced by Putin's "very high level" of support from the public, which he said "fluctuates at around 89 percent."

The Roskomnadzor chief may have misrepresented popular support for Putin at the time and downplayed the level of sustained interest inside Russia for the Navalny documentary to his Chinese counterparts. According to polling by the state-owned Russian Public Opinion Research Center at the time, Putin's trust or confidence rating had fallen to 49.9 percent, with his approval rating sitting at some 81 percent. Also, according to a previous RFE/RL investigation, the Main Radio Frequency Center (GRFC) -- a specialized unit within Roskomnadzor -- tracked online interest and discussion about the Navalny documentary and their internal metrics show that it only began to decline on the Russian Internet by July -- nearly four months after it was released.

Few follow-up details are offered in the files obtained by RFE/RL about the requests and enquiries raised in the meeting, but Roskomnadzor compiled and shared a summary of the discussions with the FSB, Russia's main domestic intelligence agency. In that document, Zharov strikes a positive note and calls for expediting joint efforts with China to improve the blocking of information and the need for the "exchange of experience at the level of technical specialists" between the two countries.

Pushing Ahead With Deeper Ties

The 2017 meeting came after a wider push in the preceding years for deeper cooperation between Beijing and Moscow when it came to monitoring and controlling information online and saw new agreements on increased collaboration signed by Xi and Putin.

A breakthrough was reached in April 2016, when the Safe Internet League, a censorship lobbying group funded by Konstantin Malofeyev, a conservative Russian oligarch with close links to the Kremlin and Russian Orthodox Church, organized a conference in Moscow that featured a large Chinese delegation led by Lu Wei, who at the time was the head of the CAC, and Fang Binxing, the architect of the Great Firewall.

Denis Davydov, the executive director of the Safe Internet League, told The Guardian in 2016 that the deal to hold the conference was reached in December 2015 in Beijing between Fang and Igor Shchyogolev, a university friend of Putin's and former communications minister who serves as a Kremlin aide on Internet issues.

Malofeyev and the Safe Internet League were part of a group pushing for closer cooperation in order to learn from China how to better tame the web and limit Western digital influence. Shchyogolev also played a key role, and Soldatov says he was one of the main figures pushing for a pivot to China at a time when some elements of the intelligence services were still suspicious of involving the Chinese more closely in Russian domestic affairs.

Following the July 2017 meeting, officials from Roskomnadzor and the CAC continued to meet and share expertise.

By 2019, Russia had introduced its own "sovereign Internet law" and Putin began to accelerate moves to bring foreign technology companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to heel by imposing fines and introducing laws that required corporations to keep employees in Russia and thereby expose them to potential arrest.

During a June 2019 meeting in Moscow, Xi and Putin announced an upgrade in their ties to a "comprehensive strategic partnership," with cooperation on information and governing the Internet front and center. The two leaders said they shared a need for "peace and security in cyberspace on the basis of equal participation of all countries" and vowed to "promote the construction of a global order for the governance of information and cyberspace."

More Practical Cooperation

One month later, Zharov and a team from Roskomnadzor met with a Chinese delegation in Moscow led by Zhuang Rongwen, who was appointed to head the CAC in 2018.

According to readouts and recordings from the July 17, 2019, meeting, Roskomnadzor's representatives asked about Chinese expertise in being able to counteract attempts to bypass blocking, with Zharov citing the agency's failed attempts to block Telegram in 2018 as an example.

The Russian side also said it wanted to learn how China uses artificial intelligence to identify and block "prohibited content." A response from the Chinese delegation is not in the files, but a 2023 RFE/RL investigation revealed that Roskomnadzor has begun to use artificial neural networks to track Russians online, particularly searching for posts that insult Putin or call for protests.

On the sidelines of the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China, in October 2019, Roskomnadzor and the CAC signed a cooperation agreement on counteracting the spread of "forbidden information" and the obtained documents show select requests from the CAC in December 2019 to block information inside Russia under the guise of that deal.

Among those requests, which were laid out in three separate letters containing links to articles and sites, Chinese officials asked to censor a Chinese-language BBC story about China's "toilet revolution," a government campaign launched in 2015 to improve the country's sanitation; a blog post that discusses rumors of Xi suffering a back injury that received less than 4,000 pageviews; and links on GitHub, the software development website, that describe ways to bypass China's firewall inside the country.

Other requests include the homepage of The Epoch Times, a newspaper affiliated with the Falun Gong religious movement that is persecuted inside China, and links to profiles on the Russian social-media site VKontakte. In one instance, a user shared a video of an apparent ethnic Uyghur couple dancing that is titled "Rustam and Zumrad (Uighurs rock)." Beijing launched a sweeping crackdown and internment system against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang that the United Nations described as committing "serious human rights violations" and some Western countries have designated as genocide.

Another request features the VKontakte profile of a Chinese university student that contains a video interview of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin in 2000 with CBS's 60 Minutes that is archived on the nonprofit U.S. network C-SPAN. The interview touches on human rights issues, U.S.-China relations, and religious freedom in China.

"The scope of these requests is quite sweeping and it's interesting that it extends beyond Beijing's classic set of issues like Xinjiang, Taiwan, or Tibet," Small said.

RFE/RL does not know Roskomnadzor's response to the Chinese requests, but at the time of publication the links are still accessible inside Russia.

"It's a wide-ranging approach to image management and it's interesting that Beijing thinks they can make these broad requests from Russia," Small said. "It's an externalization of how these issues are handled inside China and perhaps a hint of where this cooperation is headed."

Read the original here:
Exclusive: Leaked Files Show China And Russia Sharing Tactics On Internet Control, Censorship - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

Melissa Tempels first-grade class at Heyer Elementary School in Waukesha County, Wisconsin has spent weeks preparing for its upcoming spring concert. The class was going to perform Rainbowland, a 2017 duet by Miley Cyrus and her godmother, Dolly Parton, with lyrics that advocate for inclusion. That is, until the school administration asked Tempel to remove Rainbowland from the concert.

In a statement, the Waukesha School District said the lyrics could be deemed controversial according to a school board policy on controversial issues in the classroom. A first-grade class singing Rainbowland is obviously not a cause for concern, but a school district that perceives inclusion as controversial is.

If this type of censorship sounds familiar, its because weve seen similar stories across the country. The censorship of racial and LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom has garnered national attention ever since Florida passed its notorious Dont Say Gay law in 2022.

While classroom censorship in Wisconsin is not new, two recently introduced bills threaten to impose it here in a big way.

During the 2021-22 legislative session, conservative Wisconsin lawmakers passed a classroom censorship bill that was ultimately vetoed by Governor Evers. This session, to bypass the veto pen, the same primary legislative authors have introduced joint resolution AJR 8/SJR 7, calling for an advisory referendum on whether school districts should be prohibited from teaching "that an individual by virtue of the individual's race or sex bears responsibility for acts committed in the past by other individuals of the same race or sex?

The fact is that American history has been shaped by exclusion, slavery and systems of oppression along racial lines, and the restriction described by this referendum would have a chilling effect on accurate education in Wisconsin schools. While America's troubled past and current racial disparities are certainly distressing, they do not become less so by whitewashing history. Instead, this prohibition only serves to rob young people of important opportunities to learn about and process the realities they face.

This referendum provides an illusion of democracy. Lawmakers have created so many mechanisms of voter suppression here in Wisconsin that any referendum will always fail to represent the true will of the people. More importantly for this conversation, the people who will be affected the most by this referendum young people wont have the opportunity to vote on the issue.

We oppose the use of referenda to silence marginalized voices. In the early 2000s, voters in states across the country passed ballot measures that banned gay marriage through the same type of moral panic we see with the current wave of classroom censorship. Oppression is oppression even if voters advise it.

Legislators have also introduced Assembly Bill 15/Senate Bill 10, which would require public libraries and public schools to limit student access to material deemed harmful. However, most banned books are not deemed harmful because theyre violent or pornographic, but because they challenge dominant hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality.

The stories of Black, Brown, and queer people are disproportionately targeted by book bans. According to the Pens Americas Index of School Book Bans report, 41% of the books banned in the US from July 2021 to June 2022 had an LGBTQIA+ characters or themes, 40% had a protagonist or secondary character in a racial minority, and 20% related to race and racism. Meanwhile, only 21% of the banned books contained sexual content.

The most challenged book in 2021 was Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe not because of pornographic, hateful, or violent content that could be argued as harmful but because it challenges the gender binary. When The Hate U Give is banned in schools and libraries across America, young people might be protected from the distress of reflecting on racism in our society, but children of color are not protected from the distress of being told that its dangerous to talk about their lived experiences. Books like these are dangerous to dominating power structures because they offer youth a chance to see different viewpoints and the wide variety of human experiences.

In school, young people conceptualize their understanding on race, sex, gender, and their own identity. When adults in their community actively restrict the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate knowledge, it is hugely damaging for youth that do not fit within these confines, especially for queer kids of color. Censoring harmful material merely provides an excuse to ban books on gender and race, a move which will prove harmful to young people.

State legislatures, local governments, and reactionary school boards are engaged in a nationwide, coordinated campaign to censor what students learn in the classroom by banning books and shutting down discussions of race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and an accurate recounting of American history. The mission of the classroom censorship movement has never been about protecting kids. Its an entirely political project intent on the erasure and suppression of marginalized communities in schools.

We know that Nazi Germany burned books they deemed dangerous before turning that same logic into violence against people in the Holocaust, but the US has a history of similar tactics. From 17th century Puritan book burnings to The United Daughters of the Confederacy working to ban books challenging slavery, controlling books has historically been used to silence the voices and suffering of marginalized communities.

Stepping out of the classroom, we are seeing these state legislatures use the same tactics to attack other American constitutional rights.

The advisory referendum proposal and bill introduced in the Wisconsin legislature are just pieces in a larger puzzle of state governments and groups attempting to censor views that challenge the status quo. Across America, discriminatory rhetoric has put freedom of speech, protest, and voting rights all under attack.

Since Gov. Desantis of Florida signed an anti-protest law in 2021, there have been at least 126 bills and laws nationwide with similar or exact language, including a bill recently passed by Wisconsins state Assembly.

In 2018, Florida passed a Modern-Day Poll Tax that required formerly incarcerated citizens to pay all their court debts before regaining their right to vote. The American Bar Association the predominant professional organization for attorneys estimated that this is keeping nearly a million Floridians from the polls. Just a few months ago, in February, 2023, Wisconsin introduced a bill that mirrored the Florida Poll Tax in an attempt to suppress formerly incarcerated citizens voting rights. Voter suppression efforts like these arent just happening in Florida and Wisconsin. According to the Brennan Center of Justice, state lawmakers in at least 32 states have pre-filed or introduced 150 restrictive voting bills.

Additionally, 32 bills have been filed in different states this year attacking drag shows in an attempt to suppress the freedom of speech and expression for LGBTQ+ people. In fact, more than 450 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced throughout the US during the 2023 legislative session, including heinous attacks on the rights of non-binary and trans people to access gender-affirming medical care.

The ACLU of Wisconsin understands that attempts to impose this extreme agenda on state and local levels fuel anti-democratic movements on the national level. These increasingly drastic measures to undermine our rights must be stopped not just for the sake of individual states, but for the country writ large.

Check out this toolkit from the ACLU to take action against classroom censorship efforts in your own school.

Read more from the original source:
From Don't Say Gay to Rainbowland - ACLU of Wisconsin