If there’s anything on which Americans agree, from the most ardent Trump supporter to the most militant nonmember of antifa, it’s the value of freedom.
“Don’t tell me what to do” is the motto of truck drivers, anti-vaxxers and abortion providers. That’s why, when businesses from Apple to Verizon want to sell something, they’re likely to wrap their pitches in terms of “your freedom.”
But, despite their overwrought displeasure at being asked to wear masks temporarily in the midst of an airborne disease that killed people, it’s now Republican legislators, in a break from longstanding tradition and once-firm party principles, who are working hard to limit what we can read, what we can teach (or learn), what we can think about — and who can vote. This is all part and parcel of an effort to roll back individual rights. No fair person — or free person — should have any doubt that the Republican Party is now practicing a widespread campaign to legislatively censor much of American life.
In early January, the superintendent of the Granbury Independent School District in North Texas met with a group of school librarians to explain that the libraries were about to be raided and they’d better be ready to accept it.
People are also reading…
“Our community is very, very conservative,” he told them. And to any school employees who might have different political beliefs, “You better hide it. Here in this community, we’re going to be conservative.”
Over the next two weeks, more than 130 titles were pulled from library shelves, most featuring LGBTQ characters or themes, others dealing with racism and women’s rights.
Any public or school library that only permits one political view and suppresses the rest fails all of its users.
But it’s only one example of what seems to be a coordinated nationwide push to censor information. “We’re seeing an unprecedented volume of challenges,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, executive director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told Time magazine last week. “I’ve worked for ALA for 20 years, and I can’t recall a time when we had multiple challenges coming in on a daily basis.”
This suppression is also visible in Republicans’ threats toward business and corporate leaders who see and support an America that’s broader than the current Republican vision.
Last year, after Coca-Cola and a number of other corporations objected to anti-voting laws being passed in Georgia and elsewhere, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he encouraged legislators to stop offering tax breaks and multi-billion-dollar exemptions in return for financial contributions — a threat that reeks of corruption.
In Florida last week, after The Walt Disney Co. condemned the “Don’t Say Gay” bill passed by the state legislature, saying “it should never have passed and should never have been signed into law,” Gov. Ron DeSantis and other legislators threatened to retaliate financially for the company’s “woke ideology.”
Today’s Republican Party will brook no disagreement.
And then there are the new voting restrictions, which have created chaos in Texas, where new ID requirements for mail-in ballots led to an unprecedented number of legitimate ballots being rejected ahead of the state’s March 1 primary.
Such problems have arisen in other states like Florida, where last week a federal judge blocked a new election law, stating that some of the Republican-crafted restrictions were passed “with the intent to discriminate against Black voters.”
Sound familiar?
This is not the Republican Party with which many of us are familiar — the champion of parental rights, small government, local control and corporate freedom. It has taken a wrong turn somewhere. The party may be unhappy with modern-day America — but that’s the party’s problem, not America’s. The rest of us shouldn’t have our rights revoked because of its discomfort.
Back in Granbury, students attending a school board meeting in January pushed back.
“I simply want to emphasize who it is that is upset about this book ban, and it’s not just delinquents who want to read smut. It’s honor students who want access to the full extent of their education,” one said.
“It’s plain and simple: If you don’t like it, put the book down,” another student said. “No one is forcing you to read it.”
“No government — and public school is an extension of government — has ever banned books and banned information from its public and been remembered in history as the good guys,” another said.
The kids are all right — and right. This is not the American way and it is not the practice of the good guys.
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Our view: The freedom to oppress | Editorial | journalnow.com - Winston-Salem Journal
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