Recently, the Brevard County School Board held a meeting to consider banning two books from Florida schools. However, it had an embarrassing turnout as a sole Moms for Liberty member showed up to support the ban, raising the question of whom these book bans are even for.
While book banning has spread rapidly across the United States since 2021, Florida has primarily been leading the charge in the censorship movement. The state also gave birth to the notorious Moms for Liberty organization. Labeled a hate group, this political organization has campaigned for book bans across the country in an effort to erase the existence of the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized groups from school resources and curricula. The group has been caught quoting Adolf Hitler, showing up on anti-Semitic livestreams, and calling the cops on teachers and librarians for allowing students to check out books.
While Moms for Liberty once gained traction amid false claims that it was advocating for parents’ rights and protecting children, its extremism and countless scandals have led to its influence waning. Last year, almost every candidate endorsed by Moms for Liberty lost their school board races by a landslide nationwide. Meanwhile, the outcome of a recent Florida school board meeting demonstrated just how few supporters Moms for Liberty and the book-banning movement actually have.
Florida book ban meeting has a telling outcome
On January 23, the Brevard County School Board held its first meeting of the year with the intention of evaluating whether two books should be banned from Florida schools. The board had received a proposal for censoring The Kite Runner and Slaughterhouse-Five in school libraries and decided to vote on the matter. Before the board voted, supporters and opponents were invited to speak on the matter. However, there weren’t supporters of the ban—there was just a supporter. A lone Moms for Liberty member showed up to support the ban and sat alone as over 20 opponents gave scathing responses to the book-banning proposition. Over half a dozen opponents were wearing shirts supporting STOP Moms for Liberty.
Risë Walter praised The Kite Runner, drawing comparisons between the book’s depiction of “the growth of the Taliban and its repressive autocracy in the name of religious nationalism” and what we are seeing today with “the rise of parental rights groups that want to limit what students learn.” Others disparaged Moms for Liberty’s attempts to push “their ideology on all children” and for giving Florida “an ugly, ugly image in many parts of the country.” A student, Ava WolfenKoehler, also spoke at the meeting, expressing her excitement for the day she’d be old enough to vote against school board members pushing for book bans.
No one spoke at the meeting in support of the book bans, with the sole Moms for Liberty member leaving without giving a statement to the press or board. The Brevard County School Board eventually voted to keep the two books on school shelves. While it’s quite comforting that this book ban proposal was wholly and completely shot down, one must ask why book bans continue. Lawsuits and outcry have arisen as various school districts across Florida remove hundreds and even thousands of titles from school libraries. One of the largest school districts in Florida could only draw a single book ban supporter for its book-banning meeting, yet Florida schools continue pulling books from shelves by the hundreds? Something is not adding up.
What’s frustrating is that this is far from the only evidence that just a tiny minority in the country actually supports book banning. A recent study found that 11 people were responsible for a whopping 60% of book challenges in the United States during the 2021–2022 school year. The majority of book complaints in the country come from a handful of “serial book banners” who singlehandedly file hundreds of complaints at their surrounding school districts. A lot of these schools use complaints, or even just the fear of a complaint, to instantly pull books from shelves without giving anyone else the chance to vote on the matter. Hence, as the school board meeting illustrates, some of these bans may be enforced at just one person’s behest.
It shouldn’t be possible for literally a handful of people to be pushing book-banning legislation and policing school curricula across the entire nation. Every school needs to find a way to listen to the voices of all parents, students, and teachers before letting an unruly minority dictate what the entire country is allowed to read and learn about.
(featured image: Andrei Metelev/Getty)
