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6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Rutherford library board rescinds decision to remove books on transgender issues
A unanimous Rutherford County Library System Board voted June 2 to rescind a March decision to remove books promoting "transgenderism or 'gender confusion' in minors." Pending new board chairman Cody York called for the vote after he had persuaded the majority in March to remove the books on transgender topics "to protect children." York prior to the June 2 vote said the board could face First Amendment legal challenges to the March decision. Those opposing include the National Coalition Against Censorship in New York. First Amendment issues for students: ACLU warns Rutherford school board about removing 'Beloved,' other books from libraries Legal counsel has advised the board about potentially losing a lawsuit based on the library system's policy to oppose censorship by the officials and allow parents to decide what books are permitted for their children, York suggested. The book removing policy divided the board and audience members, including one holding a "No more book bans" sign. Heather Ahmie held a sign saying, "Literacy & Justice for All," to promote free speech during the meeting with over 70 people in attendance at Murfreesboro City Hall in Council Chambers. York promised he'd lead the board in crafting new policies to protect children when he begins his term as chairman by July to replace outgoing chairman Phil King. The roll call vote had two board members abstaining: Dina Piazza and King. First Amendment issue: Divided Rutherford County Library System Board bans transgender books 'to protect children' Before rescinding the March decision on removing books on transgender topics to protect children, the board heard about six speeches from audience members opposed to censorship. There were audience members present who showed support for York and his position, but none of them came to the lectern to speak. The speakers included Wonderland Rogers, who identifies as a transgender male. He questioned the majority's previous decision to remove books. 'You made it clear you want me to disappear," Rogers told the board. Rogers also made an insulting remark alluding to York being in a white shirt, which is also what many audience members wear to show support for the book removal decisions. Chairman King responded by saying he won't tolerate anyone making insults again. April 2025 library board meeting: Rutherford Library Board delays vote to possibly rescinding vote to remove transgender books Speaker Hannah Stromgren also questioned the board's previous decision to protect children as if "fearful that reading a book with a trans or gay character will turn kids trans or gay." "When you read the Bible, did it make you want to throw babies against rocks?" said Stromgren, who noted the biblical scriptures include descriptions of incest, human sacrifice and murder. "Reading a book with material that you personally don't agree with doesn't automatically create children that mirror those attributes," Stromgren said. Free speech scholar Nadine Strossen: Rutherford school board violates law by removing books Speaker Jessica Bruce urged the library board members to focus on the mission of the library system "to improve lives and empower its communities to explore, imagine and engage by providing information and technology." "Your job is to represent the community and everyone in it," Bruce told the board. "Everyone. That includes those of us in opposition. Each book the board has banned has been because of that book's LGBTQIA+ relationship and ties to the community. Your actions are not protecting any child. In fact, you are actually putting an entire demographic of children at danger." Free speech issue: Rutherford library officials draw national opposition for removing books on transgender issues The library board also heard from Tatiana Silvas, a 10-year English teacher for Rutherford County Schools. "I am a passionate lover of books and their impact," said Silvas, who teaches at Stewarts Creek High in southwest Smyrna. "However, I am always in support of a parent's right to choose what their child reads in my classroom." Censorship: Rutherford schools removal of 160 more books draws opposition from 1st Amendment advocates Although a supporter of parents making decisions on what their children read, Silvas said board members making decisions on removing books "seems excessive." "The narrative of obscene content in our libraires is one perpetuated by certain board members and their army of community members," Silvas said. "This group has also pushed the Rutherford County School Board into a legal battle with the ACLU, something they were warned of by a letter on September 16, 2024." 'We are banished' Rutherford schools book banning upsets free speech advocates Silvas noted that the library board members have received warnings from national free speech organizations about the March decision to remove books. Other communities, Silvas said, have faced thousands of dollars in costs to defend censorship decisions, including in Escambia County, Florida, and Crawford County, Arkansas. "With our budget of $4.2 million each year, just one lawsuit could pull over 11% of our annual budget," Silvas said. "This means that Rutherford County taxpayers will foot the bill if you choose to go to trial with this lawsuit and lose." Censorship lawsuit: ACLU files First Amendment lawsuit against Rutherford school board for book bans Prior to rescinding the March decision on removing books on transgender topics to protect children, the majority of the board in a 5-3 vote backed York to be the next chairman. York had the support of board members Marzee Woodward, Susan Quesenberry, Piazza and Sam Huddleston, who's also Murfreesboro assistant city manager. All of them previously voted in favor of the March decision to remove books on transgender topics to protect children. Fellow board member Kory Wells called for the minority position of having Lisa Brewer, who's also the elected Smyrna Town Court clerk, become the chairwoman of the board. Brewer also had the backing of vice chairman Rollie Holden to be the next leader of the board. Wells suggested that York and herself as outspoken advocates on opposite sides of the transgender book issue would not make for the best leaders of the board. 'Deeply concerned': Removing transgender books affects Rutherford library director search Board members and audience members should be "treating each other as neighbors" and "go sit with somebody on the other side," Wells said. "That's our job," Wells said. Wells also noted that the board has already faced $8,000 in legal fees because of the March decision to remove books on transgender topics to protect children. King, the board's current chairman, abstained from voting on his successor for the library board. Board member Benjamin Groce of Murfreesboro was absent from the June 2 meeting because of his legal work with the Smyrna government. In March, Groce joined Wells and other members of the minority vote to oppose removing books on transgender topics. Groce mentioned being an attorney and officer of the court with concerns about supporting unconstitutional positions. August 2023 decisions by library board: Library supporters upset by board pulling 4 books say they're 'fighting against censorship' Reach reporter Scott Broden with news tips or questions by emailing him at sbroden@ support his work with The Daily News Journal, sign up for a digital subscription. This article originally appeared on Murfreesboro Daily News Journal: Rutherford library board rescinds decision to remove transgender books
New York Times
11-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
In Trump's Washington, a War of Wordplay Takes Hold
Political chaos, George Orwell once wrote, is connected with the decay of language. In Washington, the current political chaos has been connected with a kind of rhetorical warping. An entire lexicon of progressive terminology nurtured by the last administration has been squelched. In its place is a new vocabulary, honed by President Trump and echoed by his many imitators in the capital. It is a vocabulary containing many curious uses of doublespeak. One presidential order titled 'Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government' calls for weaponizing the federal government against itself. Another titled 'Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling' demands that 'patriotic education' be taught to children. 'Forced patriotism is indoctrination, those words are synonyms,' said Lee Rowland, a First Amendment attorney and the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to free speech. She said that the education executive order 'is a perfect encapsulation of what we are seeing out of this administration so far, which is to diminish rights, while claiming as a matter of pure rhetoric that they are increasing them.' Across government, a war is being waged in wordplay. It is fought in executive orders, official statements from the White House, press briefings and all manner of communiqués, internal and external. The very language that Mr. Trump and his administration are using to smash the federal bureaucracy is now also the official language of that bureaucracy, because it is being dictated by the man doing the smashing. 'He's coming up with his own executive language which is then directed as a weapon against the supposed internal enemy, which is the structure of government,' said Jason Stanley, a Yale professor whose books include 'How Propaganda Works' and 'The Politics of Language.' 'All language is political,' he added, 'so all politics takes the form of war over language.' The first order of business was to dispense with the oldspeak. Even as the president signed an executive order titled 'Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,' he signed other orders policing language. The language of diversity initiatives was suddenly proscribed. So were words invoking what this administration refers to as 'gender ideology.' Out: 'undocumented.' In: 'alien.' Fear that other words could run afoul of the new edicts led anxious agency officials to come up with lists of potentially problematic words on their own. Entries included: Equity. Gender. Transgender. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression. Such words were scrubbed from federal websites. 'The things they're attacking in these executive orders are sort of loose concepts,' said Jonathan Keeperman, the founder and editor of Passage Press, an independent publisher that is influential among conservative intellectuals. (Among pro-Trump fellow travelers he is more commonly known by his nom de plume, 'Lomez'). 'By focusing on these key terms that the left has grabbed on to,' Mr. Keeperman explained, 'you can, without knowing much else about what you're doing, at the scale of the entirety of the federal budget, basically remove a lot of the rot that you're trying to remove.' This is exactly what critics of the administration fear it is doing. 'They're trying to take down the federal bureaucracy by saying it's all D.E.I.,' as Mr. Stanley put it. Indeed, that phrase seems to have been given a metaphysical, almost magical quality by the president and his officials. They have lately blamed all manner of societal ills and events on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, even the American Airlines crash above the Potomac that killed 67 people last week. (The administration has offered no evidence suggesting that diversity initiatives had anything to do with the tragedy. Investigators are still assessing the cause of the collision.) There have been all sorts of rhetorical wonders out of this White House already. Some seem semicomic (see: 'Gulf of America'); others, deadly serious: The president said he wanted to 'permanently' resettle Gazans. The following day, his press secretary opted for 'temporarily,' a word that means the exact opposite of the one her boss continues to use. The president said he was appointing a 'warrior for free speech' to run the Federal Communications Commission. That free speech warrior immediately launched investigations into NPR and PBS, and then set his sights on CBS and NBC. On Monday, Mr. Trump posted that he was installing one of his most fiercely loyal apparatchiks, Richard Grenell, to run the Kennedy Center in Washington so that there would be no more 'ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA' put on at the performing arts venue. Ms. Rowland allowed that 'the government does have a lot of leeway to set the tone and decide how to use its own voice.' Even still, she said, 'it is very clear that this administration is ushering in a new golden age of propaganda.' On social media, Vice President JD Vance posted a 'memo to the press' explaining that the official definition of the word 'oligarchy' had changed and now meant 'when a president is thwarted by unelected bureaucrats.' Left unsaid: The world's richest man is working inside the administration as perhaps the most powerful unelected bureaucrat in American history. And then there are the linguistic loop-de-loops so breathtaking they might impress even Orwell. The new 'Department of Government Efficiency' is killing off pieces of the government. When the president amplifies false conspiracies on the social media platform he owns — as he has been doing lately about U.S.A.I.D. — his posts are called 'truths.' On Sunday, while aboard Air Force One, he explained that the violent rioters he had pardoned for assaulting the seat of the U.S. government on Jan. 6, 2021, were themselves actually 'assaulted by our government.' He now refers to that date as 'a day of love.' Mr. Trump has been fluent in the ways of doublespeak for decades. Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Mr. Trump's first book, 'The Art of the Deal,' which was published in 1987, concocted the phrase 'truthful hyperbole' to describe his subject's speaking style. As the book states, in Mr. Trump's voice: 'I play to people's fantasies. … It's an innocent form of exaggeration — and it's a very effective form of promotion.' (Mr. Schwartz has said that Mr. Trump loved the phrase). This has always been one of the more beguiling paradoxes about him. He manages to be both erratic communicator (see: 'the weave') and calculating rhetorician. His ability to coin phrases, or even co-opt ones used against him — like 'fake news' — was key to his political rise. Much of his phraseology has seeped deep into the culture by this point. And now his language is being spoken in the halls of power again. 'He just does it intuitively,' said Jeremy Clark, who was a senior official in the Interior Department during the first Trump administration and is now a fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute. 'I think finally people on the left and right are understanding how smart Trump is, even if his strategy isn't always initially obvious to outsiders.' As Mr. Keeperman put it: 'He's sort of a master at this.'
