Pentagon Ordered To Reinstate Banned Race and Gender-Themed Books In Military Family Schools
The judge ruled to protect student freedoms to “inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding.”
Featured image: via Getty Images, credit Mr. Vito
On Monday, October 20, a federal judge ordered the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) to immediately restore the approximately 600 books it had scrubbed from more than 100 Defense Department K-12 public schools that serve 67,000 children of military personnel – and to cease from removing more.
The outcome is the result of the case, E.K. v. Department of Defense Education Activity, brought by the ACLU and 12 students and their families who attend DoDEA schools as children of active duty servicemembers. The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Kentucky, and the ACLU of Virginia filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in May, seeking to declare DoDEA’s classroom censorship unconstitutional.
Since January, the plaintiffs’ schools have removed books, altered curricula, and canceled events that the Trump administration has accused of promoting “gender ideology” or “divisive equity ideology.”
Quoting the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in Board of Education v. Pico, U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ruled to protect student freedoms to “inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding.”
The resultant injunction is limited to the five schools attended by plaintiffs.
Nonetheless, the ACLU declared the ruling a victory for free speech. “This is an important victory for students in DoDEA schools and anyone who values full libraries and vibrant classrooms,” said Emerson Sykes, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, in a press release. “The censorship taking place in DoDEA schools as a result of these executive orders was astonishing in its scope and scale, and we couldn’t be more pleased that the court has vindicated the First Amendment rights of the students this has impacted.”
In its quest to suppress diverse ideas and uncomfortable truths, the Pentagon (under Trump Administration directive) had banned books that included many classics, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee; The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood; The Color Purple, by Alice Walker; and material about Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks. Beyond subjects of enslavement and racial discrimination, material speaking to Native American history, women’s history, sexual abuse prevention, and LGBTQ identities and history was purged. The list included With Honor and Integrity: Transgender Troops in Their Own Words, co-edited by Colonel Bree Fram, one of the highest ranking “out” transgender officers in the U.S. military, as previously reported by GO.
“The stories of queer and trans service members are not frightening, they’re inspiring,” Fram shared with GO in response to the win for free speech. “They show people striving for the best version of themselves, which is exactly what we ask of every member of our armed forces. Having these stories available reminds us that courage takes many forms, in and out of uniform.”
