Because It’s Illegal

There are a number of us in my community who are working at improving our school district, trying to get more parent-responsive schoolboard members, trying to get more school choice, trying to get rid of SEL, CRT,and sexualizing materials from our schools. One person in the group pointed us to a video clip from a Michael Knowles show, in which Knowles highlights a dad in upstate New York who addresses his school board in an exemplary way.

 

Michael Knowles highlights a parent addressing a school board,
screenshot from here

The dad sets up a scenario: your 15-year-old daughter’s birthday party. Would you give her this particular book—it was Girl in Translation—and he reads a passage from it. [This book is in my school district's libraries, by the way.] The passage depicts a sex scene in graphic detail. Then he asks, in the same level, unemotional tone, would they give that book to their daughter? Would they read that to her? He notes that their reaction of revulsion shows they would not. And yet the book is in the schools for 10^th-graders, coinciding with that hypothetical 15-year-old daughter.

Then he read them the US Department of Justice’s statement on their website concerning laws on obscenity. He simply points out that having the book available to minors is in violation of the US code, implying to those with ears to hear that, if they don’t clear up this problem, they will be liable and should maybe lawyer up.

Here in Texas we’ve been working through the legislature—without success thus far—to eliminate the “obscenity exemption,” which allows images or descriptions that would otherwise be considered pornographic to be allowed for educational purposes. The intention of the exemption has been to allow diagrams, etc., for health science and sex education. But it has been used as a cover for anything; once a book is in the school, you call it educational, even if it would get you charged elsewhere.

Novels, including graphic novels, are not used for science and sex ed. In our school district, those particular books are disallowed from use for sex ed by the SHAC committee (school health advisory committee).

So this got me thinking: we don’t have to depend on getting rid of that obscenity exemption. The schools are already in violation of US federal laws against providing porn to minors. And they’re against the Texas code as well.

Maybe we could use this law approach to get rid of these books in schools—starting with speaking up at school board meetings. And I would assume that might need to be followed up with lawsuits—criminal prosecutions, or civil suits wherever local prosecutors fail to follow through with criminal prosecutions.

To that end, I’m looking at what could be said at school board meetings. And maybe this can be a template for parents of other school districts to use.

In our district, community members get typically two minutes to speak, so what I have below may need to be divided up for multiple speakers. I’ll be showing materials related specifically to my district. But the books mentioned are widely used across the country. You should be able to go to your school district website and find out what books are available in the libraries. And you should also be able to track down your district’s policies for getting obscene books removed from libraries.

So, consider what is below to be addressing the local school board.

 

The Law

Suppose some nefarious person decided to illustrate a classic piece of literature—let’s say a collection of Keats poetry—with pornographic images. Would the book qualify as literature because of the literary value of the poems? Or would it qualify as pornographic because of those images?

The answer is, literature does not elevate the pornography to the level of literature; the pornography degrades the otherwise inspiring poetry into a work of pornography.

This is a matter of law.

According to the US Department of Justice website, which I’ve included in your handout: 

“transmitting obscenity and child pornography, whether via the Internet or other means, is…illegal under federal law for both adults and juveniles.”

Obscenity is not protected speech under the First Amendment. Violations are criminal offenses. Also, the standard for what is harmful to minors may be different from the standard for adults, and offenders convicted of obscenity crimes involving minors face harsher penalties than if the crimes involved only adults. I suggest you read the statement in your handout.

Department of Justice information page on Obscenity

The Texas Penal Code, also in your handout, explicitly defines obscene as depicting “offensive representations of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated.” Also included are depictions or descriptions of other lewd acts. I’ll let you read the details.

Texas Penal Code 43:21

Note that none of these defined violations is allowed if you just couch it in enough non-sexual material. One example in one book is enough to be in violation of the law.

 

Process for Removing Obscenity from Schools

I understand that Cy-Fair ISD has a process called “Request for Formal Reconsideration of Library Materials,” which was updated in November 2022 and put into use January 2023. 

After identifying yourself and your relationship to the district, and the particular book in question, the first question on the request form is: 

“Have you reviewed the resources in their entirety? (If not, please do so before completing and submitting this form.)”

If a book is 150 pages long, and you’re reading through and find one example of explicit sex—which meets the statute’s definition of pornography—you do not need to read the remaining pages to know that the book contains material that should not be made available to minors.

If someone made a cake with excrement in it, would you require that a person eat the entire cake before they can speak to complain about the foul ingredient? If there is obscenity in it, it does not matter what else is in it; you cannot justify providing it to minors.

This is not merely an assumption. We have had brave parents who have read the materials in full, filled out all your forms for the formal request for reconsideration, and then patiently waited.

The chart included in your handout shows seven books that have been through the process. All of these contain multiple, pervasive examples of obscenity, some in written form, some in graphic illustrations. The examples are unmistakably inappropriate for children. But the response from the review committees, expressed by letter from the school principals, is that each of these examples is “educationally appropriate” and will be retained in the schools where our children can access them. I’m unaware of any obscene books that have been removed via this process.

The chart is a compilation of materials provided by Bethany Scanlon in multiple blog posts
at the Conservative CFISD volunteer blog, where there is a post for each of these seven books,
including multiple photos of examples from each book, as well as the letters of response.

This is not something we can agree to disagree on. It is illegal to provide pornography to minors. You are doing so. You have librarians who choose and acquire these books. You have committees of people justifying them—in private meetings without minutes, in violation of the open meetings act, despite the AG’s directive that you provide names and minutes.

These hidden committees seem to be misunderstanding the law. They disregard the obscenity, because they like the gritty realism, or they don’t think there’s enough to call it pervasive, or they offer some other justification.

These books do not qualify as sex ed; the district’s SHAC committee has ruled against using them for that purpose, so you cannot hide behind an obscenity exemption.

 

Damage to Children

Another question on your Request for Reconsideration form asks how we found the problem book, as if hearing about it from another community member is some sort of campaign you can ignore, and you only have to listen if our own child found it in the school, meaning damage is already done to our child.

Yet another of your questions asks what damage we see could result from the book—as if we have to come up, from scratch, with the arguments that led Congress to outlaw giving porn to children. We already know it does harm.

It is disingenuous for the proponents of providing pornography to children to claim we concerned parents are the book banners—as if we were trying to eliminate Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird from our libraries. We are not talking about First Amendment freedoms. We’re talking about illegal materials that we all know are harmful and cause trauma to children; that is why the laws are written to particularly protect children.

If the Cy-Fair ISD schools that have refused to remove these materials from their libraries are following your own policy requirements, they are providing the complaint, the book, and their response to the superintendent and the school board, which must mean the superintendent and school board can call into question the final decision. That also means this superintendent and school board can be held liable for breaking the law—in addition to the librarians and staff who procured the materials for the purpose of making them available to minors, and the principals who approved their retention.

Your process for reconsideration has provided evidence. Failure to immediately correct these serious errors puts you personally at risk of prosecution.

The Answer to Whodunit

Colonel Mustard with revolver image found here

Suppose you had a murder take place, and you want to know "Whodunnit" (who done it). You gather a whole lot of evidence, and nearly all of it points to a particular perpetrator: Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the revolver, say. But what you don’t have is Colonel Mustard coming out and verifying your findings. He’s not willing to show you evidence that it was him; he’s not even showing you evidence that would give him an alibi. As the detective, do you make an arrest and bring forth the case, or do you shrug your shoulders and say, “Well, I guess we’ll never know for certain, because he’s not giving us the final proof"? In just about any crime novel—as well as any real life case—you bring forth the overwhelming evidence you’ve got and see if it convinces a jury beyond reasonable doubt.

For reasons that we can only speculate about, the intelligence community—that mixture of three-letter agencies involved in gathering information and figuring out what’s happening in the world—can’t seem to tell us basic things like where the COVID-19 pandemic started. Despite all the evidence.

A couple of major pieces of information came out this week. One was a Congressional hearing, in the now-GOP-led House. Another was a committee report from a Senate investigation. Both say approximately the same thing: this was a virus created in a lab in Wuhan, China, where gain-of-function in viruses were being worked on, and that leaked from that lab.

Here is what former DNI John Ratcliffe said in his opening statement at the hearing, in its entirety, because this about says it all (I got it from a Robert Gouveia video; the link is queued up to where he starts speaking; Gouveia makes some good commentary here and there):

It’s a pleasure for me to be back in the House of Representatives, where I spent six years serving on the House Intelligence, Judiciary, and Homeland Security committees before leaving Congress when I was confirmed by the Senate to serve as the Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration.

My confirmation was actually the first in-person Senate hearing after the COVID-19 pandemic began, and during it I promised to ensure that the intelligence community would be laser focused on getting answers to the virus’s origins and spread.

What follows is a brief unclassified overview of what the intelligence community learned and knows, a synopsis of the relevant challenges that I encountered during this effort, and where I believe we must go from here.

First, let me state the bottom line up front. My informed assessment as a person with as much access as anyone to our government’s intelligence during the initial year of the pandemic has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science, and by common sense.

From a view inside the IC [intelligence community], if our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a natural origin or spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long, convincing, even overwhelming, while the spillover side would be nearly empty and tenuous. Were this a trial, a preponderance of circumstantial evidence provided by our intelligence would compel a jury finding of guilt to an accusation that coronavirus research in the Wuhan labs was responsible for the pandemic. And likewise, the Chinese Community Party would be guilty of going to great lengths to cover up the virus’s origins—from destroying medical tests, samples, and data to intimidating and disappearing witnesses and journalists, to lying and coercing global health authorities, even spreading propaganda that the virus originated here in the United States by the US military.

Their efforts continue to this day, as the Chinese Embassy has formally objected to this hearing and this committee’s efforts to ascertain the truth. And the Chinese government has done all of this while proving itself incapable of offering even a shred of exculpatory evidence.

The intelligence community’s sources on this issue are numerous, diverse, and unassailable. And I hope that the recent unanimous Congressional ??? to require the declassification of our COVID origins material will make some of this available to you and the American people.

Right now, a few of the intelligence community’s agencies are publicly assessing that the COVID-19 virus originated from a lab leak in Wuhan. And as this shift continues, the day will come when every single agency in the IC will make the same assessment. Which begs the question: Why have they not? It’s a simple and obvious question that does not have a simple answer.

The challenges that I and other senior Trump administration officials encountered while in office included legitimate concerns about our closely held sources and methods of intelligence, as well as illegitimate roadblocks that related to professional conflicts of interest and partisan politics. These included the headwinds created when a lab leak assessment was initially labeled falsely and falsely reported with near unanimity as a conspiracy theory by conflicted science, scientists, and by mainstream press, while also being censored as disinformation by social media giants.

Internally, national and electoral politics were also influencing the analysis of our intelligence on China within the IC, as reflected in the January 6, 2021, report by the intelligence community’s analytic ombudsman. As a career non-political official, the ombudsman found, “Analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward, because they tend to disagree with the Trump administration’s policies, saying in effect, ‘I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies.’”

To this day, the CIA, which I believe is unquestionably the world’s premiere spy agency, with an unrivaled capacity to acquire information, has continued to state that it does not have enough information to make any formal assessment. To put it bluntly, I think this is unjustifiable and a reflection, not that the agency can’t make an assessment with any confidence, but that it won’t.

Some three and a half years later, the only plausible assessment the agency could make with any level of confidence is that a virus which killed over a million Americans originated in a Chinese lab whose research included work for the Chinese military. And such an assessment would obviously have enormous geopolitical implications that I believe the current administration does not want to face.

Let me close by saying that I think that the search for the truth should drive where we go from here. And everyone, from our intelligence agencies to members of the administration to members of Congress, to public health officials, should put politics aside and let our intelligence speak the truth about what happened—speak the truth to the Americans, who deserve that truth, deserve justice, and deserve accountability. And only by seeking truth, justice, and accountability for this pandemic can we achieve the other equally important goal of preventing the next pandemic.

Former DNI John Ratcliffe, at House investigation hearing,
screenshot from here

He goes on to answer questions, but that will do for now. The other main information source this week was the Senate special committee’s Muddy Waters: The Origins of Covid-19 Report. For a little light reading, you can find the 21-page executive summary here.  And for the full 300-page report, go here. 

Dr. John Campbell goes over the report, in his usual calm and businesslike style, highlighting the details without too much commentary, which has allowed him to report things without getting banned on YouTube through the duration.

By the way, he’s willing to say he believes the leak was unintentional, and that the coverup has mainly to do with the Chinese desire to save face. He doesn’t think they would have leaked it on purpose, allowing the world to see them in a bad light. The Muddy Waters report also calls it unintentional: “The preponderance of circumstantial evidence supports an unintentional research-related incident.” I haven’t read the totality yet, but there’s the additional behavior of the Chinese allowing travel in and out of Wuhan—but not allowing travel into the rest of the country—causing the spread to the rest of the world. It also appears that the infection began to spread at least a month before originally reported.

Another interesting Dr. Campbell video this week related to a German report on the weird fibrous clots being found in corpses in the last couple of years. They have traced them to the vaccine and ruled out the virus as a cause.

There’s more. On Wednesday, Judicial Watch said it has received documents showing that the NIH granted funding “for experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that sought to create mutant coronavirus variants.” Just the News story here. You can find the 552 pages of documents here. 

The details and documentation are mounting. But these are things we “knew” early on. That is, we had enough evidence to suppose we knew. The documentary Tracking Down the Origin of Wuhan Coronavirus, done by Epoch Times reporter Joshua Philipp in April 2020, lays out the case for the lab leak and hasn’t been refuted.

What seems puzzling is why it isn’t obvious to more people—regardless of the media and political lies. There’s a good discussion of this (on American Though Leaders with Jan Jekielek for EpochTV) by Debbie Lerman, a self-described “socialist liberal Democrat,” who saw the falsehoods pretty much from the beginning, by reading the research and asking questions. Her friends refused to even allow her to ask questions without the accusation that she was suddenly a MAGA Trump supporter.

She refers to four things that had to be aligned for the deceptive story to spread: “panic, politics, propaganda and profits, the four P’s.” She walks us through those four, and how they each played out.

Debbie Lerman, screenshot from here

I wondered how those would compare to the four things that played into mass formation, described by Mattias Desmet:

1.       a lot of people experiencing a lack of social bonds, a lack of social connectedness.

2.       a lot of people who experience a lack of meaning making.

3.       a lot of people who experience a lot of free-floating anxiety.

4.       a lot of free-floating frustration and aggression.

It seems to me, his four things had to be in place for the four P’s of Lerman to play out. Because we had a lot of people lacking social bonds and meaning making, with anxiety and frustration, then the perpetrators of the pandemic mass formation were able to cause the panic, tie it to politics, control the message with censorship, and allow profits to flow in.

Speaking of profits, the 4^th “P,” the WHO, one of the perpetrators of the deception, is attempting to amend its treaty of 2005. Not good. (Another good Dr. John Campbell video about this here.) It is to give them greater unaccountable power over all the nations of the earth. Supposedly they are supported by funding from the various nations. But right now two of the top donors, one of which is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, combine to be the highest donor. And donors get to say what the WHO policies will be. After the manipulations we’ve been through in the last few years, this absolutely must not happen.

So, we have more information. And truth is powerful. It eventually wins. We can hope that, as people wake up from the mass formation, or deception, we can provide them with a huge supply of truth. Other than succumbing to the tyranny, it’s the only way to get through such times.

Stop Paying for Failure

Wednesday night I got to hear from our three newest, conservative school board members. One of them told this story:

I’ve got a friend of mine. He and I went to school together. He was the failure in our class. That man today owns a barbershop three blocks from my school. Right down the road. He was the number one problem kid in my class. Two years behind me. Number one problem kid. Today he owns a barbershop.

Today, the number one problem in my 7^th grade wanted to work for him. And when he went, and he had a failing grade in that school, on his report card, that man said, “You cannot work for me until you pass.” That young man got his grade to passing. The second he got his grade of passing, he ran the three blocks—left school, ran three blocks—to get to that barber shop and hold up his report card and say, “I passed!” (applause. Someone calls out “Expectations!”)

Expectations. Because that man, being in that young man’s life, said, “I will not allow you to continue to fail yourself—until you get that straight….” And the young man figured it out.

I want to come back to this story.

Scott Henry, Luke Scanlon, and Natalie Blasingame,
three of our school board members,
at a community gathering Wednesday, April 12, 2023

On Monday night our school board met. I watched it online while finishing my work for the day. Near the end they held a vote related to the board’s support of a position to oppose any state funding going to any voucher or school choice program.

During their discussions, one of the board members asked for clarification. There’s already a limited ESA [education savings account] program in place for certain special education students; the way this is worded, would it include eliminating that funding? It would have, so they reworded to carve out that exception. He has a special needs student himself and has a special place in his heart for their care.

Once that exception was made as an amendment, that left him with no visible reason to go against the policy—which the board’s discussion had made clear was wrong on its face, because it could divert funds from public schools, which already need more funding. So they held the vote. Five voted in favor, including two of our new conservative board members. One abstained, and one was absent. So it passed. Since I strongly favor school choice, and have been following the legislature, I was disappointed to see this.

Wednesday night I had a brief moment to talk about this with the board member who abstained. She said not to worry about it; the bill is very likely to pass in the legislature. This was just a game the board is playing, I think she meant, to try to force conservative members to oppose school choice.

There are plenty of questions about the legislation. There are bills related to employing an ESA program, with limited funds that would affect maybe 60,000 students statewide. Small school districts would be paid, I think for up to three years, for any student that leaves to take advantage of the program. This is to calm rural district fears that they would lose school funding that they have no way to make up—rural districts whose legislators have consistently shut down any possibility of school choice over many legislative sessions. So this might work to get through the limited trial.

Meanwhile, in the budget bill in the legislature, opponents to school choice stuck in an amendment saying no state funding could go to any schooling except public schools. (This amendment is what the local school board was supporting.) I’ve been assured that this will get taken out during reconciliation. I hope that’s true, because it’s in direct opposition to the other ESA legislation that is likely to pass. 

The same school board member who told the story above, also pointed out this statistic for our district: only 44% of 3^rd graders are reading at grade level. This is the average across the district, including all demographics. Far below half can read at the minimum level required to be considered acceptable for their grade level.

Teaching reading is not that difficult an undertaking. All but the most severely disabled can learn to read. Nearly all Down Syndrome kids learn to read. Some take longer than others. But, without some interference or neglect, most kids can learn to read. In fact, most kids can figure out the phonetic code well before the end of first grade—unless they’re not taught the phonetic code.

But not in our public schools in this relatively prosperous suburb of northwest Houston. Here, far under half are reading at a 3^rd grade level in 3^rd grade—probably because they didn’t figure it out in 1^st grade.

The one basic thing we expect from schools is that kids learn to read. Our school board  pointed out that math is reading. Every problem is a word problem. If you don’t learn to read, you also fail math.

By the way, another school board member said that across the state, across all our curriculum, only 19% meets grade level. Our district, Cy-Fair Independent School District, has an A rating, even though it's teaching less than half of students to read. But I guess the rest of Texas is failing even more catastrophically.

One more story. I’ve told this in more detail. But I had three kids in this district. Two of them had already been functioning well in a gifted magnet school in the state we moved from. This district thought they might not qualify (they did). And our daughter qualified as well. But this exclusive program the district thought they probably wouldn’t qualify for was essentially nonexistent.

Back in the day, I got a year of calculus in high school. We had two classrooms full of calculus students, close to 8% of the graduating class. Here in Texas there wasn’t a track my kids could get on that would allow them to take calculus in high school. Advanced math, by that point in high school, was considered an elective. So were foreign language, music, and PE. They offered one gifted class, a different version of world history—also elective. A kid was only allowed up to two electives in their four-year high school plan, and the district’s recommended plan was zero electives.

The basic education I got back in the 70s, before a Department of Education even existed, with three AP classes and plenty of options, simply wasn’t available for gifted students in this district. So, after two frustrating and stultifying years, we pulled them out and homeschooled.

Private school wasn’t an option. We didn’t have the additional funds for one student, let alone three. That was for the best, since homeschooling—and later combined with dual credit classes at the community college—was the best fit for our family and our kids with their particular quirks. Gifted kids are special ed, I think I mentioned. They need to be taught differently. We could accommodate that. It can be done in a classroom; we saw that in our previous state. But nobody here seems to know how or care to bother. After all, those kids are smart enough to learn to read and do math no matter how little you offer them, right?

Right. In this case because our kids had parents who cared and took on the responsibility. What did that mean for the schools? They didn’t have to bother with our kids anymore—but they still get our tax money. They get a per-student amount of money, so they didn’t get to count our three kids. But the overall amount is budgeted based on taxes. And they got ours. Meanwhile we paid in addition for the education of our children. No tax break to us. No stipend.

The purpose of education is to prepare the next generation of students to be good, contributing community members—not to preserve a particular government institution called public schools. So their failure to teach my kids is a mission failure. It's not about the money; it's about the principle.

What happens to them when they fail? They claim they need more money in order to improve.

Over the years the per-child amount has tripled or more—since my kids were there. It has grown much faster than inflation. And yet the results are abysmal. It looks as though the more money you give them, the more they will fail.

Is it possible that, at some upper backroom level, the plan is to fail? In the case of my kids, the more they fail them, the less is required of them and the more money they get. And the more money it costs parents who take responsibility for the education of their children.

Back to that story I told at the beginning, of the boy who was failing. He was told he couldn’t have the paying job he wanted until he stopped failing himself in school. That was the incentive he needed. He needed someone who cared to hold him accountable.

Maybe our failing schools shouldn’t be paid for failing. Maybe they need to have an actual and real threat of loss of money when they fail. Maybe then they would focus on the basics that are essential: reading, writing, math—and, as is required of homeschoolers, good citizenship. Schools don’t need to teach sex education at all. We can argue in favor of science, music, arts, PE—when a student is a successful reader.

How do we pull the funding for failing schools? ESAs might be a way. Thirty-two other states have tried some form of ESAs, in some 72 programs, and the result has been—not a sudden exodus from the local public schools, but an improvement in public schools.

Prager U has a video, explaining why public schools should favor school choice. This is the best 5-minute video you’ll watch today.

The video highlights Texas. Will this be the year we finally get a tiny amount of “the money follows the child” in Texas? We’re so far behind where we should be, we ought to abandon any fear that schools might lose the funding they need. Funding they need to do what? Keep failing? The status quo is absolutely unacceptable. Other states have tried this, and the result was significant improvement—in their public schools, not just for individual students.

The state is not the parent. The state should get out of the way of parents who are responsible for the education decisions for their own children. The bonus is that doing so will improve the educational outcomes for the whole state.