In the 9 years we’ve been doing this, we’ve tried to keep our focus on the local scene. There’s only so many hours in the day and so much sanity your Lady Yokels can expend, but sometimes we do need to expand our geographic purview. Today we need to talk about some legislation that’s made its way to Annapolis. For as Tip O’Neill liked to say, “All politics is local.”
We’ll start with HB0047, which thankfully (for the second time) was voted unfavorably in committee yesterday. However, just because it was shot down a second time, doesn’t mean that these folks won’t keep coming back. Let’s explore the bill together:
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That may take a couple of readings to really digest. It’s not only a very discriminatory and nasty bill, it’s also an enormous government overreach! Did you notice that this bill applies not only to public schools, but also to private schools and intramural sports?! Which party is supposedly the party of big government again? It’s so amusing to us how situational some people’s values are!
Besides trying to hurt kids, we really aren’t sure!!!
If you follow our Facebook page, you saw the link to this NY Times article we shared this morning:
What kind of world are we living in folks?
The next bill, HB0025 (at least as far as we know as of this morning) has not been voted on just yet. But someone is happy about the prospect of it passing!
Trying to have banned? You were rejected and will continue to be rejected!
Let’s explore the language of this very bad, vague bill!
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Who gets to define sexually explicit materials? Cindy? Here’s the rating system that most of these groups are using these days from the website, https://booklooks.org/ratings-system:
We have never had such a hateful reaction to a chart before! Who defines moderate, explicit, excessive, mild, aberrant, obscene?! Who has the right to tell the rest of us what our children should read? Where’s the evidence of harm in a 3-5 rated book? What studies do they have? What the hell is wrong with these people? Man, we don’t like to get all worked up this early in the morning!
At the bottom of this post we are going to give you a nice list so we can all email our local delegation to make sure they don’t vote for this very bad bill should it come before the entire delegation. Let’s divert, for just a moment, on why it’s so important that kids and adults read books:
See what we highlighted there?
Maybe we should put forth a bill that everyone has to read at least for an hour a day! That’s probably the best way to fix this problem.
Another tradition at the Yokel is a recap of our top 10 posts of the year. If you haven’t checked out our In and Out list ,be sure to take a gander at that as well.
At #10 is our summer lament about the High Sheriff claiming he got tricked, horrible “transparency” groups who seem hell bent on hurting the youngins, and the Reconsideration Committee that had to be formed due to Cindy’s uneducated complaints.
Speaking of that Reconsideration Committee, at #9 we all got an early Christmas present in that we got to see exactly what Cindy and friends wrote and said in their complaints about the so-called offensive books, PLUS the committee’s notes on the books in question. It really is a quite a treat.
At #8 we are sticking with the theme of fighting against the book-banners. In this post you can read all about our suggestions for future book banning complaints.
For #7, we had a little fun with the new flag contest. In our completely scientific poll our flag design won! Be sure to check out the other selections. It’s a stroll down memory lane.
You probably already guessed from the title that this post is about Dan Cox. Remember when he tried to get Jenkins’ co-defendant off by complaining that one of the agents involved in the investigation was of Ukrainian descent? We also had some fun with Cox’s last name.
This town could be a sitcom. If you don’t remember when the bag pipers from Gilead came to our school board meeting be sure to read this post. As we’ve said many times over the almost 8 years we’ve been writing this blog…we couldn’t make this shit up if we tried.
So far we’ve rejected all attempts from these people to infiltrate our school board. But we must not get complacent as one of the two filed candidates for this year’s election is one of these so-called “Joyful Warriors”. Expect them to rebrand soon as a result of some their recent sex scandals.
Our most popular post of the year was about a so-called Joyful Warrior attempting to to ruin the first day of school because she didn’t like a question on a teacher’s “All About Me” form. She was egged on by Cindy Rose, who of course shows nothing resembling joy in her interactions with the school system.
We hope that y’all see a theme here. We really need to be on guard against these book banning, anti-joy people. This year is going to be stressful when it comes to politics, but we will be with you every step of the way!
Hey y’all. We are as sick of writing about Cindy as many of you are of hearing about her. However, we would be remiss if we didn’t pay a little more attention to her pornography charges regarding the books she’s demanding be removed from FCPS libraries.
First of all, it’s important to point out that none of these books are part of the curriculum. They are in the library for students who are interested in expanding their knowledge or vocabulary. Two things that this Education Not Indoctrination slate finds very offensive.
Let’s begin by defining pornography by way of the good old Webster’s dictionary:
Definition of pornography
1: the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement
2: material (such as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement
Cindy has a lot of trouble with words and their meanings.
ICYMI, click here to read and watch the “performance art” Cindy put on at last week’s meeting. What we are going to do next is delve a little deeper into the two books she claims are pornographic and sexualizing our children. Please keep the above definition in mind.
1st book: Push by Sapphire. (Which was made into the movie Precious). Here’s a review by the Literary Phoenix:
Precious Jones, an illiterate sixteen-year-old, has up until now been invisible: invisible to the father who rapes her and the mother who batters her and to the authorities who dismiss her as just one more of Harlem’s casualties. But when Precious, pregnant with a second child by her father, meets a determined and highly radical teacher, we follow her on a journey of education and enlightenment as Precious learns not only how to write about her life, but how to make it her own for the first time.
What Cindy misconstrues (misconstruing things is her favorite) as pornography is a tragic rape, meant to show the reader real trauma the author endured. It is a terrible experience that she is eventually able to overcome through the help of a teacher. (Maybe this is the part that bothers Cindy? Never mind, she didn’t read it…). It is not, as the definition of pornography above shows, meant to sexually excite, nor is the intent to sexualize children.
2nd Book- Sold by Patricia McCormick. Here’s a summary from the website SparksNotes:
Sold is a contemporary YA novel by American writer Patricia McCormick, published in 2006. Written in short vignettes, Sold tells the story of thirteen-year-old Lakshmi, a poor but happy girl living with her family in a mountain hut in Nepal. When a Himalayan monsoon washes away her family’s crops, Lakshmi must find a job to support her family. On the advice of a stranger, she goes to India to stay at a ‘Happiness House’, but once there finds she has been tricked, and sold into prostitution. Mumtaz, the cruel woman who runs the brothel, tells Lakshmi she is now trapped until she can pay off her family’s debts. Mumtaz finds a way to cheat Lakshmi of even her small earnings, ensuring Lakshmi will be in her service for a long time. Despite the horrors of her life, Lakshmi finds a way to survive through friendships with other girls in the house and the hope that one day she will be able to escape. Sold was a National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature in 2006.
This book is a fictionalized account, based on real stories, of what happens to many girls who are sold into sex slavery in Asia. It also tells the story of a young woman who is able to overcome absolute terror and reclaim her life. Again, this is not the definition of pornography.
So, those of you so shocked by her reading out of context vignettes of these books in an incredibly poor attempt to prove that the school system is offering pornography to kids need to wake up. These books, while graphic, are not pornographic. They are dealing with the very real issues of incest and human trafficking. (Side note: the only time Cindy was inspired to speak out against human trafficking is when it was a part of the Q conspiracies). These are stories of redemption and hope. If you don’t want your high schooler exposed to these books, then pay attention to what they are reading and what they bring home from school. We definitely do not need someone who hasn’t read any of these books AND previously demanded Click Clack Moo not be used in elementary school anywhere near our children.
The dream library of those who haven’t picked up a book since high school.
Surely you’ve heard of the Tennessee board of education’s decision to ban the graphic novel Maus, an account of the Holocaust. This board of education cited dubious claims of mouse nudity and profanity as to why children should not have their precious little eyes tainted by its pages. The grown ups in the room know it’s just another attempt to eradicate history and control information.
Let’s swing on back to our upcoming BOE election because it’s super important to be vigilant about these local elections. So, ICYMI, Cindy Rose is a book banner and we have all kinds of fun receipts!
We would like to take you back to 2018! In the post linked above, you will see some emails that Cindy wrote to FCPS about books (that she admittedly didn’t read!) that she didn’t want available to our students! The subject of those books apparently don’t fit reality as she sees it, so no child should be allowed to read them! I mean come on folks do you really want someone like Cindy deciding what is and isn’t appropriate for your kids to read? Especially when she didn’t even bother to read the books she’s complaining about?
Nothing to see here folks! But come on! When do snake’s oil advertisements equal real science? Just another example of her critical thinking skills.
In the above mentioned post, you will also get to see a Facebook post about the children’s book, Click Clack Moo! (And yes we really did contact the author!) She’s afraid that the cows and chickens in the story demanding the farmer give them blankets when they are cold will cause all the little children to revolt! Against what isn’t clear.
Cindy and her peeps really need to grow up.
Cindy also has some new thoughts about the FCPS hiring process:
The amazing thing about Cindy and people like her is that they think they are espousing American values! When, in fact, they want compliance to their way of thinking only! How un-American can you get?
A book that really affected one of your Lady Yokels when she was a wee lass was a book called Mexicali Soup.
In this book family members, one by one, come into the kitchen asking the matriarch to remove an item from the soup. At dinner time the family is shocked to learn the menu consists of only hot water. If everyone wants to remove something they don’t like, we are eventually left with nothing.
Frequently banned author, Stephen King, has lots of good thoughts about what do about these book banners (It’s long but well worth it):
First, to the kids: There are people in your home town who have taken certain books off the shelves of your school library. Do not argue with them; do not protest; do not organize or attend rallies to have the books put back on their shelves. Don’t waste your time or your energy. Instead, hustle down to your public library, where these frightened people’s reach must fall short in a democracy, or to your local bookstore, and get a copy of what has been banned. Read it carefully and discover what it is your elders don’t want you to know. In many cases you’ll finish the banned book in question wondering what all the fuss was about. In others, however, you will find vital information about the human condition. It doesn’t hurt to remember that John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, and even Mark Twain have been banned in this country’s public schools over the last 20 years.
Second, to the parents in these towns: There are people out there who are deciding what your kids can read, and they don’t care what you think because they are positive their ideas of what’s proper and what’s not are better, clearer than your own. Do you believe they are? Think carefully before you decide to accord the book-banners this right of cancellation, and remember that they don’t believe in democracy but rather in a kind of intellectual autocracy. If they are left to their own devices, a great deal of good literature may soon disappear from the shelves of school libraries simply because good books — books that make us think and feel — always generate controversy.
If you are not careful and diligent about defending the right of your children to read, there won’t be much left, especially at the junior-high level where kids really begin to develop a lively life of the mind, but books about heroic boys who come off the bench to hit home runs in the bottom of the ninth and shy girls with good personalities who finally get that big prom date with the boy of their dreams. Is this what you want for your kids, keeping in mind that controversy and surprise — sometimes even shock — are often the whetstone on which young minds are sharpened?
Third, to the other interested citizens of these towns: Please remember that book-banning is censorship, and that censorship in a free society is always a serious matter — even when it happens in a junior high, it is serious. A proposal to ban a book should always be given the gravest consideration. Book-banners, after all, insist that the entire community should see things their way, and only their way. When a book is banned, a whole set of thoughts is locked behind the assertion that there is only one valid set of values, one valid set of beliefs, one valid perception of the world. It’s a scary idea, especially in a society which has been built on the ideas of free choice and free thought.
Whoa! Those last few lines really say it all. We can’t let the book banners (and don’t forget about that slate she’s running with) on our board. Free thought and ideas, including critical examination of our nation’s history, are crucial in education. We’ll leave you with one last post we wrote a few months back:
frederick local yokel 