Book selection in schools

Banning books has a bad reputation. It calls to mind black and white images of narrow-minded angry people around a flaming pile of books. Distasteful business banning books.

So. what we’ve learned is that the people who want to ban books have spent a lot of time crafting messaging that might sound reasonable to the busy voter who skims the voter guide before filling in the bubble. 

People don’t say outright that they want to ban books from our schools or that they support censorship. But when you look into the organizations behind these efforts, we start to see some common themes. Their goal is to remove books they don't like from schools. And there are a lot of books they don't like.

Where is Chinmay in all of this? 

We did the work so you don’t have to. It took a lot of time to make these connections because we didn’t want to just accept opinions out in the community that Chinmay’s a right-wing book banner. 

Here is what we found. Stick with us, you’ll see what we mean! There are links so you can dig further.

1. Chinmay is a member of the Facebook group: Washington, Parents’ Rights In Education, and makes supportive posts in the group. 
2. This group is part of a national organization that aims to run candidates in school board races to oppose what they call “Radical Gender Ideology” and “Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE)” among other platform issues with pretty disturbing labels. You might have heard about Moms for Liberty. Similar organization, similar goals.
3. Below you will see a screenshot of post by an admin for the group. She posted a link to a site called Take Back the Classroom, a site that shouts: “Find Out Which Pornographic Books are in Your Child's School.” 
4. The post accompanying the link states: “Naysayers will say I believe in ‘banning’ books. Nope. I believe in screening for age-appropriateness in PUBLIC SCHOOL libraries. If ya’ll want your kids to read smut so badly, go check it out at the public library or buy them at the book store. Because they are NOT ‘banned.’ You can print them, write them, and even read them.”
5. Chinmay LOVED this post.
6. Yeah, we know it’s just a heart. On a post. The key is that Chinmay has adopted the language of parents’ rights. And if you aren’t familiar with the vocabulary these “we’re-not-banning-books-but-we're-banning-books” groups employ ... well you could end up giving him the benefit of the doubt.