At a local school board conference, Alison Hair was abruptly cut short from reading a passage from a leftist sexually graphic book she discovered in her child’s school library.
At the Feb. 15 meeting, Forsyth County Schools Board of Education Chairman Wesley McCall said, “We have other people that are younger in this, and I think we understand your point.”
Hair replied before being told her time was up, “My son’s a minor, and this book that you all have copies of is in my son’s middle school.”
On March 15, she was again interrupted while starting to read, and on March 17, she received a letter from McCall informing her that she was no longer welcome at future sessions. Staff members are also now prohibited from making offensive or disparaging remarks or personal abuse that violates board policy.
Forsyth County’s Board of Education is now being sued by Hair and Cindy Martin, a Georgia mom and the chairperson of the group “Mama Bears of Forsyth County.”
The lawsuit’s goal is not to say which publication should be permitted in the school libraries but to analyze “unlawful attempts to sanitize how parents speak about those books in the presence of elected officials and other adults.”
When it comes to reading from books at board meetings, the First Amendment protects the Plaintiffs’ voice to express and lobby the government regarding which publications belong in school libraries, the lawsuit says. “The school board may find this language offensive, but the law is clear: giving offense is a First Amendment-protected viewpoint.”
Every member of the board should be embarrassed by the fact that the mothers had to sue for the right to speak at meetings. These moms have the right to speak out against officials and the text they have allowed their children to access in school. This is a clear First Amendment violation. Read more