Thursday July 6, 2023

ANALYSIS: Welcome to the Nanny State

OPINION: Welcome to the Nanny State

Since at least the 1980s, the American political right has leveraged the expression “Nanny State” as a pejorative to describe the American political left.

In Spotsylvania County, however, the Nanny State is no longer a marker for meddling progressives. It’s an unadulterated description of the school board’s four Tea Party members, their hand-picked superintendent, and their dwindling band of supporters’ approach to governing.

There is no clearer example of this than an event that transpired recently in the Courtland District.

A person using the name Jen Petersen - the person who has submitted the vast majority of book challenges in the county - took to Facebook to push the banning of books beyond the public schools.

The post on Real Talk Spotsy read:

Courtland Ace Hardware has accepted and is located in their teen section, a book removed from SCPS and other Virginia school districts, for its sexually [sic] explicitness, in their library. BTW, this store is located near Courtland Elementary School.

In a feeble attempt to drive home the dangers of this book, the writer points visitors to the BookLooks site for its review of the book in question - Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Left unsaid? That Toni Morrison is one of America’s most gifted, celebrated, and decorated writers, whose books offer an unsparing look at the experience of being Black in America.

Also left unsaid - the decisions of the school board have absolutely no power outside the confines of the school system.

This is hardly a minor point, and in fact lays bare the authoritarian motives that drive the majority school board members and those who support them.

Tipping Their Hand

Adults are well within their rights to publicly debate and argue about topics related to the education of children and young adults in school board meetings. That is why these institutions exist. Adults are further within their rights to enact policies that reflect the outcomes of those debates.

When school boards get it wrong - as I believe this one has - there is a process for redressing the error. Elections.

But when those debates and actions move from a public body established specifically for the purpose of having those debates, to a public place outside the legal reach of the school board - in this case, a free library sitting in front of a private business - the actors have gone a step too far.

And no one said it better than a representative for the Courtland ACE Hardware store the Facebook post targeted.

In an email to F2S, the representative wrote:

Our mission at Courtland ACE Hardware is to help and serve our community.

We believe that parents get to decide what their children are allowed to see.  We believe that every family has different boundaries and are grateful to be living in a country where diversity is respected.

We respectfully ask that this store and Little Free Library not be used as a battleground and appreciate being allowed to return our full attention to helping our customers.

The move to force the debate beyond the school system to a private business, using the justification that the school district has banned a book in the Little Free Library, is utterly indefensible.

One strains to even imagine what leap of logic the post’s writer would employ to justify this action.

The action does, however, expose what is behind the book banning mania that has roiled the district this year.

Simply put - to establish a Nanny State that strips from parents the right to decide what their children can read and see because this post’s writer and the school board and superintendent clearly believe that parents are utterly incapable of making these decisions for themselves.

So much for “parents’ rights,” which has been this board’s clarion cry.

Becoming what you most fear

Conservatives have, quite rightly at times, spent the better part of 50 years fighting the progressive Nanny State - everything from rewriting classic texts like Huckleberry Finn to playing language police via political correctness.

At least here in Spotsylvania, however, they have become precisely what they’ve spent decades fearing. A government that believes it knows better than its own citizens what’s right for them.

Those who back this book-banning fervor are following in the fateful footsteps of Nanny State actors past and present.

In Spotsylvania, the ruling elite have become what they once feared. A Nanny State, with nary a stitch of clothing to hide their own corruption and insecurities.

The Taliban in Afghanistan were so fearful of religious traditions that weren’t Muslim, they destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas - sculptures built in the 6th Century recognized as one of the great monumental works of art in the world. The Chinese government is so fearful of religious belief systems they believe undermine communist doctrine, they are again cracking down on the ownership and sale of Bibles, and “re-educating” the Ugyhurs.

Both examples, of course, are of a Nanny State run amok. But they and the movement to ban books in Spotsylvania rest on the same flawed idea - that people must be protected from ideas that the ruling majority fears.

In Spotsylvania, the ruling elites have become precisely that thing they have long feared.

An unchecked government that exists only to control what you see and read, fearful that citizens daring to experience life beyond their orthodoxy will see the leaders for what they are.

A Nanny State, with nary a stitch of clothing to hide their own corruption and insecurities.