The Rising Tide of Fear & Censorship: Book Bans in Colorado Classrooms

Attempts at censorship and book challenges are cropping up throughout Colorado and the rest of the country, particularly surrounding education and literature that bring visibility to the LGBTQ+ community and people of color. Attempts to stifle equality can feel shocking, yet efforts to suppress knowledge are actively underway. Yellow Scene Magazine took some time to try to understand the landscape of the movement. How does it seem that some see information on a range of age-appropriate identity possibilities and self-expression as harmful to our children? 

Unfortunately, no one on the pro-censorship side would agree to an interview. There has been a fair amount of buzz around the politicization of the Elizabeth School Board and its members’ staunch position against LGBTQ+ material in schools. YS reached out to three of the board members. President Rhonda Olsen declined our request for an interview. 

Vice President Heather Booth — who has given several previous media interviews — and Secretary Mary Powell — who we were particularly interested in talking to due to her longstanding history in the community and a background in law — both ignored our requests. The Colorado Times Recorder recently published an article on the Elizabeth School Board’s calculated political plans for hiring staff. Vice President Heather Booth defended these actions, stating that she is scared of the sexualization of children.

There is a long list of books banned or facing bans around the country. The most commonly banned books feature LGBTQ+ literature, either authors or themes. Often, books are deemed sexual by those who see the LGBTQ+ community as made up of sexual beings rather than humans with an alternative sexual orientation. Additionally, some literature written by authors of color centered around their unique narratives and experiences is deemed inappropriate by these groups as well. Very few of the listed books appear to be challenged on the grounds of violence or hate. The American brand of violence and hate may be more familiar and, therefore, more digestible. Violent themes aren’t raising red flags for many “traditional” families like identity politics are.

Some citizens from more conservative counties around Colorado believe that issues of diversity and equality should not be taught in schools. Much of this rhetoric is rooted in religious thought, which by definition should be separate from state education. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” While the founding fathers weren’t concerned with the livelihoods of women or non-white men, they did make it clear that religion has no place in politics, unambiguously writing it into the Constitution. 

The principle of non-religious government was again reinforced in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which begins with the statement, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion…”  Therefore, by law, religion cannot be taken into account when making changes to school standards. 

The state and school board, however, have no control over conversations that parents have at home with their children. Home education is the most poignant of all. People who disagree with what’s being taught in schools can place their faith in individual rapport with their kids or the ability of their children to think for themselves. If these concepts are innately immoral, surely they can rely on most children’s internal moral compasses to guide them. So why the fear?

Repressing specific points of view, historical narratives, and social groups’ voices is far more dangerous than distributing radical literature or making space for radical narratives. One gives us options —  to use our educated brains and intuitive guts to analyze the material. The other rewrites reality, creating a sort of tunnel vision. 

The American Birthright Curriculum was developed by the Civics Alliance, a right-wing group in opposition to changes in social studies standards by the Colorado Department of Education, to be implemented in 2024. Some of the changes opposed by the Civics Alliance center around teaching the holocaust, genocide, and the inclusion of minority groups in history and government. Instead, the Civics Alliance proposes standards that focus on our more “classical” — or white — roots, which they link to Hebrew, Greek, and Roman ideals. Colorado state law allows school boards some control of content outside of state standards, and in the wake of these CO Department of Education changes, conservative counties are setting up school board meetings and votes to take advantage of this, bringing politics into education. 

The Civics Alliance’s mission statement purports that “education should teach students the founding principles of the United States.” Unfortunately, the founding principles of the United States excluded protection and rights for women and people of color. This distinction was further clarified in 1787 with the establishment of the Three-fifths Compromise, which defined Black slaves as lesser than other Americans.

The hefty time gaps between the country’s founding and the granting of more universal voting rights to first Black men and later to all women illuminate the mindsets of the Founding Fathers and early Americans. They had no interest in including women and non-white men. 

The United States was founded in 1776, Black people were freed from slavery in 1870, and women were given the right to vote in 1920. This doesn’t take into account Jim Crow-era policies, voter suppression, voter registration restrictions, criminalizing benign activities while waiting in long lines at ballot boxes, and erroneous voter purging.

We love a good paradox

On their site, the Civics Alliance praises Ohio policymakers that require universities and colleges receiving state funds to “commit themselves to free speech and intellectual diversity, and prohibit both ‘diversity statements’ and the imposition by required courses on training of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’” How can one be committed to diversity while prohibiting diversity?

Douglas County is another Colorado locale surrounded by censorship buzz over the past few years. There are four specific books in the crosshairs of Douglas County’s far-right attempted book censorship, all centered around LGBTQ+ topics. They are: “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish Swish Swish,” “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” “This Book Is Gay,” and “Jack of Hearts (and other parts)”. Though it need not be stated, no one is forced to check out these books, just as no one is forced to check out white supremacist literature at the local library. 

We, as citizens, are free to abstain from cultural events and literature as we see fit. So why this push to repress and eliminate cultural groups that aren’t like us? It certainly brings to mind dark historical events of our past.

This is the issue that scares us. Not that people disagree with others’ lifestyles but that they’re motivated to eliminate evidence of them. Any visibility of non-straight or non-white groups is seen by some as an agenda. 

We talked with Bob Pasicznyuk, the Executive Director of Douglas County Libraries, to try to gain a better understanding of the situation there. One of Pasicznyuk’s responsibilities is to review book appeals. When asked what his experience with book challenges was before 2023, he said when someone had an objection about certain material, it was generally a conversation. They simply wanted to be heard, and it rarely escalated to a formal request for a book’s removal from a library. In fact, in the ten years that Pasicznyuk has had this responsibility, he never once saw it escalate to an actual appeal. 

And then, in 2023, one man, Aaron Wood, founder of a Christian men’s activist group, took a handful of LGBTQ+ titles through the entire appeal process. During that time, his group was very vocal and active in library board meetings. Board meetings that usually had no attendance from the general public suddenly attracted more than one hundred concerned citizens, some in support of removing the books but more in opposition. In August, Douglas County Library System’s Citizens Board voted unanimously to keep the books on the shelves.

When we asked Pasicznyuk why the sudden change – ten years of the community not escalating a challenge to anything formal, and then five appeals in one year – he said, “I think in the last 2 years, it’s become a part of different political agendas … It’s part of their plan. And I also want to say this – I mean, it seems gratuitous – but intellectual freedom challenges aren’t the province of the right or the left or Republicans or Democrats. 

People make decisions for what’s in front of their children or themselves – or, for goodness sake, we have Mein Kampf. We don’t have it because we think it’s a wonderful book … But in the last couple of years, there’s been a concerted effort by party politics to get involved.” He talked about a person’s decision to check out the material or not, that the library’s responsibility is to provide a wide array of material, and the individual’s responsibility is to decide whether or not they or their children will engage with it.

He went further, addressing claims that library staff are pushing certain points of view on the public. “I think there’s a secondary claim that’s being made. It’s a claim that’s worthy, again, of self-examination. Are we promoting a particular viewpoint …? It’s not our role to say, ‘Hey. You need to change your value set.’ It also is kind of interesting because our organization does take a stand just by its very basis of what it is. Everybody is welcome in our library. Even that term has a political bent to it.”

He continued: “But I think that the conversation about books by or about gay people [has] not been very fair. We have heterosexual books with salacious content, and we have books about gay people with salacious content. Why is one inappropriate and the other one’s okay? If I use salacious content as a filter…, we’re not going to have the Bible.

“One of the claims people are making is that these things are brainwashing … so if I have a staff member who has 50 people [at] story time [presenting] a book [that] has a male dad figure and a female mom figure, am I trying to brainwash these kids? But if I have two women or two men in the same role, I’m brainwashing the kids. Again, trying to be consistent with me no matter what I view about family,” Pasicznyuk pointed out the hypocrisy.

The response to attempts at censorship has been enormous. Pasicznyuk reported that far more people from the Douglas County community showed up to defend intellectual freedom than to limit it. Organizations like Moms for Liberty, Civics Alliance, and far-right school boards may be loud, but they are not the majority. People from all political viewpoints feel passionate about squashing censorship. But the attempts are still concerning. 

YS was disturbed by the fear-mongering language encountered within the Civics Alliance and in videos put out by Moms for Liberty, such as comparing curriculum changes to Stalin’s Soviet brainwashing agenda within Russian schools, though ironically Stalin was trying to silence the same groups of people as Moms for Liberty. We asked about his concern level, having had a front-row seat to some of this activity. Should we be scared for the future, or does it just feel big because it’s happening now and to us? 

Pasicznyuk responded: “I don’t want to oversample the moment and say, look how terrible it is. And it’s never been like this before. At the same time, these are important topics, and in history, when they’ve gone off the rails, you should’ve paid a lot of attention to them. We should be careful. 

“Oppressing someone else is sort of baked into our DNA. How do I keep from doing that even though I disagree? And if somebody told me that my kids were at a very young age having to encounter content that was very different from my moral framework, I think it’s perfectly appropriate that they would engage the teachers or the school and say, ‘How do I work with this because I need an alternative? I think this isn’t working for me.’ But again, to make rules for everyone about that seems to be antithetical to American life, you know?” He concluded.

So, should we be panicking? Probably not. Should we be vigilant? Definitely.