A Florida father who went viral for confronting his local board of education over lurid books in the school district’s library system is speaking out against “groomers” in the public education system, saying administrators are introducing children’s works that are “vile” and “poison.”
Bruce Friedman, president of the Florida chapter of parents activist group No Left Turn in Education, had his mic shut off after he read a portion of one of the books at a June 30 meeting of the Clay County School Board, according to Fox News.
(At The Western Journal, we know that cases like this are far from rare — and we’ve been fighting alongside parents tooth and nail to expose the left’s perverse agenda. You can help us bring America the truth by subscribing.)
“I’m going to read things. If there’s children watching, cover their ears,” Friedman said at the meeting before attempting to read excerpts from three objectionable works he said were in school district libraries, including Alice Sebold’s “Lucky” — a book with a graphic rape scene.
Both Fleming Island High School and Orange Park High School in Clay County carry the book, according to Fox.
“I’m going to stop you right there, sir,” a board member told Friedman as he began to read. “Turn off his microphone, please.”
When Friedman asked why, the board member explained:
“The problem is, sir, that these meetings are broadcast, there are people at home that are watching it on YouTube. There are people that are watching it on community television. Are you going to listen? Or are you going to run your mouth?
“There are federal and state laws that prohibit you from saying the things that you’re getting out to say on television. There are state laws that prohibit and federal communications laws that prohibit you from publishing these things to a child. You don’t have the ability at this point to determine who’s watching the television show. And for you to say, ‘everybody cover your ears’ just doesn’t cut it,” the board member told Friedman.
Yes, you can’t broadcast the filth carried in school libraries live on YouTube and community television, but you can loan it out to kids. The board member might not have realized it, but his objection to Friedman’s reading actually confirmed just how bad some of the books being allowed in the district’s libraries really are.
Talk about giving the game away.
In an interview with Fox News, Friedman said he had “skin in the game” because his son, now 15, attended public schools in New York for first and second grade. That experience, Friedman said, caused the boy “considerable harm.”
“In my experience, people don’t get off the couch until it’s on fire. People don’t work to protect their children until they’re harmed,” Friedman told Fox.
“In my case, the same applies. I sent my son to New York … public schools for kindergarten and first grade. They did considerable harm to my boy. That is why I’m here — I never shook it off. I never stopped fighting.
“We got him into a private school promptly after first grade, but the damage was done. It took five years, in my opinion, to put him back on the right track.”
And while Friedman said his son is a “bright… gifted … fine young man. He’s considerably smarter than I am.”
“He makes me proud, but I am not going to stick him in a school with groomers and pedophiles and twisted sick people that think these three books and many like them are OK to present to a child,” he continued. “They are not OK. There’s no literary value to any of this. It’s poison.
“These books are so vile that reading any excerpt that I captured will end this interview,” he noted.
Friedman also pointed out that, while parents were getting rightly irked by events like Drag Queen Story Hour, they were asking the wrong questions.
“People are arguing about things like Drag Queen Story Hour, whether or not is it appropriate for children to learn that other kinds of persons and lifestyles exist,” he said.
Should more parents homeschool?
“I saw this recently, so I’m going to repeat it. We shouldn’t be asking whether or not it’s OK for our children to sit in on a Drag Queen Story Hour. We should be asking why the drag queens want an audience of children.”
Friedman also expressed concern about critical race theory, according to Fox, which he called “the worst piece of any curriculum to ever be presented to an American child” and said went by many names — including intersectionality and diversity, equity and inclusion.
“All of that is the same junk. And all of it is designed to divide us and make us hate each other,” he said.
“Our children deserve better. They should be taught reading, writing, arithmetic. Put them on the bus and send them home safe. Do your job. Stay in your lane.”
Unfortunately for Friedman — and the rest of the country — the problem is that the mindset behind critical race theory, Drag Queen Story Hour, pornography in the library and leftist indoctrination is public education’s lane in 2022. The idea that public schools exist to provide our students with the knowledge and critical thinking skills they’ll need to survive and thrive as citizens is a quaint one, at least at this point.
Instead, with notable exceptions, we have government-run automaton factories, which parents are expected to hand their children over to at age 5 and have them returned to us at age 18 with all of the Acceptable Ideas™ they’ll need to fit in to the progressive societal hamster wheel our betters have mapped out.
When it comes to everything from sexual education to gender identity to critical race theory, they know better than us — and it’s our job to stay in our lane.
If Americans don’t take their kids and their school boards back, this is only going to get worse — and we’ll only have our own inaction to blame.
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