Pa g e 38
W is c onsin Ch ristian N e w s .c om
Volume 26, Issue 2
Judge Blocks School Board (Continued from Page 37)
“We have an unelected judge forcing her particular opinion and values on a community with which she has no connection and no desire to hear from the de- fendants, judging all submitted evidence as invalid over a few cherry-picked, out-of-context emails re- garding a couple of the books in question,” Snow- berger said. Removed books include “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison (which critics say contains sexually explicit content and depicts child sexual abuse) and “Thirteen Reasons Why” by Jay Asher (which critics say glori- fies suicide), among others. The case traces back to 2023, when the school board’s director, Mike Callahan, learned that his 11- year-old daughter had checked out a book with sex- ually explicit content. The board established a Curriculum Review Committee to review and weed out inappropriate books. The committee listed approx- imately 100 books containing sensitive topics and rec- ommended 19 books for suspension pending review. The board solicited feedback from the community about the books and then voted to remove them. The board voted to suspend or remove books be- cause they had sexually explicit, violent, or age-inap- propriate content; because parents, voters, and taxpayers expressed opposition to the books being in school libraries; and because the board members did not consider the books’ educational value enough to
outweigh other concerns. The ACLU of Colorado sued in December, repre- senting a high school junior at Elizabeth High School, a preschooler at Running Creek Elementary, the NAACP Wyoming State Area Conference, and the Authors Guild. The ACLU claimed that the Colorado NAACP chapter includes parents of kids in the dis- trict’s public schools, but neither the ACLU nor the NAACP identified the parents. The Authors Guild in- cludes authors of some of the restricted books. The ACLU claims that the school board violated the First Amendment rights of the high school junior and the preschooler — neither of whom has yet to attempt to check out the books — by removing the titles. The ACLU also claims it violated the authors’ First Amend- ment rights by interfering with their ability to commu- nicate their ideas to students. On Jan. 27, the school district decided to make the 19 disputed books available to the plaintiffs in the law- suit. Even so, Sweeney ordered the district to restore the books on March 19. The district appealed the case, and while the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit will hear the case, it rejected the district’s ap- peal for a stay to block Sweeney’s order. The school district argued that it is a matter of gov- ernment speech which books the district allows in school libraries, but Sweeney rejected this argument. Sweeney cites the 1982 Supreme Court case Board
of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico, a complicated case involving a school dis- trict’s decision to remove books from a school library. The Supreme Court did not issue a majority opinion in Pico, only a plurality holding that school boards “may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.’” Though a Supreme Court plurality opinion is not considered binding on other courts, Sweeney nonetheless used it as a “starting point.” The Elizabeth School District also argues that the Supreme Court’s 1988 ruling in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier allows them to remove books. In Hazelwood, the court allowed school districts to change the curriculum “so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical [teach- ing] concerns.” Yet Sweeney dismissed this argument because Hazelwood involved a high school newspaper pub- lished by students in a journalism class. She ruled that which books a library contains is not as directly tied to the school curriculum. In appealing the case, the school district noted that all school board members declared under penalty of perjury, “My objections are based on the age-inap-
propriate content that appears in these books and they have nothing to do with the ‘viewpoints,’ ‘ideas,’ or ‘worldviews’ expressed by the authors, or the fact that some of the books ‘discussed LGBTQ+ and race- related topics.’ I would oppose the inclusion of books with this type of content in our school libraries even if those books supported conservative viewpoints, ideas, or worldviews, and even if they discussed top- ics other than LGBTQ or race-related issues.” The district also argued that Sweeney’s “claim that the First Amendment forbids ‘viewpoint’ discrimination and ‘content’ discrimination in library-weeding deci- sions is untenable and unsupported by any decision of the Supreme Court.” “Libraries are supposed to engage in ‘content’ and ‘viewpoint’ discrimination when culling books from their collections, and the district court’s no-viewpoint- discrimination rule would prohibit government-owned libraries from removing books that deny the Holo- caust, promote crackpot conspiracy theories, or es- pouse obsolete and debunked scientific theories such as spontaneous generation or scientific racism,” the district argued. Courts need to clarify this issue, and the appeals court should strike down Sweeney’s perplexing ruling. Sexually explicit materials have no place in school li- braries, and courts need to make it clear that remov- ing them does not violate the Constitution.
NPR, Truth, and Public Funding
By Jerry Newcombe, D.Min. May 2025
with which we disagree? During the classic debate over federal funding of the arts around 35 years ago, I interviewed the late North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. He told me, it’s one thing to scribble naughty
chronicles to the human experience and all forms of culture is because we acknowledge there are many different truths.” She added what’s true for you might not be what’s true for the person sitting next to you.
certain unalienable rights.” If there is no truth, we have no rights. In the book, “Lord of All,” which I cowrote with the late D. James Kennedy, we included an interaction he had with the late ABC anchor, Peter Jennings — who was promoting a 2004 documentary he hosted on Jesus and Paul. Dr. Kennedy had been quite crit- ical of Jennings for his 2000 special on Jesus that relied almost entirely on radically liberal Jesus schol- ars. Peter Jennings said, “I’m looking for as many opin- ions and ideas and reference in all this regard as I can. Your truth I fully wholeheartedly accept. But it’s not everybody’s truth and you know that.” D. James Kennedy: “Well, of course I believe that there are such things as absolutes and that there is an absolute truth, and the fact that it was true before I ever believed it — and I was almost 25 years old before I ever believed. But when I was 22, it was still true and I didn’t believe it.…I did not believe Christ rose from the dead… and [now] I do believe that Christ rose from the dead, and nothing changed ex- cept me.” The founding fathers believed in truth, in free speech, and in robust debate. Freedom of speech and of the press are enshrined in our First Amend- ment. In his famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, founding father Patrick Henry spoke of the importance of “the freedom of the debate,” not- ing, “It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country.” But that didn’t mean the government had to pay for that debate — on either side.
President Trump has repeated his call to defund PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) and NPR (Na- tional Public Radio). Under the First Amendment, PBS and NPR cer- tainly have the right to free expression, but must the American taxpayers be forced to fund them? From a Christian and conservative perspective, they are heavily biased broadcasters. When the issue came up two months ago, Con- gress held a hearing with Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR. Ohio Republican Representative James Jordan asked if NPR was biased, and she re- sponded: “I have never seen any political bias.” But Jordan countered: “In the DC area, editorial positions at NPR have 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans.” He gave an example where one of those 87 Democrat editors said of the Hunter Biden laptop story: “We don’t want to waste our readers and listeners’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” Defenders of PBS and NPR, such as MSNBC, claim that “Trump’s attempt to defund NPR and PBS is straight out of the authoritarian playbook.” In an op-ed for The Hill, Jonathan Turley writes of “The Cost of Arrogance: NPR’s undoing is a cau- tionary tale for the media.” The Media Research Center (MRC) — no fan of NPR and PBS — reports, “This media dinosaur [NPR] has recently hired a horde of new lobbyists who are now scurrying across Capitol Hill to justify its hold on $1.1 billion in taxpayer subsidies.” Must we the taxpayers be forced to pay for speech
words on the public bathroom wall — but don’t make me have to provide you with the crayon to do it. What’s fascinating about NPR’s Katherine Maher is that she certainly has a squishy view of truth. In a 2022 TED talk she observed: “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done…That is not to say that the truth doesn’t exist or to say that the truth isn’t important. Clearly the search for the truth has led us to do great things...[but] one reason we have such glorious
This reminds me of what many of us heard last month in the Good Friday account in the Gospel of John, when Jesus was standing before Pontius Pi- late, and the Defendant referenced “the truth.” And the Roman procurator asked a famous question to Christ — not realizing he was speaking to Truth In- carnate. “What is truth?” sneered Pilate. Does truth exist? Yes, said the founders of Amer- ica in our Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are cre- ated equal and are endowed by their Creator with
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