Fairbanks volunteers who have joined Moms for Liberty are looking for books to ban in local school libraries, including books they have not read.

It’s no surprise that they have found plenty of objectionable words and want to read them out loud at school board meetings.

Members of the club, including Ruth Ewig, Gail McBride, and Cynthia Wozniak, want their opinions about acceptable books and objectionable words to become the law of the land. McBride and Wozniak made that clear in testimony to the school board this week.

They denounced “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, with McBride and Wozniak saying it should be immediately removed from school library shelves. Lots of other books should be pulled as well, they said.

Parents have the liberty, under state law, of asking any public school to prohibit their children from checking out “The Bluest Eye” or any other book from a school library, but that is not enough for Ewig, McBride, Wozniak and other club members. They want to strip parents of the ability to make those choices on books the moms condemn.

“I think we need to stop what we’re doing right now, get in our vehicles, go to every school, pull these books, is what I think,” Wozniak told the school board.

Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize, wrote “The Bluest Eye” in 1970, her first novel. Demands to ban her book are common across the country. It is an unsettling story about unsettling issues, including sex abuse, violence, racism, hatred, pain and a young girl who longs for blue eyes and thinks she is not attractive because of the color of her skin.

Moms for Liberty, following a playbook used elsewhere in the country, has published extended quotes from Morrison’s book and others on many internet sources, which means those who have not read a book can easily quote segments they deem salacious and portray these as imminent threats to children.

McBride said “The Bluest Eye” is so objectionable that no children should be exposed to it, then she read a section that she found particularly objectionable, heard by all those in the room, watching online or listening to the radio.

Wozniak also wanted to read objectionable material from the book, but her time for testimony ran out.

“And my motive here for sharing this content is to alert people that may not know about it and know that it’s even going through our schools across the U.S. and Fairbanks. It’s here on our home front. And we just need to alert and more than alert, get active. I think we need to stop what we’re doing right now, get in our vehicles, go to every school, pull these books, is what I think,” Wozniak said.

“And I just can’t believe that it’s here, that we’re even addressing it, among all the other vile, evil, perverse stuff going on,” she said.

Ewig didn’t speak Tuesday, but she makes regular comments on right-wing blogs in Alaska, complaining about atheists, pantheists, perverting children, Dominion voting machines, evolution, abortion and a Fairbanks school curriculum “submitted through the lesbians, feminists and homosexuals within the UAF and Human Rights Commission.” Last November she complained about “pornographic librarians” in Wasilla.

“The NEA and Lbrarians and other unions (AFL-CIO) are the unelected thugs running the country,” Ewig wrote on April 12, 2023.

In testimony this week, Wozniak claimed that in 11th and 12th grade, out of the required reading lists in Fairbanks that there are 26 “anti-white” books, 11 “anti-Christian” books, 14 “sexually explicit” books, 26 “anti-American” books, 8 “anti-men” books and “an entire homosexual section.”

“I don’t want this in my grandchildren’s path or any of the kids. Do you? I mean something needs to be done about this. They need to be pulled immediately. Yesterday. I hope you all agree. Here’s some more of what Gail was reading from ‘The Bluest Eye,’ as much as I really don’t care to read it. But people need to wake up. They need to see this and know this and know that it’s in our kids’ paths, every day,” Wozniak said.

The moms said they will continue to point out books they find objectionable.

“The conclusion was that we will pursue policy change because our concern is a fundamental difference in the purpose of education,” McBride said. “My goal will be that material offered will be kind of like a doctor, ‘do no harm.’ Sexually explicit material is damaging in many ways, especially to young forming brains.”

After reading an objectionable section of Morrison’s book, she said: “There’s more of course. And I am not happy. I am disturbed, very troubled to have read this. I’ve been disturbed to have read it myself, but to read it publicly is troubling. And I’m sorry, but more than that I’m sorry that our children are exposed to this. This is only one. And this was called a classic. Apparently we need a different definition,” she said.

Rich Eide of North Pole also complained about offensive words in books. “We know there’s a lot of books that I could embarrass some people if I read portions of them,” said Eide.

To some extent, the claims about objectionable words and banning physical books are divorced from the reality of life in 2024, as anyone who keeps track of technology understands.

The real challenge to our society is not that students are fighting each other to get into school libraries and check out books.

Anyone who thinks the 224 pages of “The Bluest Eye” are a danger to young people is unaware of the real problems created by the overwhelming flood of electronic information, disinformation and hogwash that stops many people from thinking.

Later in the meeting, school board member Bobby Burgess had the best response about judging the merits of any book: “I would encourage people to read the whole book before judging it. Context is important.”

He also mentioned a discussion he had with his teen-age daughter not long ago about a book she was reading and how it contained material that was difficult for her to read about sexual assault, violence and other challenging matters.

Burgess said they discussed the broader question of what high school students should read and without hesitating he said his daughter said that students need to know about difficult topics. She’s right.

Arguments about works of scholarship on library shelves, even those with offensive words, are like relics of an age that has already passed, the time before the iPhone and the internet. At some level, even the most strident mom for liberty must realize this.

I think that this is not really about books or the logical processes that have long been in place to debate and decide what is appropriate for students.

I think this is about the desire to whip up hysteria and anger, spread disinformation about public schools, create chaos and attempt to gain political power.

The idea is to get people as worked up as possible and elect extremists to local government offices on the strength of overheated emotions.

Sometimes it works, especially when people don’t pay attention and allow the loudest voices to drown out all others.

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GVEA ELECTION: Gary Newman won reelection to the Golden Valley Electric Association board by a 650-591 vote over Harmony Tomaszewski.

SULLIVAN SKIPPED OUT: Sen. Dan Sullivan skipped the U.S. Senate vote on a bill to guarantee access to contraceptives. Sullivan was in the Capitol Tuesday and he voted earlier in the day, but was missing in action for the bill, which was blocked by Republicans. Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Sen. Susan Collins were the only Republicans to vote for it.

There was no news coverage in Alaska about why Sullivan did not vote and no statement from Sullivan. He appeared on Newsmax shortly after the vote, for an interview from the Capitol about his recent trip to Taiwan.

His office refused to tell Alaska Public Media why he declined to vote and how he would have voted. There was no other coverage by Alaska news organizations regarding Sullivan’s disappearing act.

Since Sullivan won’t answer those questions, I’ll do it for him.

He didn’t vote because he didn’t want to be on the record opposing the contraception measure. He would have voted against the measure had he chosen to do his job and he was worried that political opponents would use that vote against him in the future.

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