Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer refused to condemn pornographic books in public schools during a debate this week as she battles for another term in office against Republican Challenger Tudor Dixon.
Dixon has heavily campaigned against the furtherance of radical sexuality education in the nation’s public schools, as have many of her fellow GOP midterm candidates, taking a cue from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s successful race against Democrat opponent Terry McAuliffe last year running largely on the issue of parental rights in education.
When moderators asked each candidate how they would handle the well-publicized issue of books containing sexually explicit content in taxpayer funded schools, Dixon emphasized that their inclusion in school libraries was borderline criminal.
“If you have material in your school that is something you can’t read to a child at a bus stop because you would be arrested, because it is pornographic, then it should not be in our classrooms,” she said.
“What these parents are talking about are not textbooks that will help children learn about themselves. These are books that are describing to children how to have sex, and parents are outraged about it across the state.”
When it came to Whitmer, however, rather declared that she “rejects the false choice” between banning books that contain graphic descriptions and illustrations of sexual organs and sex acts from school libraries.
“As a public-school parent, I know that we have rights to understand the curriculum, the materials, to opt our children out if we think that it doesn’t keep in line with our desires,” Whitmer said.
“We also have a duty to make sure that all children feel accepted and safe and can learn and play when they are in school,” she added.
As The Federalist noted, when Whitmer was given the opportunity to respond to Dixon’s accusation that the incumbent refused to “stand with parents,” she tried to shift the debate audience’s focus to gun control instead.
“Do you really think books are more dangerous than guns?” she said. “Do you really think that books pose a greater danger to our kids than gun violence does? Mrs. Dixon is trying to distract us.”
Democratic leaders, in line with proponents of so-called comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) argue that sexually explicit books are necessary for the sake of protecting students who identify as LGBT.
When Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law earlier this year that banned sexuality education in younger grades in the Sunshine State, the establishment media and Democratic politicians dubbed the legislation the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Yet as a number of commentators and outraged parents have highlighted, the books often include quite literally pornographic material.
See these pages from “Gender Queer,” blocked under a content warning on Twitter yet widely touted by LGBT activists as necessary and important for LGBT youth and on the catalog of many American public schools (Warning: contains sexually graphic content):
Pages from the graphic memoir "Gender Queer," which is controversially on the shelves of many US school libraries. 1/ pic.twitter.com/zpWcXzilzv
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) October 29, 2021
An issue that we have been covering here at Elizabeth Johnston Ministries for years, parental rights in education have certainly taken center stage in the midterm race.
Yet, it is not always your stereotypical Christian conservative voter that is concerned over the issue of graphic material and curricula in public schools, as Whitmer herself ought to know.
Dearborn, Michigan, home to the nation’s most concentrated population of Muslims, was recently the site of the kind of boisterous school board meeting that has served to underscore parents’ outrage at the public school bureaucracy over the last two years, as conservative Muslim parents sharply rebuked the existence of sexually graphic books in school libraries.
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