Unless you’ve been living under a rock, by now you’ve probably heard about Moms for Liberty and their activism regarding sex education, library books, and LGBTQ+ topics in schools. As word spreads of a new M4L chapter recently launching in Howard County, with failed (phew) 2022 Board of Education candidate Tudy Adler serving as its vice chair, I sit in amazement about the fact that in the year of our Lord 2023, people still get all bajiggity about sexual topics being discussed in public schools.
It puts me in mind of a story from the year 1975. That year, a young teacher named Rebecca Dawson, serving as adviser for a high school newspaper in a small town on the Eastern Shore, became the first teacher outside the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area to earn the Baltimore Sun‘s Maryland Scholastic Journalism Teacher and Newspaper Adviser of the Year award. That very same week, she was dismissed from her role as newspaper adviser. Why?
The Baltimore Sun published an article about what happened to Ms. Dawson in its June 8, 1975 edition:
“A controversy here over an issue of the Snow Hill High School newspaper devoted to sex education has caused the removal of its adviser, Rebecca Dawson, in the same week she received an award as Maryland’s ‘newspaper adviser of the year.’
Miss Dawson … was selected by the Sunpapers last week as winner of the 1975 scholastic journalism award.
Simultaneously, she was replaced as teacher-adviser of the Eagle after what the school principal, Kelly Hunt Shumate, described as community ‘wrath’ over the May 1 issue which contained research by the staff into birth control, contraceptives and abortion.”
Mary Corddry, The Baltimore Sun, June 8, 1975
A letter from Ms. Betty White of Newark, Md., to the editor of the Daily Times, a local Eastern Shore newspaper, dated June 13, 1975 states “I would like to go on public record as backing Miss Dawson and her staff for this edition of the Eagle. None of this shocked the students, so why should it shock the parents and public so much?”
A follow-up article by Ms. Corddry in the Sun dated August 20, 1975 states that the principal and superintendent of schools received letters from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Student Press Law Center in Washington asking for Ms. Dawson to be reinstated. She wasn’t.
Now, here’s a fun fact: Ms. Dawson is my mother. And nearly fifty years after she boldly affirmed her students’ First Amendment right to write about taboo subjects, it seems that parents like those in Moms for Liberty – who get all hot and bothered by Nora Roberts books – haven’t evolved much when it comes to demanding that our public schools serve as an extension of their puritanically-curated households in which sex, sexual orientation, and gender nonconformity are never to be discussed, let alone affirmed.
In 2023, we know now that attempting to shield our kids from topics like sex, sexual orientation, and gender issues is not only short-sighted and futile, but also detrimental to their health. Moms for Liberty would do well to let go of their pearls long enough to consider what the word “liberty” really means.
PS: If some of you out there are wondering why I defiantly support the First Amendment instead of worrying about people’s virgin ears, well… there’s your answer.