Editorial -- Cancel Culture Comes to Missouri Schools

Cancel culture is coming to Missouri schools. On Sunday, it became a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail or a $2,000 fine for librarians or other educators to give students access to books with what the Missouri legislature and Governor Mike Parson deem to be sexually explicit images. This includes photos, drawings, videos, and other visual depictions. This does not apply to written descriptions. There are exceptions for anatomy, biology, sex education, art, and other images considered educational.

But when Big Government decides to appropriate the right to decide what is educational and what is not, the problem is, where does it all end? There is speculation that the Missouri legislature will next turn to written depictions. 

One could easily see this sort of law working the other way around. In Rome, for instance, if you distributed books written by the apostolic fathers, you risked being tortured to death or thrown to the lions in the arena. Is it far fetched to assume that slavery advocates would have banned abolitionist works given the chance before the Civil War? 

The Soviet Union would have sent people off to the gulags for distributing Bibles to people. Walter Ciszek, for instance, was an American priest who conducted clandestine missionary work in the USSR between 1939 and 1963 and was imprisoned for his work for 15 years in the gulags. He was eventually released and wrote a riveting book, “With God in Russia,” about his time there.

Let’s turn to more recent examples. What if former President Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden become so toxic to voters that we elect Hillary Clinton in 2024? If you’re a Republican, would you trust Hillary Clinton not to demand that our libraries censor any material that praises Donald Trump? Would you trust Hillary Clinton not to demand that our libraries censor material that she deems to be Russian propaganda or that shows Russian culture in a positive light? 

Or let’s turn to an actual example, not a hypothetical one. Russian President Vladimir Putin has imprisoned over 10,000 people in Russia for protesting against his “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine. I’m sure he would imprison people for printing books critical of his operation or getting them to kids. So if our cause of escalating the war in Ukraine and playing nuclear chicken with Russia is so right and just, then why are our governments acting like him here at home?

We already have safeguards against graphic sexual images getting before our kids. School librarians follow district specific policies in deciding which books to offer students. Educators and administrators are trained on what is age appropriate; as a Northwest alum with a teaching degree, one of the topics we learned was what was and wasn’t age appropriate.

It is not the place of state government to impose a one size fits all approach to public education. What books should be offered to our kids is a matter that should be decided by administrators, educators, librarians, parents, students, and school board members. If the Republican Party is really committed to getting Big Government out of our lives, they need to trust the taxpayers and local school boards to make their own decisions about what to offer our kids. To do otherwise is to violate the First Amendment protections of freedom of the press and freedom of speech.