LAUSD School Board President Destroys Homophobes Who Are Banning Books Over One Sentence

“Fear is not our friend; love is.”

School Board President of Los Angeles Unified School District, Jackie Goldberg, recently went viral for calling out a radical group in her community that wanted to ban the children’s picture book “The Great Big Book of Families” because of one sentence.

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That’s it. One sentence. That was all it took for an extreme few in President Goldberg’s district to demand this children’s book be ripped off shelves. “Families can also have two parents who are mothers or two parents who are fathers.” In a video posted on social media, you can hear President Goldberg discuss the book’s central message: that there are all kinds of families in the world. She even remembers children who heard her read the book, The Great Big Book of Families, sharing that their families looked different. It is an underlying message of empathy and understanding. But as we have discussed before: empathy is dangerous to these radical groups.

President Goldberg goes on to emphasize the freedoms that the parents in her school district do have. She discusses how it is the parent’s right to keep their children from attending any assembly that does not align with their values (like the one where she read the book in question). And that is actually in line with where the majority of people are. Study after study and poll after poll show that book bans are not popular: that parents across the political spectrum want the liberty to choose what their children can read and that no one else should make that decision for them.

That was President Goldberg’s point. Don’t like the book? Don’t read it. It’s that simple. Her closing words were some of the most powerful and most poignant. “Fear is not our friend; love is.” Extreme voices and agitators are trying to get books banned by telling people to be afraid of what is in them. Those voices cannot be elevated, and those fears cannot be spread.

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