“Why do you need to know how to masturbate when you still got skid marks in your underwear?” asks Tia Bess, the newly appointed national director of outreach for the conservative advocacy group Moms for Liberty.
Inside a squat Pentecostal church on a country road in Clay Hill, Florida, Bess flips through a large illustrated handbook titled It’s Perfectly Normal, marketed to kids ages 10 and up, intended as a primer about the onset of puberty.
“This is not something you want your children to see if they are not developmentally ready,” she says, pointing at a rudimentary sketch of young adults masturbating. Bess sports a bright blue T-shirt with a Moms for Liberty logo plastered on the front, touting an organization which she refers to as an army of “joyful warriors” advocating for parental rights, and which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a rightwing extremist group.
Advancing the analogy, Bess pulls a copy of Hustler magazine from her bag, along with a copy of Gender Queer, the graphic novel by Maia Kobabe that PEN America ranks as the most banned book in the country.
“Show me the difference,” she says, holding the two illustrated pages side by side.
Both pages depict oral sex. Though, in the case of Gender Queer, it’s fairly obvious that the message is one of confusion and insecurity about sexuality, which contrasts with the superficially erotic scene in Hustler.
Bess thinks these distinctions are too subtle for teenagers to understand. She wants to see Gender Queer and many other titles removed from shelves of public school libraries in her home district of Clay county, a rural, predominantly conservative swath of north-east Florida. And she’s had tremendous success.
Clay county has become a flashpoint in the state of Florida on the topic of book challenges. According to recent tallies, more than 175 books have been permanently removed from its public school libraries – a number which ranks among the highest of any county in the US – and hundreds more remain unavailable to students due to a policy unique to the county, requiring that books are pulled from shelves as soon as a challenge form is filed with the school district. Conservative activists from two organizations have seized on that policy, often filing multiple challenge forms at a time, which inundates the systems and committees that process the claims.
“The biggest issue facing Clay county right now is the backlog of challenges and the huge political divide that’s driving it. No other county is dealing with a similar problem,” says Jen Cousins, co-founder of the Florida Freedom to Read Project (FFTRP) and a mother of four. “They’re creating fake outrage over what’s available in libraries.”
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Last year, Bess moved her family from Jacksonville to Clay county due to a “less restrictive” political and cultural climate. She’s since embedded herself locally in the fight for book removal, filing challenge forms, holding forth in school board meetings on the dangers of books like Gender Queer (which has since been removed from public school collections) by drawing salacious parallels with flatly pornographic material, and recording hammy YouTube videos reading selections from books that she deems inappropriate for middle- and high-school students.
In her official capacity at Moms for Liberty, she advises other parents in Clay county on how to do the same. She is also a key player in advancing the mandate on a national level – going city to city, state to state, speaking at chapter meetings and conventions, recruiting new members and encouraging members to run for school board seats.
“Empower and educate parents – that’s what we want to do,” says Bess. “And holding elected officials accountable for the decisions they’re making.”
Bess first rose to prominence as a volunteer at Moms for Liberty in the spring of 2021, when she successfully sued Jacksonville’s school district for defying Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-masking mandate on behalf of her then three-year-old son, who has autism and sensory issues. As a Black woman from downtown Jacksonville, who spent a portion of her teenage years homeless, she complicates the stereotype of Moms for Liberty members as a tidy bloc of predominantly white suburban housewives.
“A lot of people in the Black community are afraid to speak up,” she says. “And I just didn’t care about that. It wasn’t about me or my feelings.”
Despite the express mission of parental empowerment, it’s rare that book challenge forms are filed by individual parents. Instead, nearly all of the challenges in Clay county have been filed by activists affiliated with the same two organizations: Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Bess also chalks this up to fear over repercussions and a lack of knowledge about school board politics and procedures.
“Parents are afraid. Even my own mother still has the mentality of a Black woman born in the 40s. There’s still that fear and intimidation,” she says. “The average person doesn’t know these books are out there. But if they knew how to challenge them, they would. And that’s my job.”
Founded in central Florida in 2021, Moms for Liberty began as a critical mass of parents troubled by their school district’s Covid-19 mask mandates. With the help of well-organized campaigns of outrage (both in person and online) it has since spread rapidly, growing to 285 chapters in 45 states, with roughly 120,000 members, in two years.
The group’s national profile has been built on combating what it deems the ills of society: gender ideology, critical race theory and the “sexualization” of children. For those critical of the group, these interpretations often translate to homophobia, racism and delusions of rampant pedophilia.
Moms for Liberty purports to be a grassroots organization, but has attracted donations from political action committees such as Conservatives for Good Government. It also has longstanding connections to the Republican party. The founding mothers are Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, both former school board members from central Florida. The third founder is Bridget Ziegler. (She has since stepped back from her leadership role in the group, but continues to serve as chair of the Sarasota county school board.) She is married to Christian Ziegler, chair of the Florida Republican party. The pair are close friends with Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who recently appointed Bridget Ziegler to the board overseeing Disney World’s district after stripping the corporation of its power to self-govern.
Ziegler’s advocacy for the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” laid the groundwork for last year’s Parental Rights in Education Act, better known by the “don’t say gay” moniker. She appeared behind DeSantis at the bill’s signing last year.
Among its most controversial sections, the bill prohibits classroom discussions of gender identity or sexual orientation from kindergarten to third grade. An update to that legislation, HB 1069, was passed in the spring of this year, and went into effect on 1 July and extends those same prohibitions from third to 12th grade.
Additionally, the new law emboldens book challenges by forcing all districts in Florida to adopt policies that were already in effect in Clay county, such as removing books from shelves five days after a challenge form has been filed, allowing parents to appeal a school district’s decision to return books to shelves, or refile the same challenge form repeatedly, and providing parents a path to limit their children’s access to public school libraries.
“It’s effectively a ban when you pull books out of circulation,” says Gargi Chipalkatti, a mother of two children in Clay county public schools. “I want my kids to have access to any book they want to read. I didn’t like the fact that somebody else was trying to dictate that.”
Chipalkatti served as a volunteer on Clay county’s book review committee last school year, which rules on whether or not challenged books should be returned to shelves. “It boggles my mind that you had a couple of organizations flooding the system and holding everybody hostage.”
All of this is particularly troubling for media specialists, who oversee library collections in public schools, and bear the full weight of the issue.
Julie Miller, who serves as chair of the Clay county education association media specialist committee, is in charge of selecting and purchasing books for a high school library in Clay county. Her husband, Joel Miller, is likewise a career educator, and teaches media studies at a rival high school.
“Prior to 2021, we’d gone over 20 years without a single challenge,” Julie Miller says. Midway through this summer, 706 books have been officially challenged, according to data provided by FFTRP. Many of the titles currently receiving negative attention have been in libraries for decades. Such is the case for Push by Sapphire, and Lucky by Alice Sebold, both of which contain granular depictions of rape. A handful of outliers, like those furnished by Tia Bess, have questionable illustrations and advice, which the Millers make no concessions for.
“It all comes down to community standards,” Joel Miller says. “Portland, Oregon, may feel differently, but there’s probably no place for books like that in Orange Park, Florida.”
The Millers note that a large percentage of challenges are for books that have LGBTQ+ themes, such as All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson. And yet more are challenged on the grounds of being critical race theory-adjacent and teaching “alternative history”, including canonical novels such as Native Son, Beloved and the anodyne children’s book Before She Was Harriet (which has since been returned to library shelves).
“There are a few inappropriate books on that challenge list,” says Chipalkatti. “But 99.9% of those are really good books.”
As is the case across the country, judging these books as roundly unsuitable for students and demanding their removal is a minority opinion. And Julie Miller feels that librarians are being unfairly maligned.
“They’re calling her a groomer, a pornography peddler,” Joel Miller says.
She has become the target of one conservative activist’s ire in particular – a former resident of New York named Bruce Friedman. Like Tia Bess, Friedman moved to Clay county in 2021 for political reasons. He now serves as the Florida chapter president of No Left Turn in Education, a rightwing advocacy group allied with Moms for Liberty.
Last year, Friedman made headlines for having his microphone cut off at a school board meeting while attempting to read a rape scene from Alice Sebold’s memoir Lucky. At a Florida department of education meeting several months later, Friedman said he’d made a list of books in Clay county public school libraries that had “concerning content”, including “porn, critical race theory, social-emotional learning [and] fluid gender”.
He has since become one of the most prolific book challengers in the country. A spreadsheet on his website compiles 4,623 titles that he labeled as problematic and intends to challenge. (Friedman declined to comment for this story.)
In dozens of challenge forms provided by FFTRP, Friedman mentions Julie Miller by name – along with comments that the books will “DAMAGE SOULS”, declaring his need to “PROTECT CHILDREN”. In a school board meeting earlier this year, Friedman shared an anecdote about a friend of his son’s reading a library book aloud in his high school cafeteria that contained “steamy, erotic” scenes. Friedman said the experience “stole his son’s innocence”, but failed to provide the title of the book.
Dubious, Julie Miller immediately requested an investigation. “I wanted to know if there was a book like that in my library so I could deal with it. If not, I wanted my name to be cleared,” she says.
She found no record of any book that had been recently checked out matching Friedman’s description.
The term “pornography” is the most bandied by Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Bess warns that these books violate statutes. “There’s a clear definition,” she says, citing Florida statute 847.012. “All materials must be free of pornography, the depiction of erotic behavior or pictures intended to cause excitement.”
The caveat is statute 847.001, which clarifies that material can only be deemed pornographic if, “Taken as a whole, [it] is without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors,” making the question of age-appropriateness difficult to parse. If the state holds to the most conservative possible reading of that statute, then texts like the Bible, Shakespeare and countless others would have to be taken off shelves as well. (Since then, Shakespeare has actually come under scrutiny.)
“You have to consider context. And if you don’t do that there are not going to be libraries left,” says Chipalkatti.
Bess says that the chair of Clay county’s Moms for Liberty chapter introduced the idea of a rubric, like the one recently proposed in Texas, to determine at what age certain themes and language are permissible. “But there hasn’t been much feedback on it yet,” Bess says. “That’s something that I’m really going to push for. Where’s the parental advisory label for books?”
Another proposed solution was introduced last school year, when the district advertised a new “individualized school library access plan”, which allows parents to limit what books their kids can borrow or ban library access outright. “What more could you want? It blows my mind as to why that’s not sufficient for [the activists],” Joel Miller says.
However, out of 38,265 students enrolled in Clay county schools, only four parents signed up to limit or oversee their children’s library access. In nearby Citrus county, the school district introduced an “opt-in” access plan, where students are defaulted to having no library access until the form has been turned in to school officials by a parent. There were roughly 4,000 students who couldn’t use their school library last school year due to “parent error or lack of engagement”, according to FFTRP. Citrus county has yet to amend this policy.
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The future of public school libraries in Florida seems to be imperiled in the debate over book challenges. Last year, Julie Miller purchased chairs instead of new books. And she has not been cleared to make any acquisitions for the approaching school year either. DeSantis’s new law does away with earmark percentages of school district funding for specific departments, allowing school boards to curtail or redirect library funds to different categories if they so choose.
All of this suggests it might be easier to defund libraries and winnow collections rather than venture the social and political risks associated with fighting a culture war with a governor who’s currently using the state legislature as his personal armory.
In a Clay county school board workshop meeting from last month, the chief academic officer Roger Dailey seemed to cast aspersions on the very utility of libraries, referring to them as glorified copy rooms, and admitting that his own teenage children have never checked a book out of their high school library because they “consume their literature in different formats, most of it digitally on their devices”, he says.
“I don’t even know if my own sons know where the library is in their school.”
