Teacher Suspended Over LGBTQ Books Fights Back in Court
metroweekly.comAna On the Edge, by A.J. Sass, The Fabulous Zed Watson, by Basil Sylvester, Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea, by Ashley Herring Blake, and Too Bright to See, by Kyle Lukoff.All feature LGBTQ characters, but do not contain any sexual conduct or descriptions of sexual activity, reports the Cincinnati Enquirer.Cahall argues in her lawsuit, filed in U.S.
District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, that none of the books can be considered “obscene,” “offensive,” or appealing to prurient interests, and all have serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value.Furthermore, the lawsuit argues, the presence of LGBTQ-themed books within the collection aligns with Cahall’s “sincerely held moral and religious beliefs that all children, including children who are LGBTQ+ or the children of parents who are LGBTQ+, deserve to be respected, accepted, and loved for who they are.”Such arguments invoking religious freedom are typically used by conservatives to justify anti-LGBTQ discrimination or the removal of LGBTQ materials from classrooms and libraries.Cahall claims that the books in question are not prominently displayed in her classroom but are “kept in a series of large bins” and are interspersed with nearly 100 other books on various topics.
She argues that the books “are not arranged or displayed in a manner so that one can easily peruse the book titles or ascertain the subject matter of any particular book without physically going through the bins and individually reviewing each of the books.”Cahall maintains that she did not teach from those books as part of her instructional duties and did not require her students to read those books.The lawsuit notes that even Shaw, in her email complaining about the books, never alleged that Cahall was teaching from those books or “otherwise using the books to indoctrinate students or endorse an LGBTQ+ lifestyle in her classroom.” Rather, Shaw’s objection was that the mere presence of books in the classroom, even if they.
