Green is an undergraduate student journalist for Medill on the HIll, a program of Northwestern University in which students serve as mobile journalists reporting on events in and around Washington, D.C.
WASHINGTON — Saying they want to protect students from explicit content in school, Republican lawmakers on October 18, 2023, pushed for parents to have more power over educators in deciding the materials used in schools.
As books containing LGBTQ+ and Black stories continue to be taken off shelves in school libraries across the country, the debate around the role of parents in education has intensified in school districts. With this increase in tension, parental rights advocacy groups, including Moms for Liberty, have seen an increase in membership as parents push for the inclusion of their voices in curriculum decisions for their children.
Citing the apparent destruction of parental trust in the public education system, Republican lawmakers in the Education and Workforce Committee commended advocates for their work as they expressed their distaste in what they said is a system allowing young children to read sexual content prematurely.
“I am very proud of the engagement of parents who recognize the rotten filth that is being pushed on our innocent, vulnerable children…,” Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) said. “Moving forward, our Republican majority will work to stop the entrapment of children in institutions who prioritize sexual indoctrination instead of reading, writing, thinking and succeeding.”
Across the aisle, Democrats said the worst possible solution would be the infringement of First Amendment rights.
“One of the things that I see is the erosion of that public institution,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said. “Part of it is trying to control what people read and don’t read… I think that is a huge threat to public education.”
As a former school board member in Arizona, Rep. Grijalva said he is concerned about the impact of book bans on communities of color.
In his time on the school board, Grijalva represented a diverse community where he said students had a hard time relating to traditional learning materials. Failing to see themselves represented in the curriculum, he said students in his district struggle to remain engaged.
“Our schools are becoming more diverse,” Dr. Jonathan Friedman, Director of Free Expression and Education Programs at PEN America, said. “Research shows that young people are going to be more engaged in learning in schools when their libraries and the books they have access to reflect their identities and a range of their life experiences.”
Beginning the hearing with a content warning for those in the audience, Republican lawmakers and witnesses used graphic language to establish a connection between the apparent discomfort created in the audience and the discomfort children experience while reading these books.
Witnesses described the oral sex, rape, incest and sodomy depicted in the most controversial books, which they said have been made readily available to their children in their school’s libraries.
After her 3-year-old son came home with a book depicting “drag queens and leather,” Lindsey Smith, the chair of a local chapter of Moms for Liberty in Maryland, was prompted to investigate other sexually explicit books in schools. Through these investigations, she was made aware of Maia Kobabe’s memoir “Gender Queer,” a book with an innocent cover which deceives young readers about the content inside, she said.
“In the pages of this graphic novel, we see a sexual fantasy play out,” Smith said. “We see the sexual position of two young adults with both parties' private parts all being displayed.”
Kobabe’s memoir, which depicts their journey through childhood as they come out as nonbinary, has been praised by some parents as an appropriate portrayal of sex and gender identity issues facing children today. Smith, however, said the graphic novel goes against Maryland’s minor indecency and obscenity laws, which prohibit individuals from showing minors obscene images.
“Mentioning details of this book feels wildly inappropriate in a Congressional hearing,” said the Superintendent of Wyoming’s Department of Education, Megan Degenfelder. “Why then is it available to our children?”
Degenfelder said she was upset with the sexually explicit materials in schools, but added she was equally concerned that these books were coming from taxpayer dollars. Degenfelder was joined by lawmakers in her calls for parents to push for more oversight in school library catalogs, instead of seeking more oversight from the federal government.
“Age appropriate content moderation by local school officials is a right deeply ingrained in the principle of localism and federalism,” Chairman Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.) said. “Federalizing the book review process by putting it in the hands of D.C. bureaucrats, thereby taking parents out of the equation, would be the worst possible solution.”
As Democrats expressed their concerns, they said they fear their Republican colleagues have gone too far.
“We don’t have students testifying today Mr. Chairman, but their voices should be heard…,” said Ranking member, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) as she read letters from students across the country. “‘Hiding away things that make us uncomfortable doesn’t make them go away. Even if we don’t talk about it, racism, sexual assault, genocide and many other complex issues will still exist. We have to face the discomfort to keep it from happening again.’”
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.