Forsyth County Georgia Board of Education - Jere Krischel - 5/17/2022

For the past few Board Meetings, several speakers have promoted systemic islamophobia, pushing for explicit sexual content in our school libraries. In Islam, explicit sexual content is haram, forbidden. Homosexuality is also haram, punishable by death under sharia law, or requiring forced hormonal and surgical conversion therapy for both gays and lesbians.

Diversity, inclusion and equity obligate us to combat this islamophobia - making sure that depictions of the Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him, and other haram topics, such as explicit sexual content, or the glorification of immoral sexuality, are kept out of our school libraries. The attempts of white liberals to push their sexual agenda in our schools is an offense to Allah, and all the POC muslims who follow him. It is a crass exercise of woke white privilege.

Personally, I'm a fairly extreme liberal atheist, but I understand, that even though I might be fine with my children being exposed to sexually graphic content, I can't make that choice for other parents, and neither should our schools. We need to make sure that our shared government schools are places that respect the wide diversity of viewpoints our community has, including conservative islamic viewpoints. I might be willing to draw a picture of the Prophet Mohammad, and post it on a website, but it would be wrong of me to insist that our government schools provide picture books with the Prophet's likeness.

Ultimately, our teachers and administrators work for the parents of our community, and the students are given, in trust, to be educated in a manner that is consistent with the family values each individual family has. Even though conservative parents may be eager to see the best selling LGBTQ children's book "Johnny The Walrus" as a part of our elementary school curriculum, those parents who have decided put their children through hormonal and surgical conversion therapy, may find this book offensive to their worldview, since it depicts gender transition as abuse disguised by compassion.

As messy and imperfect as government schools are, we can only support diversity if we're willing to compromise with each other towards consensus. Curriculum and books need to strive for the most bland and neutral point of view, erring on the side of caution. As much as I love Mark Twain, I understand that some people are so sensitive to the n-word that they would censor Twain's classic anti-racist works. As much as I may appreciate Charlie Hebdo, I understand that cartoons of Mohammad would be offensive our POC muslim families.

For those families that would like to have ideological content for their children, which are otherwise banned from school libraries in the name of consensus, there's always amazon.com, or public libraries, or the entire internet. No child is ever going to be prevented from consuming books their parents want them to read - and no parent should be afraid that their child can pick up a book from their school library, that they can't read out loud at a Board of Education meeting.

I'd like to ask the Board to commit to developing an "opt-in" program for adding books to our school libraries, and to have books reviewed by both liberal and conservative parents, before they are placed in our libraries. We should be exerting local control over our libraries, rather than simply getting book lists from partisan, ideological, and biased national institutions.

Thank you very much for your time, and again, I'd love to have lunch with anyone who disagrees with me.