The Supreme Court case on ‘LGBTQ-inclusive’ books shows how unfair he was.
The Supreme Court case on ‘LGBTQ-inclusive’ books shows how unfair he was.
L ast year, 60 Minutes did a segment on an attempted book ban in a South Carolina town that could have been written by ChatGPT.
The overwhelming sense of it was that such “bans” — or the removal of inappropriate material from libraries and classrooms — are based on hoaxes perpetrated by paranoid and hateful church ladies.
The villain of the Scott Pelley–anchored piece was Moms for Liberty, the parental advocacy group that fights against gender ideology and DEI in the schools.
The segment focused on a fight in Beaufort County, S.C., where parental activists had asked for 97 books to be taken out of middle and high school libraries for their sexually explicit material.
A heated controversy ensued, and the books were reviewed by school authorities in an extensive process. In the end, five were removed, some were designated just for high school libraries, and others for both high school and middle school libraries.
Pelley considered this a terrible travesty and blamed Moms for Liberty for occasioning such battles. He sat down with founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich for a classic 60 Minutes drive-by job.
When Descovich said there are rogue teachers, Pelley was incredulous, repeating back to her, “Rogue teachers?”
He badgered them about the supposed “ideology” that kids were being indoctrinated into.
He objected to the use of the word “groomer” in posts on X.
He said the two were dodging questions with talking points.
The viewer was clearly meant to conclude that these women — and anyone who thinks like them — are nuts and were making up things.
When Pelley asked what the fear is, Tiffany Justice replied, “I think parents’ fears are realized. They’re looking at these books where sexual discussions are happening with their children at younger and younger ages.”
In response, Pelley narrated, “Tiffany Justice read from sexually explicit books written for older teens but found in a few lower schools. Most people wouldn’t want them in a lower school. But in a tactic of outrage politics, Moms for Liberty takes a kernel of truth, and concludes these examples are not rare mistakes but a plot to sexualize children.”
Mind you, this wasn’t a counter-advocate editorializing in this manner, but the anchor for the segment. Pelley was using all his anchor authority — the resonant voice, even manner, non-threatening good looks — to render a verdict that was meant to be unassailable.
Of course, none of the material from the books Justice read from was included in the segment — what’s okay for kids is not appropriate for network television.
Oh, by the way, Beaufort was so enlightened that it “gave the last word to parents,” who could decide to ask the school not to let their children check out a dubious book. But the whole controversy was supposedly so ridiculous that no parent had ever made such a request.
Anyone who watched this would have been shocked to learn that, shortly thereafter, there was a Supreme Court case involving the kinds of books that Moms for Liberty fights against, and the objecting parents are quite likely to win.
Wasn’t this kind of thing all made up?
The case was brought not by crazy people but by a diverse group of parents in Maryland led by a Muslim family.
The controversy wasn’t a concoction — “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks were added to the classroom curriculum in grades pre-K through twelve.
(Pride Puppy! was one of the books in the pre-kindergarten curriculum, and there was back-and-forth during the Supreme Court oral arguments over whether kids reading the book were asked to look for the leather worn by someone who is into bondage, or by a sex worker, or by a drag queen — apparently it’s a drag queen.)
There was no opt-out; in fact, that’s the issue in the case.
Montgomery County wasn’t worried about foisting such material on kids despite their parents’ objections; rather, it worried that having an opt-out would mean “exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.”
None of this computes with the narrative that Pelley constructed in his segment, which summoned all the moral authority CBS News can still muster to condescend to parents who don’t want schools exposing their children to transgressive content.
This is what it has come to — it’s easier for parents to get a fair hearing at the Supreme Court than from 60 Minutes.