'The Irony': GA School Board Shut Down This Mom for Reading Dirty Book Aloud - They Said Kids Might Hear It

The Georgia mother who confronted her county school board about sexually explicit books that are available to students in school libraries says many parents are afraid to speak up about their concerns. The type of confrontation she faced at the Cherokee County school board meeting may be one reason why.

At the March 17 meeting, Michelle Brown was told to stop reading a sexually explicit passage from a book that's available to high-schoolers in the conservative county's libraries. A school board member interjected her concerns that the live-streamed reading was "inappropriate" for any children who might be listening.

In an excerpt from the meeting that aired on Fox News, school board member Patsy Jordan interrupts Brown's reading from the book Homegoing.

"Excuse me, we have children at home," Jordan told Brown after she read a sexually charged section from the book.  

"Don't you find the irony in that?" Brown responded, noting that Jordan was making her point. "You're exactly saying exactly what I'm telling you! You're giving it to our children! I would never give this to my children!"

Brown says she spoke up because other parents "were kind of afraid." 

"They didn't want to go up against the school board. So I thought, 'Well, I'll do it, I've done it before' ... I had no idea that they were going to react that way," she said.

She told Fox News that many parents are intimidated by the school board. "The school board is deemed a machine," she said, that has "power over administrators, teachers, and parents in the community" and intimidates parents into silence. Parents spoke up about the critical race theory curriculum in the district at a board meeting last May, but were met with quick pushback and were labeled "as terrible and irrational people, domestic terrorists if you will," according to Brown. 

The Georgia mom also charges that the school board's review process of questionable books is convoluted and ineffective. She says a group of a dozen parents reviewed 45 books and appealed 14 as inappropriate for kids. But according to Brown, the final word on removing those books won't come 'til December. The school board denies the accusation, saying the review process is not "lengthy" or "broken," and that in the 20 years it's been in force, no one had complained.

Brown was surprised that this kind of push-back from the school board could be happening in deeply conservative Cherokee County. Nearly 70% of voters there cast their ballots for Donald Trump. But parents are facing resistance from school boards around the country. 

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As CBN News previously reported, backlash is growing in many school districts nationwide against sexually explicit content now available to children as young as kindergarten. 

Parents who first started packing school board meetings to re-open schools and remove mask mandates are also focusing on books with explicit and obscene content.  

"I think it's been hidden from a lot of parents. The shutdown has allowed parents to actually see and hear some of the content that was being discussed in classrooms," said Amy Jahr, a mother in Loudoun County, Virginia. 

That content in question includes sexually explicit books like Gender Queer, which is a recipient of an American Library Award.  

"It's a story of my own life about coming out as queer and non-binary and asexual," said author Maia Kobabe during a recent media interview.  

The story contains graphic text and illustrations depicting men having intercourse, children engaged in sexual acts, pedophilia, and the sexual fantasies of the then 14-year-old author.   

"They basically want to normalize the abnormal, right? Any idea of sexual boundaries, any right, and wrong morality, they want those knocked down," said Natassia Grover who pulled her three children out of public school in northern Virginia.  

Since Gender Queer and other explicit books began popping up in more school libraries, the outcry is growing louder among parents and politicians.  

Vowing to prosecute, Texas and South Carolina's Republican governors are demanding statewide probes into how books like Gender Queer got into school libraries.  Virginia's newly sworn-in governor is using executive orders to help parents reclaim control over public schools.  

There are numerous efforts underway to recall school board members across the country.   

Some parents are even running for political office, including Brandon Michon who just entered Virginia's 10th Congressional District race. Several months ago, Michon's rant against school closures in Loudoun County, VA at a school board meeting went viral. Not long after, he says he was shocked when his kindergartner brought home a book on transgenderism from school.   

"A kindergartner is just trying to learn. Adult decisions and adult viewpoints and agendas are being pushed down at a young age. That's not right," said Michon.   

But resistance to removing these books is strong. In January, Virginia Senate Democrats unanimously blocked a bill that would have forced schools to warn parents about sexual content, citing First Amendment rights. 

Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis has faced loud opposition from leftist groups after he signed a bill to protect young children from being taught about transgenderism and homosexuality by teachers in his state's public schools. Polls show that most Floridians support the law.

Now he's locked in a war of words with the Disney company which has decided to push transgenderism on visitors to their theme park as they also lobby to overturn the bill DeSantis just signed into law. That's led many former Disney fans to ask why the company is so determined to sexualize the little children who go to Florida's schools, and watch their movies or go to Disney World.

For members of the LGBTQ community, the issue is about social justice and inclusion.  

But many child experts insist what matters most is the children. They warn that sexual content for young audiences can have serious consequences.   

"It's literally a disaster for developing brains where they watch something so explicit and so stimulated, it actually begins to wear out their pleasure centers in there. And it leaves them more vulnerable to addiction and depression," said Dr. Daniel Amen, a psychiatrist at Amen Clinics. 

Others are concerned that children who view abusive and misogynistic acts will begin to see them as normal and acceptable.  

According to Dr. Danny Huerta of Focus on the Family, "It begins to shape their experience and perception of what it means to be in a relationship with someone else and it opens up experiences they would never have been exposed to in such an explicit way, and it begins to shape their behavior toward other people."

For Brown, she hopes the experience with her local school board fighting obscene books, will help rally other parents to stand up to protect their children.

"I am hoping all of this attention empowers our parents, and other parents out there, to stand up for what's right for their children. When they contact me to say thank you, via private messaging, not even publicly, I ask them to join me in speaking up," she said.