How a Harmless Teacher Got Branded 'Pedophile' by Extremists

[Jilly_in_VA]

“The worst parts of this are at the beginning.”

That’s what Laney Dicksion mumbled as she angrily flipped through Gender Queer—a graphic memoir about exploring gender identity and sexuality—for a local Oklahoma TV broadcast last month.

But the interview was not about the book the American Library Association ranked as its most challenged (or rebuked) of 2021. It was about one mother’s decision to complain to Norman High School officials about her daughter’s English teacher, Summer Boismier.

Dicksion suggested the teacher should potentially face criminal charges. Her alleged crime? Providing students like Dicksion’s daughter with a QR code leading them to UnBanned—a Brooklyn Public Library program offering teenagers unlimited digital and audio access to banned or challenged books—on the first day of school last month. Boismier did so after updated guidelines and a restrictive new law inspired her to cover her entire classroom library in butcher paper, which she adorned with the phrase “Books the state doesn’t want you to read.”

“The woman has access to children and to minors,” the Oklahoma mom told Fox 25 after reading parts of Gender Queer out loud and describing it, dubiously, as “pornographic material.” “No one should be allowed to disseminate this to children, much less a teacher in our public school systems.”

Boismier resigned just days after dishing out the QR code. In so doing, she styled herself a defiant champion of free thought in Oklahoma, a state that last year enacted a law—HB 1775—targeting so-called critical race theory. The right-wing bete noire is effectively nonexistent in the classes taught to young American kids, even as rage about it has fed a larger cultural panic over education nationwide.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/summer-boismier-exiled-norman-oklahoma-teacher-faces-cloudy-future?ref=home

Oklahoma is NOT OK!

[regnaD kciN]

1. Why is Oklahoma described as 'OK'?

Because people there can’t spell ‘mediocre’.

– Joke from a friend who lived there for fifteen years

[crickets]

2. Nuts. All she exposed her students to was access to a public library.

For that, the Oklahoma Secretary of Public Education wants to revoke her teaching certification?

Boismier did go out on a limb and call attention to herself by turning her classroom into a statement against book banning, and I respect that, but there's no way it was going to go unnoticed.

I don't agree with it, but I can see how she would have lost her job under current circumstances if she hadn't resigned first. However, the level at which she's been villainized and doxxed, and that anyone would call for criminal charges is just way, way over the line.