Oklahoma Gov’t Revokes License Of Teacher Who Dared To Push Back Against State’s Censors

More and more politicians have decided the only way to make America great is to abandon the things that made America great in the first place. The free and open exchange of ideas is getting shut down. The First Amendment is being remade and remodeled to only protect the ideas those in power are in favor of.

As is always the case when aspiring fascist take the law into their own hands, the first people against the wall are those whose job it is to pass information on to others. That’s why when rulers seek to control the public’s perception, they go after journalists and teachers first. An educated and informed voting bloc won’t vote the “right” way. And if they’re going to hold onto their power, they need to make sure the next generation of voters and public servants only know what their current leaders want them to know.

This is America and yet it feels like something else entirely in far too many states. Between the incessant book bans, anti-LGBTQ laws, and the constant portrayal of the First Amendment as only protective of speech government leaders like, no one insisting on travelling in Donald Trump’s orbit is actually trying to make America “great.” Instead, it appears they’re trying to make America WWII Germany. Or Russia under Lenin/Stalin/Putin.

That’s why state officials now feel comfortable punishing teachers for the crime of… teaching. Here’s Nadia Lathan with more details for the Associated Press.

Oklahoma’s education board has revoked the license of a former teacher who drew national attention during surging book-ban efforts across the U.S. in 2022 when she covered part of her classroom bookshelf in red tape with the words “Books the state didn’t want you to read.”

The decision Thursday went against a judge who had advised the Oklahoma Board of Education not to revoke the license of Summer Boismier, who had also put in her high school classroom a QR code of the Brooklyn Public Library’s catalogue of banned books.

For that, the board pulled her license. And All Boismier did was highlight the ridiculousness of the state government’s actions and provide opportunities for students to discover for themselves the content Oklahoma legislators unilaterally decided they should no longer have access to.

There’s nothing more American than someone fighting censorship, especially when that person is tasked with educating and informing developing minds. But the Oklahoma government doesn’t want Americans teaching in its schools. And it clearly doesn’t want anyone — no matter what age or position — to question the status quo being imposed by the censors in its midst. All it wants is unquestioning equivocation — the sort of thing that, if adopted by the founding fathers, would have resulted in us never referring to them as “founding fathers.” This would still be a British colony, or failing that, a former British colony now presided over by China or strip-mined of anything of value periodically by successive European nations with their own takes on colonialism before settling in for a long run of corrupt governments and military coups.

But we’re not that. We’re the land of liberty. Or supposed to be. Firing teachers for pushing back against censorship isn’t an American ideal. It’s apparently an Oklahoman ideal, although it would be a stretch to think all Oklahomans support this sort of thing.

But one politician has managed to convert a personal vendetta into a chilling effect that will harm teachers, librarians, and other government employees across the state. State Superintendent Ryan Walters has been trying to get Bosmier fired for two years. And now he’s finally succeeded.

Walters, who was a candidate for Oklahoma’s top education office when Boismier was teaching, had called on the board in 2022 to revoke her teaching license in a letter he shared on social media.

“There is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda in the classroom,” Walters had wrote. He accused her of providing “banned and pornographic material” to students.

Strong words from the state sup. Strong words indeed. Of course, one feels Walters would be completely supportive of a teacher with a “conservative political agenda” presiding over a classroom of young impressionables. His follow-up statement — that Bosier was fired for “breaking the law” that prohibits instruction on topics related to race and gender (and let’s just take a beat to recognize just how amazingly shitty that law is) — doesn’t add anything that would alter the immediate reaction to this news. That reaction being: the state will always fire people who don’t align themselves with the bigots running the government.

He also added this:

He accused her of providing “banned and pornographic material” to students.

This is just as patently false as it is technically false. Bosmier didn’t provide any material to anyone. In fact, she taped off a section of her own classroom bookshelf to prevent access. Handing the kids a QR code to a list of banned books doesn’t “provide” this material to anyone. All it gives them is a list of books. It’s up to the students to do what they will with that information.

But discussing this in rational terms is useless. These are not rational people. These are people steeped in hatred who have the power to inflict misery on anyone who pushes back against their agenda. The state superintendent doesn’t seem to like any political agenda other than his own and the ones pushed by the party he clearly supports. That’s not how America is supposed to work. There’s supposed to be free and open discussion of competing views — something that encourages younger minds to consider all the facts and draw their own conclusions.

For all the whining about “indoctrination” of students with “liberal agendas,” state officials clearly aren’t opposed to indoctrinating kids. They just want to be the ones doing the indoctrinating. It’s sickening and, unfortunately, it’s not the political career-killer it once was. Now, going as far right as you can — even past the Constitutional confines these people claim to support — is encouraged and rewarded. Many more people will be up against the wall before America (hopefully) moves past this embrace of the worst people to ever hold public office.