by Joe Fitzgerald
Everybody probably already knew what moving the goalposts meant, but with Taylor bringing in a new set of football fans, the sports-related metaphors can probably be used more widely.
Moving the goalposts is of course a reference to changing the standards in the middle of a process. Latest example: the Rockingham County School Board’s half-assed approach to banning books.
We all know the things wrong with their approach. Some of the books aren’t in the library; they haven’t read them; they can’t substantiate their claims of parental complaints; they’ve over-ruled a policy they didn’t know existed; and they’ve interfered in an educational process in which they have no training.
Two writers in The Harrisonburg Citizen have recently suggested that there are two sides to the issue or that the problem is not the book-banning but the way it’s being discussed. Giving the Fahrenheit 451 crowd this benefit of the doubt moves the goalposts toward censorship and religious domination of public discussion. There’s a reason the First Amendment is the first one, and there’s a reason its first clause says the nation won’t give special respect to an establishment of religion.
The mention of The Citizen, by the way, is to tell where the original posts can be read, for the benefit of those who want to look for them in order to judge this post. It’s not a criticism of The Citizen, which remains the premier news site in the Valley where clear thinking is concerned.
One writer describing himself as a public intellectual compares the banned works to the works of the Marquis de Sade, a little like comparing People magazine to Hustler. He then hangs his defense of the county school board on this hook. Later he refers to the cartoon oral sex in Gender/Queer, which is the go-to for censors. Don’t like To Kill a Mockingbird? Put it on a list with Gender/Queer. Don’t like the rape scene in The Fountainhead? Tell people it’s just like Gender/Queer. Take the most inflammatory scene and behave as if it’s typical of all of the books banned.
When Perks of Being a Wallflower winds up on a list with G/Q or de Sade, it’s no longer a book about a teen struggling with buried secrets and building relationships. It’s a book on that list. Teen oral sex alert! The goalposts have been moved.
Another writer vaguely refers to “legitimate concerns to be heard and a lot of common ground” and states that “vitriol, fear and outrage are not just present but encouraged.” The neutral, almost abstract tone makes it unclear if she thinks those defending literature are encouraging vitriol. She appears to describe the debate over banned books as “a tragic comedy tug of war.”
Perhaps most annoying, the writer compares the debate over book-banning in the county with the “angst and frustration” in the city about school start and stop times. The comparison is nonsense. A task force in the city studied the issue and made recommendations. They didn’t get their ideas off a Moms for Liberty website. The school board heard a presentation on the issue, is holding a public hearing, and will then discuss the issue at a meeting before voting. All of the city board members have at least a year’s experience in their jobs and all but one have more than that. They did not rush into their first meeting and start making half-assed changes without any discussion.
But the month-long process is compared to the impulsive book ban in the county and the school board’s petulant reaction to the opposition. The goalposts have been moved.
People practicing both-sideism, the Trumpian “good people on both sides” approach, trivialize the actions of Christian Nationalists and other right-wing extremists who are trying to force their religion on the rest of us. They’d have us ask January 6 vandals why they broke windows instead of asking for a key. They’d have us ask a school board member just why they won’t speak to the public about their actions. It’s a gentle, pacifist approach. That’s not the approach to take toward someone with a machete, figurative or literal.
There are two sides to the issue of “temporary removal” of books in Rockingham County. One side is people who believe government should not do things without a clear process and a clearly stated justification. The other side is banning books they haven’t read.
That goalpost isn’t moving.
Joe Fitzgerald is a former mayor of Harrisonburg. Republished with permission from Still Not Sleeping.
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