<!–

–>

November 13, 2023

Tania Galiñanes is a martyr to the aspirational job of being a school librarian, driven out by the draconian dictates of Governor Ron DeSantis and his inquisitors in the Florida legislature. Thanks to them, she can no longer put sexual or racially divisive content before young children. Those restrictions, according to a loving profile in the Washington Post, make her job untenable.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”); } }); }); }

I don’t think I can do better than to give you the first two paragraphs from the WaPo’s teary essay because they so perfectly set the tone for what is to come:

It was her last Monday morning in the library, and when Tania Galiñanes walked into her office and saw another box, she told herself that this would be the last one.

Inside were books. She didn’t know how many, or what they were, only that she would need to review each one by hand for age-appropriate material and sexual content as defined by Florida law, just as she’d been doing for months now with the 11,600 books on the shelves outside her door at Tohopekaliga High School.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609270365559-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”); } }); }); }

Can you feel it? Can you feel the sheer horror of making sure that high school students, some of whom are as young as thirteen, are not being exposed to sexualized material?

Image by Andrea Widburg using an AI prompt.

But that’s not all. On her last day at the school, Tania’s being burdened by another DeSantis mandate, one intended to stifle her freedoms as a librarian:

She’d wanted to get to the box right away, but now she saw one of the school administrators at her door, asking whether she’d heard about the latest education mandate in Florida.

“What’s the name of this thing?” he said. “Freedom Week?”

She exhaled loudly. “Freedom Week.”

“Oh, good,” he said. “You know about this.”