One morning in February 2022, about a year into the nationwide backlash against school lessons on racism, gender, and sexuality, my phone was buzzing with missed calls from numbers I didn’t recognize. NBC News had just published an article I’d written about the new wave of attempted book bans that was hitting school districts across the nation. I knew the piece would be a conversation starter, but the people trying to reach me that morning, I would soon learn, weren’t interested in dialogue.
One of the callers followed up with a text identifying herself as a concerned mother and asking me to call. She said she wanted to discuss my article, which opened with the story of a queer 17-year-old student in Katy, Texas. The girl, unnamed in the piece, had told me that, because her parents opposed homosexuality, her school library was the one place where she felt free to read books that reflected her experiences as an L.G.B.T.Q. teen. Now she felt that was under attack.
About an hour after the barrage of calls and texts, another mom e-mailed to say she was reaching out on behalf of several Katy parents who were “gravely concerned” that I’d spoken to a 17-year-old about her “sexual preferences.”
“This is the crux of our argument,” she wrote. “The exploitation of children and their sexuality. Speaking to a child in this way is one of the initial steps taken when adults groom minors. We feel this is grounds to file a police report … for soliciting a minor.”
After nearly two decades in journalism, I’d gotten used to hate mail. Like most reporters, I’ve been called biased or fake news—but never a child sexual predator. The accusation and threat hit like a punch to the gut, momentarily knocking the wind out of me.
The mom’s message was part of a worrying nationwide pattern, which I document in my new book, They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms. As politicians and activists in recent years have pushed incendiary and unsupported claims about teachers and librarians and their supposed mission to indoctrinate and sexualize children, some parents began to view educators, school-board members, neighbors—and the journalists covering it all—in a dark and disturbing light.
“Speaking to a child in this way is one of the initial steps taken when adults groom minors.”
The phrase “O.K., groomer” has become a popular right-wing insult, used as a weapon against anyone who defends classroom discussions and books dealing with gender identity, sex, or sexual orientation. Under this framing, teachers and librarians who argue that it’s important to allow children access to a wide range of age-appropriate books, including those depicting L.G.B.T.Q. characters, are no longer regarded as well-intentioned educators with whom some parents happen to disagree; they are accused, like I was, of being child predators.
Every week we learn more about the consequences of the new us vs. them, good vs. evil depiction of local school politics and policy. In this climate, many teachers have quietly amended lesson plans in an act of self-preservation, avoiding mention of L.G.B.T.Q. identities or ugly chapters from America’s past.
Others have left the profession. “I’m no saint,” a 55-year-old North Texas school librarian tells me of her recent decision to quit in the middle of the school year. “I got out because I was afraid to stand up to the attacks. I didn’t want to get caught in somebody’s snare. Who wants to be called a pornographer? Who wants to be accused of being a pedophile, or reported to the police for putting a book in a kid’s hand?”
I’d learned firsthand the power of such a loaded accusation—a small taste of what many teachers and librarians across the country have endured in recent years.
Later, I discovered that the woman who’d threatened to report me to the police was not just any parent. She was a leader in her local chapter of Citizens Defending Freedom, an activist group that’s on a mission to assert “America’s biblical founding and Judeo-Christian ideals” in public schools nationally. Its members have protested outside drag performances and alongside members of neo-Fascist militant groups such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, and pushed to place Christian pastors and symbols inside public schools.
I don’t know if she and her friends ever followed through with calling the cops on me, but the truth is, it didn’t matter. The baseless allegation had done its damage. I felt sick all day afterward, and for the first time in my career, I began to question when the next threat might arrive, and whom it might harm, and whether I could continue to do this work under that cloud.
Mike Hixenbaugh is a national reporter at NBC
