It’s not just David. Check out what else folks have been banning Florida:

Disney’s anti-racism film Ruby Bridges is the subject of a complaint brought by a Florida parent who claims the movie is not appropriate for second-graders, because it might teach them that “white people hate Black people”.

The film, which tells the story of a six-year-old girl who integrated New Orleans schools in the 1960s, has been a staple of school curriculums during Black History Month in the state’s Tampa-area county of Pinellas.

We began to frame our response to this, but we find that someone else has done a whole lot better than we could.

Over to you, Charles Blow, in the NYTimes:

“The school banned the film until it could be reviewed. So I decided to review the film myself.

First, here’s a refresher on Ruby: When she integrated that school, she had to be escorted by federal marshals. She was met by throngs of white racists — adults! — jeering, hurling epithets, spitting at her and threatening her life. Parents withdrew their children.

Only one teacher would teach her, so every day that 6-year-old girl had to be in class by herself, save for the teacher, and eat lunch alone.

Ruby became afraid to eat because one of the protesters threatened to poison her. Her father lost his job, and the local grocery asked that her family not come back to the store.”

Imagine that for a moment. Put your own dudgeon, if it’s rising, aside. Think about your child, age 6, in such a place, with such hatred surrounding her. Think about the courage it took for her parents to ask this of her and to brave the backlash. Ruby Bridges is a national hero, who earned her spot in the pantheon of American Greatness.

Back to Mr. Blow:

“All of this was endured by a Black first grader, but now a Florida parent worries that it’s too much for second graders to hear, see and learn about…

But in Florida, the point isn’t the protection of children but the deceiving of them. It’s to fight so-called woke indoctrination with a historical whitewash.

And the state has given individual parents extraordinary authority as foot soldiers in this campaign: In this case, a single objecting parent is apparently enough to have a lesson about our very recent history questioned or even banned. Remember: Bridges isn’t some ancient figure in a dusty textbook, she’s alive and well today. She’s 12 years younger than my own mother.”

Not the protection of children, but the deceiving of them.

“Giving so few parents so much power to take educational options away from other parents and children runs counter to the spirit of democracy and free inquiry, and enshrines a form of parental tyranny of the hypersensitive, the inexplicably aggrieved and the maliciously oppressive.

How is one parent’s feelings enough to put education on hold? How is that liberty?

It portends an era of bedlam in Florida’s schools, all courtesy of extremist state legislators’ and Gov. Ron DeSantis’s quixotic war on wokeness.

What happens if this glove gets turned inside out and minority parents begin to complain about the teaching of other aspects of American history and culture?

What happens if they reject lessons or books about Thomas Jefferson because he raped a teenage girl he enslaved, Sally Hemings, and was the father of her children, including at least one born while she was a child herself. (For the record, I consider all sex between enslavers and those they enslaved rape, because it was impossible for the enslaved to consent.)

Will they call that “cancel culture”? Is cancelling only something the other side does?

What happens if a parent objects to a school celebrating Columbus Day because Christopher Columbus was a maniacal colonizer who sold young girls as sex slaves?

We can feel the pants coming on…

What happens if parents object to books about and celebrations of Thanksgiving because the standard portrayal of the first Thanksgiving as a meeting among friends who came together to share bounty and overcome difference is a fairy tale?

What if they object to the Bible itself, which includes rape, incest, torture and murder?

In Central Bucks, the Bible is on the list of challenged books, FYI.

History is full of horribleness. We do ourselves and our children no favors pretending otherwise.

Learning about human cruelty is necessarily uncomfortable. It is in that discomfort that our empathy is revealed and our righteousness awakened.

It can also be argued that discomfort is one of the hallmarks of a thorough education. As one professor in our lives put it about a difficult student in the past: “I was doing what I was trained and hired to do: to place obstacles in the path of the joyous feet of the young.”

These debates continue to center on the discomfort of white children, but seem to ignore the feelings of Black children, discomfort or otherwise.

As I watched the film, I was incredibly uncomfortable, sometimes angry, sometimes near tears as I revisited Ruby’s story.

Raise your hand if you’d be interested in a community screening of this movie.

How did that happen? How do we honor that moment, condemning the cruelty of the racists and exalting her bravery? And how do we address the effect of racial discrimination on the American experience?

If an accurate depiction of white racism and cruelty is a metric by which educational instruction and materials can be banned, how is a true and full teaching of American history possible?

Pause and think about that. If accuracy disqualifies it, how can we tell the truth?

Maybe distortion is the point. It’s the resurrection of a Lost Cause moment in which a revisionist history is crafted to rehabilitate Southern racists.

At least it serves to center the feelings of some of us while marginalizing the feelings of others. Are some people’s sensitive feelings so important that they cancel the truth?

The wave of censorship we’re seeing also invokes, for me, the “slave” Bible, an abridged text used in the 1800s in the West Indies to try to pacify the enslaved. Passages that evoked liberation were cut and passages that supported slavery were kept. It was a tool of psychological warfare masquerading as sacred text.

We never learned of the “slave” Bible in school. We never learned much about enslavement, either. We never knew the Japanese were interned during WWII, although fathers of our friends fought in the war. We never learned of the Pavonia massacre of Lenni Lenape families, so nearby. So much was whitewashed and we do not thank our schools for offering us that distorted picture of our past.

Florida is engaged in similar psychological warfare. Its battlegrounds are race, gender and sexuality, and it is napalming inclusive narratives.

Why? Why can we not unite? Remember E Pluribus Unum?

The state’s crusading censors are choosing the comfort of ignorance over the inconvenience of truth.

Join Advocates for Inclusive Education. Let us include all of us, ALL the great Americans including Ruby Bridges and her family and friends, in our knowing and our doing.

We owe you, Ms. Bridges.