Students at Pentagon schools sue Hegseth over book bans on race and gender

Twelve students studying in Pentagon schools in the US and around the world are suing the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, over the book bans he has instigated to remove titles on race and gender from their libraries.

A lawsuit lodged on the students’ behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Tuesday argues that their first amendment rights are being irreparably harmed. The complaint says that the censorship has been applied system-wide across Pentagon schools, and was endangering children by preventing them from learning critical information about health, hygiene, biology and abuse.

The legal action targets Hegseth, the former Fox News host, who has been aggressively pursuing the censorship drive as part of Donald Trump’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). It also names as a defendant the head of the Pentagon school system, Beth Schiavino-Narvaez.

It blames both for violating the students’ first amendment rights by culling library books, and by making curricula changes such as cancelling Women’s and Black History month.

At the center of the lawsuit is the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA), the federal school system that runs kindergarten through 12th grade schools. It serves about 67,000 children of both active-duty and civilian personnel in the US military.

Though the schools are run by the Pentagon, they are civilian in status and as such their students have the same first amendment rights as any other US child. The 12 students acting as plaintiffs in the case come from five families ranging from pre-kindergarten to high school in DoDEA schools in the US, Italy and Japan.

“The quality of children’s education, their exposure to ideas and the preparing of citizens in the next generation are all being harmed by this censorship,” said Emerson Sykes, the ACLU’s senior staff attorney and the lead counsel in the case.

He added: “This is not how public schools are supposed to work – students have a right to learn and to access information that should be above the political fray.”

The Guardian reported in February that thousands of children in Pentagon schools had had their access to library books dealing with race and gender barred under a sweeping review ordered by Hegseth. The move was prompted by two of Donald Trump’s executive orders – Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling – which are both designed to eviscerate DEI from the federal government.

The ACLU lawsuit has been lodged in the week in which the Pentagon widened its censorship drive from DoD schools to colleges by removing almost 400 titles from the US Naval Academy library. About 381 books were taken off Naval Academy shelves, with Hegseth citing the same Trump executive orders.

The volumes included Maya Angelou’s celebrated autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and many titles relating to race and LGBTQ+ rights. Meanwhile, two copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf were allowed to remain in the library, the New York Times reported this week.

The ACLU’s legal action has been lodged in a federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, where the DoDEA is headquartered. It calls for the immediate reinstatement of removed books and curricula to school library shelves and classrooms.

The complaint reveals new details about the books culled under the purge. About 61 books were taken off shelves at a high school in Japan, including A Queer History of the United States, which is taught in AP psychology courses and won the 2012 Stonewall Book Award.

In a DoDEA elementary school in Italy, 25 books were removed. One was a picture book about a boy who makes a mermaid costume, titled Julian is a Mermaid.

The suit also reveals that children’s yearbook entries have begun to be scrubbed for content related to gender. A letter from management was circulated around Pentagon schools saying that “student yearbooks are not to include any visual depictions, written content, or editorial choices that would directly or indirectly support the instruction, advancement, and/or promotion of ‘gender ideology’ and/or ‘social transition’.”

Any student engaging in one of the several protests and walkouts against the book bans that have been staged in Pentagon schools have been warned that they face disciplinary action.

The library books that fell foul of this week’s purge at the Navy Academy illuminate the speech to which Trump and his cohorts object. Most of the titles concern gay rights, gender identity or race relations in America.

Among the titles caught in the censorship dragnet is Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America. The book was written by Juan Williams, who as Fox News’s senior political analyst is a former colleague of Hegseth’s.

In a statement to the Guardian, Williams was critical of the removal of his book. He said: “A friend told me to put a sticker on the cover to let readers know the book is so powerful it had been banned by the Trump Administration. That is a joke but it gets to the point that book bans are the work of weak minds trying to limit growing minds.”

Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor, also had one of his books removed. Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, looks at the history and application of what is described as ​​the “nuclear bomb of racial epithets”.

Kennedy told the Guardian that the Trump administration was engaged in a “destructive assault on civil liberties. Libraries, schools, law firms, museums, news media and other institutions that display any smidgen of independence and depart from Trumpian orthodoxy can expect to be targeted.”

He added that he suspected that Trump’s incursion into civil liberties will turn out to be even worse than the anti-communist purges conducted by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

Geraldine Brooks, a Pulitzer-prize winning author, responded on Facebook to the inclusion of her historical novel Horse on the banned list.

“I am proud that Horse is on the list of fine books which Hegseth just ordered removed from the library,” she wrote.

As the title implies, Horse features a thoroughbred racehorse in the antebellum south. That sounds anodyne, but what the Trump administration appears to have objected to is that the story is set against the legacy of slavery.

Animals figure bizarrely frequently in the banned Naval Academy list. Another censored title is Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs.

As with Horse, it is the underlying context that appears to have upset Hegseth and Trump. The author of Good Boy, Jennifer Finney Boylan, is a transgender activist.

In an email to the Guardian, Boylan said that she had two possible explanations about the censorship of her book: “It might be because it is a book about dogs, and we know President Trump hates dogs. And why shouldn’t he? They are famously excellent judges of character.”

The second possible reason was that “he doesn’t like transgender people either, and the fact that I have lived a happy life, loved by not only dogs but humans, too, seems like an injustice to him.”

She added: “I hope Trump will consider actually reading some of the books he has removed from the Naval Academy, and that his heart may be opened by them. Failing that, I hope he’ll get a dog.”