Three months ago, Josiah Kemp, a transgender teenager living in Hunterdon County, NJ, made the decision to leave his home church. Kemp did not quit Christianity, he said, but he needed to stop attending services at a church that was openly opposed to LGBTQ people like him.

“What I kind of realized is that my church and my God are not the same,” Kemp told Sojourners. “They’re connected, but leaving the church doesn’t affect leaving God behind.”

Soon after, Kemp faced another challenge as he considered organizing his peers to resist the proposed ban on LGBTQ books in his high school library. Ultimately, Kemp and his peers organized, spoke out against — and rejected — the proposals.

At a September meeting of the North Hunterdon-Voorhees Regional School District School Board, residents turned out to demand that many books be removed from high school libraries in the district. The list of books they wanted to ban included This book is gay; Fun Home: A Tragicomic Family; Gender Queer; Not all boys are blue; and lawn boy.

At three school board meetings in the months that followed, parents argued that the sexual content of the books constituted “pornographic” material that had no place in schools.

Many parents cited their Christian values ​​and rights as reasons they spoke out against the books. One resident claimed the books went against the intent of the “founding fathers” of the public education system and said schools instead teach children to “hate God, hate their country, and hate themselves.” same”.

Kemp isn’t surprised that people are showing up in droves to speak out against LGBTQ people; his childhood experience taught him to expect this opposition.

“People feel this need to become these saviors and to make other people Christians,” Kemp said.

In addition to attempting to ban books with LGBTQ themes, residents at these gatherings have also complained about anti-racist books and authors, such as Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Parents who object to books referencing sexuality, gender and race are not unique to Hunterdon County. The Evangelical Family Research Council regularly uses social media to call back parents to speak out at local school board meetings and runs school board boot camps to teach people how to run for office in their own local school board. My Faith Votes, a Christian organization chaired by former Republican Arkansas governor and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee, posts similar articles on its website urging believers to raise their voices at school board meetings or sit in office. themselves to the councils.

Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, an organization dedicated to making K-12 schools safe for LGBTQ youth, said banning books that represent the LGBTQ community is detrimental to all students; it “excludes a future that includes us all”.

Willingham-Jaggers’ mother – a former nun – taught them a “social justice view of faith”, one that emphasized people coming together to understand each other. Although they no longer identify as a person of faith, Willingham-Jaggers thinks faith should support a “liberating view of society” that asks, “How do we love and support children? How do we make justice, love, and people who are fed up the center of our practice?

Casey Pick, senior advocacy and government affairs researcher for The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth, said denying students access to information can hurt their mental health. A 2020 study by The Trevor Project found that when students learned about LGBTQ issues in schools, their chances of attempting suicide decreased by 23%. The study also found that when an LGBTQ student has at least one supportive person in their life, their chances of committing suicide drop by 40%.

Pick said schools and libraries should provide “a free discussion of ideas where everyone can feel safe to be who they are.”

“Silence really doesn’t help anyone, and it’s never succeeded in silencing ideas or suppressing books. It only ever hurt,” Pick said.

The Trevor Project is working with Q Christian Fellowship, a ministry serving the LGBTQ community, on The Good Fruit Project, a faith-based guide to the harms of conversion therapy. Q Christian provides resources to help Christian families accept their children unconditionally, regardless of their sexual or gender identity. Nathanial Green, director of communications for Q Christian, said positive LGBTQ representation is essential to the healthy and unhindered growth of gay children.

Some proposals would ban “sexually explicit” content in books like Gender Queer: A Memoir — which include depictions of masturbation and early sexual experiences. Green asks what the long-term effect would be if libraries banned LGBTQ books with sexual content.

“remove [these books] worth the loss for children who might otherwise be made aware of their own experiences [and have their] validated feelings? said Green.

When Kemp learned of the book ban, he wondered if he should put another project on the plates of his busy classmates. But, as president of his high school’s Gay Straight Alliance, a club that LGBTQ and straight students join to support each other, he decided he had to do something. He emailed GSA members and their allies, and the group held an emergency meeting, practicing speeches which they then delivered to the school board at its meetings. October, November and January.

Alex Ford, a second-year student at North Hunterdon Secondary School, was one of the students preparing a speech for a school board meeting in favor of bookkeeping. Her experience as a transgender teenager initially soured her view of religion.

“[Family members] constantly tried to pray with me [so] that I wasn’t trans, I wasn’t gay, which really hurt my ideas about religion,” Ford said. “And for a very long time, I was anti-religious. [I thought] all religions should be like that.

Ford changed his outlook on religion after learning that some of his close friends were religious.

“I’m glad I’m not like that anymore,” he said. “I’m more open-minded. I say to myself: ‘They act like that, but that does not include all religions.’ »

On January 25, after four months of testimony from students, parents and a local group called the NH-V Intellectual Freedom Fighters, the North Hunterdon-Voorhees Regional High School District Board of Education voted to not ban any of the books in question. .

Jude Gepp, a sophomore at North Hunterdon, was one of the students to come to the defense of This book is gay at the January 25 board meeting.

“I don’t think taking the Lord’s name in vain means saying ‘Oh my God,'” Gepp told Sojourners. “I think it’s meant to advise against using the name of the Lord to justify unwarranted hatred.”