I had thought I’d turn this month’s column to something a little more light-hearted when I saw an old AITA post from Reddit making the rounds on social media again this week. In the post, a man asks whether he’s the asshole because, after years of crushing rejection from literary agents and publishers, he’s taken his wife’s novel manuscript, self-published it, and presented it to her family and friends for their support of her endeavors. This was against her wishes to pursue a traditional publishing arrangement. Obviously the asshole, and the lit community has had a blast roasting this poster while diving into the thicket of self-publishing v. traditional publishing, copyright law, and all the attendant questions the post inspires. As interesting and important as those questions remain, I can’t help but instead return to the news out of Cobb County this month, which continues to spiral around the aftermath of book bannings and the firing of Katie Rinderle.
As I wrote last month, Rinderle was terminated by her superintendent and sent before the school board for reading My Shadow Is Purple to her fifth-grade class. In the interim, CNN reports, a three person tribunal appointed by the Cobb County Board of Education “issued a non-binding rejection of the superintendent’s recommendation to terminate Rinderle.” Despite the tribunal’s recommendation (and its ruling that Rinderle had not violated the board’s insubordination policies though conceding she might have run afoul of the divisive concepts law), the School Board voted 4 to 3 to terminate Rinderle’s contract. Responding to that ruling, Rinderle’s lawyer, Craig Goodmark, reminds us that although she is one of the first teachers fired under the divisive concepts law, “it’s not the only thing happening in Georgia, teachers are censoring themselves.”
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