Over the past few months, parents across our state have taken to social media to share their concerns about materials in their children’s library at school. Later this month, this controversy will reach a tipping point with Utah State Board of Education Member Natalie Cline’s egregious proposed USBE policy for book banning.
Cline’s policy bans materials from school libraries indiscriminately based on parent complaints with a very complicated review process. Cline, who has denied the reality of unconscious bias or systemic discrimination, is triggered by modernity, or the reality that LGBTQ+ people, women and people of color may want power and a voice at the table. She projects her anxieties onto all of us.
While many in her camp may mock “trigger warnings” that have become ubiquitous in our society, Cline and her like cannot stand that we live in an increasingly multicultural society rather than a society dominated by powerful, white, straight, able-bodied Latter-day Saint men and women. These anxieties about our modern society explains Cline’s book ban proposals and extremely public persona. She is constantly “triggered” by reality and expresses her anger openly.
Cline is an extension of the Satanic Panic that gripped the nation in the 1980s and 1990s: repackaged outrage about changes in our society. In the 1980s, mothers felt guilt about entering the workforce. Their anxieties were projected onto daycare sexual abuse cases. Now it is the acceptance of LGBTQ+ people that propels this new panic.
Latter-day Saint leaders did little during this time to calm fears in the 1990s. Elder Boyd K. Packer compared homosexuality to incest and molestation in a General Conference address in 1990. In 1991, the LDS Church endorsed the contents of the Pace Memorandum, a 12-page report detailing victims of Satanic child abuse that were later called into question.
The LDS Church endorsed a spurious conspiracy theory. Now with book bans, accusations of ritualistic sex rings and higher rates of hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people, the LDS Church again remains silent and tacitly endorses Cline and the far-right in the process.
As more people stand up to Cline and the LDS Church, Cline and many far-right Latter-day Saints Saints dig in their heels. They want LGBTQ+ people to be quiet, Black Americans to “know their place,” and their own actions to face no accountability. They also definitely want their sociopolitical values to be state-sanctioned. No one else, in Cline’s mind, should have a say in the education of our children, especially not gay people like me who have watched as Cline endorsed people to “get out their muskets.”
But the world keeps getting better for LGBTQ+ people. More parents are accepting their children and choosing to affirm their LGBTQ+ loved ones. Last year, nearly 70% of Americans polled declared that they supported the legal rights of same-sex couples to get married, up from nearly 60% when Obergefell v. Hodges became the law of the land.
Despite a moment of Satanic Panic in which LGBTQ+ people are compared to groomers by Cline, we see brave people in our state leading the charge to hold her accountable. Cline will face her day of accountability when people in our state collectively denounce this Satanic Panic as nothing more than bigotry.
Many want to return to the 1980s with bigotry propelling policy for children in 2022. That cannot be good for our children, our state or our society. No one told Cline that modernity needed a trigger warning. We’re just living the consequences of Cline and a segment of our society having severe cultural anxieties that they project on us.
Time to fight back.
Jacob Newman
Jacob Newman was born and reared in Millcreek. He served a Latter-day Saint mission in Bangkok, Thailand. Jacob is a passionate advocate for the LGBTQ+ Mormon community. He writes for Unboxing Queer Mormonism, an exploration of the intersection of Mormonism and the LGBTQ+ Mormon experience. He and his husband of nearly six years live in Millcreek.
