Rick Brattin is a Missouri state senator representing a district outside Kansas City.
In last year’s lawmaking session, the Republican advanced an amendment to a senate bill — later signed into law by Gov. Mike Parson. Senate Bill 775 makes it a misdemeanor crime for school employees to provide “explicit sexual material” to students. Librarians or other school workers could face up to a year in jail or a $2,000 fine for violating the policy.
In a Thursday interview, Sen. Brattin told Ozarks Public Radio, “I think anyone that is a reasonable human being would say yes, there are certain things that are or they aren’t age-appropriate. And that’s what we’re trying to make sure that any materials in our districts, in our schools, and in our children’s hands is appropriate in nature for that age.”
This week, a century-old free-speech nonprofit in New York came out with a report about laws like the one Sen. Brattin helped to write.
In PEN America’s view, those laws are part of a trend of new tactics that don’t always rely on specific book bans or other censorship. They say the backlash started in the wake of protests over the death of George Floyd in 2020, and The New York Times 1619 Project reporting published the year before.
Dr. Jonathan Friedman is PEN America’s director of free expression and education programs.
"They seem to be trying to create the conditions for censorship and self-censorship in schools without necessarily including direct bans," Friedman said in a Thursday interview. "So nobody is saying ‘you can’t teach this part of history.’ Instead, what the bills are doing is saying you have to provide all parents new notifications about when you’re going to talk about something or new opportunities to opt their children of learning about certain topics.”
PEN America’s new report examines 392 bills and policies advanced by state governments over the past three years. Across the U.S., roughly 10 percent of them passed into law.
The report-writers found that Missouri led the nation in the number of so-called “intimidation” measures. Thirty-one bills were introduced over the past three lawmaking sessions, all but two of them by Republican lawmakers. Just one — the bill linked to Sen. Brattin — made it to the governor’s desk.
For Sen. Brattin, that’s a good thing.
“First and foremost, you do not have a First Amendment right with a child to, you know, show them or force upon them required reading material that is highly graphic and sexual in nature," Sen. Brattin said.
But for PEN America, laws like Senate Bill 775 create a climate of fear and undermine core American values enshrined in the First Amendment. Friedman says while individual parents may rightly have concerns for their own child, it’s another matter to deny access to learning materials for all of the other children.
Friedman said, “It’s that view that I think is really uncompromising, and the one we are trying to take on here, which is spreading. And it’s spreading not only about schools, we have seen this idea be floated about public libraries, in some states, and as well as about universities.”
Several months after Senate Bill 775 took effect, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of two Missouri library associations, asserting that the law infringed on free-speech and other rights of school employees, especially school librarians.
Senator Brattin told Ozarks Public Radio he thinks the lawsuit is shameful. Federal records show the matter is currently working its way through the courts.
