Augusta County Second Amendment guy wants to protect schoolkids from … books?

Augusta County is so, so lucky that a rando named Jeremy Nance appointed himself the book czar for the county school system.

This Nance fellow, per a story in the News Leader, is responsible for three of the four books that have been banned from public schools in Augusta County.

Interesting note here: Nance doesn’t have any children in the school system.

He says he’s speaking up for “single moms, single parents who don’t have time to go to the school board” and teachers who are “afraid of retaliation.”

Of course he is.

What this Nance dude is, actually, is a far, far right political activist.

A quick Google search tells us that Nance, back in 2019, threatened a boycott of Mill Street Grill, a Downtown Staunton restaurant owned by City Councilman Terry Holmes, because Holmes signaled that he wouldn’t support a Second Amendment sanctuary resolution being pushed by the local far, far right.

Guns, guns and more guns, but books – like the award-winning Golden Boy, by Abigail Tarttelin, about an intersex teenager – books are dangerous.

The objection that Nance has to Golden Boy is a pages-long graphic rape scene involving an adult and the teen protagonist.

As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse by an adult, the problem I have here is, not the book with the rape scene, but the political activist guy who thinks that just pretending the bad stuff that is perpetrated upon kids doesn’t happen means, you know, it doesn’t happen.

We see this phenomenon with another book that this Nance fellow objected to, The Swallows, by Lisa Lutz, which challenges the “boys will be boys” hierarchy in a fictional high school, the problem here being, if you’re a far, far right activist, “boys will be boys” is your favorite ex-president raping a woman in a department store dressing room and then claiming she isn’t his type.

“It’s a shame books like this are still in there,” Nance told the Augusta County School Board as he raised his objections.

Sure, it is.

But the real shame is that we have a school board here that gives a guy like a Jeremy Nance the power that he has.

This is your daily reminder that elections matter. The school board’s chair, David Shiflett, is leading an effort to review the school system’s guidelines to “make sure that the materials that are in our libraries are age-appropriate for the students that have access to them.”

That review is on the agenda for the Augusta County School Board meeting on Thursday night.

You can bet that the review will end with the board empowering more Jeremy Nances to make sure that kids in Augusta County are protected from the uncomfortable realities of the world that we live in.

Well, except for the uncomfortable reality of gun violence.

It boggles the mind that there’s a Jeremy Nance who thinks it’s more traumatic to read a book than it is to have to walk through a metal detector at the entrance to the school and have armed deputies patrolling the halls, but that’s where we are.