A page from I Am Jazz, co-written by Jessica Herthel and transgender teen Jazz Jennings.
Normally, when I think of Mount Horeb, I think of trolls. The trollway, the Grumpy Troll, those trolls in Middleton who stole away the Mustard Museum. But today, I see Mount Horeb as a community that has come together to defeat some hateful trolls from Florida.
It’s been a rough few weeks in the news — the attacks in California and Paris, the release of the video of Laquan McDonald’s murder and the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado Springs.
In the middle of all of this, the Mount Horeb School District decided to cancel a reading of I Am Jazz after being threatened with a lawsuit by the Liberty Counsel, a Christian legal advocacy group. Now, I know a book reading probably isn’t a life and death matter like the other stories making the news, but it pushed me over the edge. If we can’t read a book about tolerance and acceptance without threatening a lawsuit, what hope do we have to solve our society’s other problems?
I Am Jazz is the true story of Jazz Jennings, a transgender youth. It’s a cute and touching book. You’d have to be pretty damn hateful to believe that the book is doing anything like exposing children to a “psychological and moral disorder.” Except that’s exactly what Liberty Counsel claims in its letter to the district.
Really, threatening legal action over a children’s book? TLC, of all channels, made a TV show based on I Am Jazz. Come on, the religious right got like a billion seasons of Duggars out of TLC. Can’t they let this one pass?
So I thought this was going to be another case where humanity’s inability to see other human beings as human beings was going to win out. But, happily, Mount Horeb proved me wrong. Since they can’t host the reading in the school, they hosted a couple outside of the school. Nearly 600 people showed up for a reading Wednesday night at the Mount Horeb Library. Co-author Jessica Herthel flew in from California to read the book.
This lawsuit backfired against Liberty Counsel and is showing Mount Horeb as a loving, caring community where people look out for each other and stand up for each other. While the Wisconsin Legislature debates a ghastly discriminatory bill that would segregate school bathrooms, Mount Horeb displays the Wisconsin values I grew up with.
As in Scandinavian folklore, Mount Horeb defeated the trolls with the power of light.
