CINCINNATI — A school board member in Ohio who is active in the ongoing GOP campaign to ban books deemed "pornographic" from libraries across the country is resisting pressure to resign after she shared a link to an actual porn website during one of her morality tirades on Facebook.
Lakota Local Schools board member Darbi Boddy doubled down yesterday in another post, noting she is “not going to apologize for putting these sites up and I don’t regret putting them up. A light needs to be shined on this material. I urge the community to examine them and ask yourself if you want to know whether they are in your school or not.”
Boddy insisted that her original post provided context for “possible future curriculum reviews” for which she is advocating.
“I posted multiple links in my response, three to be precise, that are being distributed to children in Ohio schools that are filled with sexual material that is disgusting and entirely inappropriate for children,” Boddy explained. “One link that has the same name as the link that the board has used to justify this shameful emergency meeting was posted because I had accidentally put an extra 'T' in the spelling. It was an unfortunate error because once you look at the sites that I meant to put up, and that are still up, and will stay up, you will see they need no embellishment to rise to the highest level of disgust.”
The religious conservative activist and school board member — who does not send her children to the district’s schools, and boasts, “I homeschool my children because I want to incorporate the teachings of Jesus within the curriculum” — had posted on her Facebook page links to terms and sites she seeks to ban from public schools.
These included “Syntero Healthy Bodies, scarleteen.com, bedsider.org, discussion about masturbating, sex toys, anything taught besides abstinence.”
The problem appears to be that Boddy’s original post misspelled “scarleteen.com” — the name of a well-respected, sex-positive resource for teens — and the resulting link led to an adult website.
Complicating matters, Boddy continues insisting that, regardless of the typo, the Lakota School District is actually teaching “pornography” to students.
Proponents of censorship have shown no evidence that any school in the country is exposing teens to actual pornography, instead offering as examples books largely dealing with LGBTQ+ and race issues, of which they also disapprove, and books that occasionally include mention of sexual situations.
One of Boddy’s self-exculpatory posts claims that “the pornography that’s being taught in our classrooms around the country is disgusting and I am glad to see individuals who have been quiet about it being very animated. One of the pornographic sites that was put in my communication, as part of my list of what to look for in our schools, was a typo and although it was not meant to be part of my communication, it is still representative of the disgusting material that is being put in front of our children. If a typo brings more attention to this problem so be it. Check it out our self and see what you think [—] Scarleteen.com.”
“The school board held an emergency meeting Wednesday afternoon at which it voted to censure Boddy and request her resignation,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, adding that Boddy then “walked out in the middle of the meeting with her young daughter.”
It is unclear why Boddy brought her child to a hearing dealing with the sharing of pornographic websites through her own social media.
"I will not be part of this political ruse," she said as she walked out.
