A group of military and veterans’ spouses is joining forces to advocate against book bans at Defense Department schools, service academies and elsewhere within the military.
While starting small -- the group has six core members -- the organization they've dubbed Military Families for Free Expression has plans for virtual events and "activations" in communities around military bases with the goal of educating other military families about the book bans and empowering them to speak out.
"I can't believe the irony is lost on anyone that our service members who protect and defend, serve the Constitution, which houses our free speech right and our access to these books and these publications, they might have that same right limited for themselves and their families," said Kelly Wilson, one of the founding members of Military Families for Free Expression and the wife of a Navy veteran.
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Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has been cracking down on anything it deems to have an undue emphasis on diversity.
At the Department of Defense Education Activity schools that serve military children and service academies that are preparing the next generation of military officers, that crackdown has largely played out by officials pulling from library shelves books that focus on minorities, women and LGBTQ+ people.
In May, the Pentagon expanded the book banning effort with a memo directing all military branches to scrub their libraries of materials "promoting divisive concepts and gender ideology."
The memo also created an "Academic Libraries Committee" to review the books that are pulled from the libraries to make a final decision on what to do with the books. And it listed search words to use to find books to pull, including "affirmative action," "discrimination," "gender identity" and "white privilege."
The May memo, in particular, spurred conversations among a network of military spouses that resulted in the formation of Military Families for Free Expression, or MFFE, said Kellie Artis, another of the group's founding members.
"We started calling ourselves the anti-committee committee because the initial impetus was the May 9 memo that came out standing up the Academic Libraries Committee," Artis said. "This shouldn't be a thing, first of all. Second of all, we don't agree with this. We want to put some pressure on that."
The group publicly launched late last month with a post on the blogging website Substack.
The Substack page has generated some interest from other military families who want to get involved with MFFE, but the group is expecting its bigger public launch to be a webinar it is tentatively planning for later this month, Artis said.
"Just informing people. What are we even upset about? Why is this bad?" Artis said of what the webinar will be about. "And then what people can do on a local level, whether it's with their own lawmakers or whether it's on base. Is there a structure on base where they can lodge complaints or ask questions about processes? ... Little things that you can do to inject yourself in the process, be a bit more civically engaged in that way."
After the webinar, the group is eyeing in-person events, likely near but not on military bases. Artis pointed to a Naval Academy graduate who raised money to buy and distribute copies of books that had been removed from academy libraries as inspiration for the type of activities MFFE could do.
Wilson, a lawyer whose professional experience includes high-profile issues such as being part of former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher's legal team and helping draft an early version of the military family housing tenant's bill of rights, said opposing the book bans should not be a partisan issue.
"The short term is to educate people on why this is important and to get more information from people in positions of leadership that are involved in this process, because right now there's no transparency," Wilson said. "Long term would be ... to help people understand that these rights are integral to our country and who we are, and we cannot cherry-pick them in their application."
"We have to protect these rights no matter what," she said. "And I really think that we can help people understand that, regardless of what side of the political aisle you find yourself, we need to protect these rights."
MFFE is the latest way military families are pushing back on the book bans.
Students at DODEA schools have staged several walkouts in protest of the book bans and other anti-diversity efforts, and a handful of families protested during Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's visit to a base in Germany in February.
Six military families represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union also filed a lawsuit against the DODEA and the Pentagon over a range of anti-diversity actions, including the book bans.
In court filings last month in response to the lawsuit, DODEA officials acknowledged that 555 books have been pulled from shelves for "further review," along with 41 classroom materials. The filing downplayed the removals, noting that they represent 0.1% of DODEA's library books and 0.01% of classroom materials.
"As ample case law shows, curating a library collection or developing a teaching curriculum is an act of government speech," Justice Department lawyers wrote in a filing last month. "It is therefore not subject to rigorous scrutiny under the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause. Even if that were not the case, plaintiffs cannot establish that DODEA schools' reviews were motivated by any impermissible reason other than a pedagogical concern for its schoolchildren."
At a hearing in the lawsuit last week, a federal judge ordered the government to produce a full list of all the materials removed from DODEA schools, according to an order posted to the court docket. The deadline to submit the list is this week.
Meanwhile, at the Naval Academy, all but about 20 of the nearly 400 books that were removed earlier this year have been returned to shelves, officials said last month.
MFFE is keeping an eye on the ACLU lawsuit but does not want to do anything to get in the way of it, Artis said.
For its effort, MFFE has sought advice from some larger free speech and anti-book ban groups, including American Booksellers for Free Expression and National Coalition Against Censorship.
"I've just tried to give them some sense of what the national landscape is like in terms of book bans, so that can mean what's happening in school districts, but also what's happening legislatively," said Philomena Polefrone, associate director of American Bookseller for Free Expression. "I think this group can do some really important work in raising awareness and just getting back to common sense curation practices in libraries."
Lee Rowland, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, similarly commended MFFE for "upholding the best of American traditions" and "the full essence of the Constitution."
"Book bans are pernicious wherever they happen, but there is a particularly insidious aspect to banning words and ideas in an institution that is designed to defend American values," Rowland said. "Because at the core of those values is the Constitution, the First Amendment and a commitment against censorship and for liberty. And book bans undermine all of those values. And while they're always bad, it does feel particularly pernicious and dangerous in a military context."
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