Monthly Archives: November 2024

Escambia County School Board members face testifying in a books case

Reversing an October decision in a legal battle over access to books, a federal judge this week ruled that Escambia County School Board members must testify about the removal of books from school libraries because the officials are not shielded by what is known as “legislative privilege.”

U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell’s ruling Wednesday complicates litigation about school book removals in the Panhandle county, which has become a battleground amid controversy in Florida and other states about removing or restricting access to children’s books.
READ MORE: Florida Department of Education releases list of over 700 banned books in K-12 schools

Lawyers for the board members had sought to shield them from having to testify in the lawsuit filed last year by parents, authors, the publishing company Penguin Random House, and the free speech group PEN American Center, Inc. U.S. Magistrate Judge Zachary C. Bolitho last month agreed that the board members were protected by legislative privilege.

But reversing Bolitho’s ruling, Wetherell pointed to previous court rulings establishing guidelines for determining whether board members’ decisions to remove or restrict books were legislative acts.

“Under those standards, even though the school board’s decision to remove or restrict a book has some hallmarks of a legislative act (e.g., voting after debate at a public meeting), it is functionally an administrative act,” Wetherell wrote.

A book removal or restriction decision is “based on specific facts (the content of the book)” and is “more akin to a permitting or employment termination decision,” which courts have held to be administrative acts because officials are following already-established guidelines, the Pensacola-based judge added.

“The fact that school board members must exercise discretion, engage in ‘line-drawing,’ and make ‘policy judgments’ when deciding whether a particular book is educationally suitable, grade-level appropriate, etc., does not change the fact that they are applying policy, not formulating it when doing so,” Wetherell’s ruling said.
Wetherell’s decision was at odds not only with Bolitho’s ruling in the same case but also conflicted with a ruling by U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor in a separate lawsuit challenging Escambia County school officials’ removal of the children’s book “And Tango Makes Three.” That book tells the story of two male penguins who raised a penguin chick at New York’s Central Park Zoo. Co-authors Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson and a student identified by the initials B.G. are challenging the removal of the book, contending, at least in part, that it was targeted for depicting same-sex parents raising a child.

Winsor in September ruled that legislative privilege shielded Escambia board members from having to give depositions in the “And Tango Makes Three” lawsuit. saying that a decision about removing a book from a school library “was a quintessential policy about how best to educate Escambia County children.” Bolitho’s Oct. 18 ruling relied heavily on Winsor’s decision.

“… there is a functional difference between the school board’s adoption of a policy detailing what content is generally prohibited in school library books and the board’s determination that a specific book must be removed from school libraries because it contains such content.”

U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell

Wetherell wrote that he “did not overlook” Winsor’s opinion, which said the decision to remove a particular book from school libraries “was a quintessential policy decision about how best to educate” children in the county. READ MORE: Report: Last year ended with a surge in book bans

“But the same could be said about the decision to fire or retain a particular teacher — which is indisputably an administrative act,” Wetherell wrote. “Moreover, just like there is a functional difference between the adoption of a zoning ordinance (legislative act) and the application of the ordinance to a specific permit application (administrative act), there is a functional difference between the school board’s adoption of a policy detailing what content is generally prohibited in school library books and the board’s determination that a specific book must be removed from school libraries because it contains such content.”
Wetherell’s Wednesday decision tweaked a ruling he issued Monday and formalized a verbal ruling he made during a hearing last week. Lawyers for the board members told the judge during the hearing that they intended to appeal his decision and request that it be blocked while the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals weighs the issue.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit contend that school board decisions to remove or restrict access to library books violated First Amendment and constitutional equal-protection rights.

Litigation over book removals in schools has mushroomed as Florida and other Republican-led states have made it easier for parents and other people to scrutinize books and to challenge materials that they deem unsuitable for students.

A Florida law passed in 2022 ramped up scrutiny of books and instructional materials and gave parents and members of the public increased access to the process of selecting and removing school library books. A 2023 law includes a requirement that books drawing claims of containing pornographic material or describing “sexual conduct” be removed within five days of objections and remain unavailable to students until the objections are resolved.

The Escambia County cases are among a number of lawsuits pending throughout the state about the controversial book laws.

Some of the nation’s largest book publishers joined authors and parents of high-school students in a federal lawsuit filed in August challenging the 2023 law, alleging that it unconstitutionally violates speech rights. Penguin Random House; Hachette Book Group, Inc.; HarperCollins Publishers LLC; Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC; Simon & Schuster, LLC; and Sourcebooks LLC and other plaintiffs alleged in the lawsuit that books “have been targeted for removal or removed from school libraries” throughout the state following passage of the law.

The lawsuit challenges parts of the law that prohibit books with content that “describes sexual conduct” or contain “pornographic” content. The law imposes “a regime of strict censorship in school libraries” and requires school districts to “remove library books without regard to their literary, artistic, political, scientific, or educational value when taken as a whole,” the lawsuit said.
In June, three parents filed a federal lawsuit alleging the 2023 law’s process for removing books unconstitutionally discriminates against parents who disagree with “the state’s favored viewpoint.” Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are two parents from St. Johns County and one from Orange County. They contend Florida lacks a procedure for parents to object to book removals, an unconstitutional infringement of their First Amendment rights.
Copyright 2024 WUWF

How To Make Google Docs Look Like A Book

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As the most popular word processing software on the planet, Google Docs even beats out the once-ubiquitous Microsoft Word in terms of its user base. That popularity is likely due to Docs’ cloud-centric workflow that keeps everything saved automatically and allows for real-time collaboration, as well as its unbeatable price scheme: free until you exceed 15GB of Google Drive storage. But it can take some time to get to know all the Google Docs shortcuts you need to know. When you start trying to get fancy with Docs, that’s when it can stop being as user friendly as it first appears. For example, what if you want to write a book in Docs, or at least format your work to look like a book?
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There are a couple of reasons why you might have clicked on this article. The first thing you may be looking to do is to format your Google Doc for the purposes of long-form literary writing  — in other words, you’re writing a book and want to know how it should be formatted. The other reason is to make your document “look” like a book, which is to say, you want it to have headers, page numbers, and other elements that replicate the look of pages in a book.
Making a Google Doc look like a book isn’t an intuitive process, but it is possible. While competing products like Scrivener exist for the express purpose of channeling your inner Hemingway, many writers still choose to use Docs for long-form projects, and they make it work. Either by adjusting settings manually or by using templates, you can format your Google Doc for book writing, or make it look like a book. Here’s how.
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How to use templates to make your Google Doc look like a book

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By far the easiest way to customize a Google Doc to look like a book is to use a template. Templates are presets that load particular settings, formatting, and text to get you started with a project. Think of opening a blank Google Doc like making a cake from scratch, whereas a template is cake mix.
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To use a template in Google Docs, open your web browser and navigate to https://docs.google.com. You’ll see a few templates alongside the Blank Document button at the top left of the screen. To see the full collection of available templates, click on Template Gallery at the top right underneath the search bar. You can comb through the many templates to find one that most closely matches your needs. However, at this time there aren’t any templates specifically for books in the standard list of Google Docs.
If you want to find one, many people have made their own Google Docs templates available, so you can search for one using an Internet search engine like Google or DuckDuckGo. However, do not blindly click on the first book template you find. Be careful of anything that asks for permission to access your Google account, as there’s always the possibility, however remote, of encountering a phishing operation disguised as a legitimate template.
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The official templates inside of Google Docs include a template for an MLA-formatted report. MLA standards are close enough to book formatting that these templates may suit your needs, or at least get you close enough to book formatting that you can make a few adjustments from there.

How to format your Google Doc for book writing

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If you’re an aspiring writer, you’ll eventually have to turn in your work to an agent or publisher, and they’ll expect it to look a certain way. Having the wrong formatting can send the message that you don’t know what you’re doing. How a literary manuscript should be formatted, be it a short story or a full-fat novel, varies slightly across different genres. Science-fiction and fantasy are the strictest, so you can never go wrong by adhering to the industry standard there, which follows Shunn Manuscript Format. Click that link if you want laborious detail, but here we will go over the basics. Open a new document and follow these steps.
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First, set your default font in Google Docs to Times New Roman using the font selector in the control ribbon at the top of the Docs interface. Courier New, a monospaced font, was once preferred for clerical reasons, but since computers make exact word counts easy to determine, Times New Roman is now the industry standard for readability.
Second, set your line spacing to Double using the Line & Paragraph Spacing tool in the control ribbon or under Format in the Docs menu bar. This is both for readability and markup. Set indents of 1 inch on all four sides of the page using the ruler tools on the left and top side of the Docs interface.
Do not put a page number on the first page, but do apply one to every page thereafter. You can do this by selecting Insert > Headers & Footers > Header, and then clicking the box next to Different First Page. On the second page, double-click the header, then type your last name in front of the page number. For example, mine would say, “Miller 2.”
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How to format a Google Doc to look like a book

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If you’re hoping to make your Google Doc look like a book, you can follow the steps above to achieve the general presentation of a book page with the correct margins, page numbers, and layout. If you make any mistakes, you can clear the formatting in Google Docs. You can increase the bookishness of your Doc by adding headers that will function as chapters. Simply select Title or one of the three Heading options from the Styles selector in the control ribbon near the top of the screen, select Apply, and then type your chapter title. The title will show up in the Document Tabs section of Docs, which can be accessed by clicking the icon to the left of your document that looks like a bulleted list.
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Unfortunately, the one book-like thing Google Docs cannot do is a side-by-side page layout where you view two pages alongside one another as if reading a book. For whatever reason, Google has never added this option to the software. However, if you have access to Microsoft Word, which does have this ability, you can download your Google Doc as a Word document by clicking File, then selecting Download > Microsoft Word. Open the downloaded file in Word, then click View in the Word menu up top and select Side to Side from the Page Movement section.

Book Review: Deconstructing, Leaving Church, Finding Faith

Published in October of this year, Deconstructing: Leaving the Church and Finding Faith is a book which is both an autobiography and a life-coaching guide for people struggling with their Christian beliefs or belonging.The book was written by and follows the life of Karla Kamstra, a reverend and social media star who has made her mark online by talking about faith, feminism, and the problems with Evangelicalism.

Kamstra grew up in a Kentucky church with broadly fundamentalist views of Biblical inerrancy, discouraging exploration outside of the teachings and practices of the immediate church environment, and, to her great discouragement, the submission of women.Kamstra says that she was introduced to the church by her grandmother, who loved the church, the Bible, and especially, the person of Jesus. As she sat in church with her grandmother as a child, she decided that she would like to one day become a preacher. However, as she grew, she found that her church discouraged women from taking a ministerial role. She tried serving in other ways, but even in those areas of service, she felt marginalized, disrespected, and underappreciated. One such instance she cites is when a young couple showed up at the church one evening, expressing interest in possibly attending the church. Eager to encourage them, Kamstra began to give them a tour of the church. Unaware that an event was taking place in one of the conference rooms, she opened the door and was very publicly excoriated right in front of the young couple – humiliating her and scaring them away.Kamstra eventually leaves the church for good, and cites three different historical figures as instrumental in her eventual exit. The first of these is King Henry VIII. This English monarch established the church of England because the Catholic Church refused to authorize a divorce he wanted (because his current wife did not bear him a boy-child to take over the throne). Not receiving the answer he wanted from the Catholic Church, he founded the Anglican Church contingent upon them affirming his divorce.The story was shocking to Kamstra for several reasons, not least of which was the terrible way in which Victorian culture treated women. Further, however, it made her see the arbitrary nature of Christian religion: that churches can be founded and dismissed on a whim so that the men behind them could use them as tools of manipulation to get their own way.The second man she cites as instrumental in her leaving the church was the British author C. S. Lewis. In her insular Kentucky church, there were approved Christian authors, and then there were heterodox authors that members of the church were discouraged from reading because their beliefs and ideas were not in lockstep with the teachings of her particular church. Lewis was among these forbidden authors. Kamstra decided to step out of line and pick up Lewis’ magnum opus, Mere Christianity. The title alone struck her as heresy, that anyone would dare to refer to Christianity as “mere,” as if it were unimportant or trivial.Nevertheless, Kamstra found that she quite liked Lewis’s writing, and decided that perhaps Christian authors outside those approved by her church might be worth further consideration. This led her to pick up books by Bishop John Shelby Spong. Spong is a longstanding critic of the modern church, suggesting that the church ought to be restructured along more Progressive lines, including feminism, social justice, and queer theology to make the church a more open and progressive institution.The ideas of Spong resonated with Kamstra, not least because it would allow her to enter the role of Reverend that she had always dreamed of doing.Upon entering seminary, Kamstra eventually did become an ordained Reverend, but considers herself in the category of Spiritual-but-not-religious.

The most recurring theme within the book is that of feminism. Upon the first mention of God with the pronoun “He,” Kamstra includes a footnote apologizing for using a masculine pronoun, and explaining that she is only doing so out of convention and not because she buys into the gendered category of God as a man. She follows this theme up later in the book by including a chapter on “The Divine Feminine,” in which she speaks of how liberating it is to see the divine as a nurturing, empathetic, life-giving, and overall feminine rather than domineering, bullying, masculine character.Kamstra includes frequent explanations of terms such as “mansplaining” for her reading audience, and provides a trigger warning before mentioning that someone once referred to her as “anorexic” due to her slender frame. Additionally, the book begins with a trigger warning in which she warns the reader that the book will discuss Religious Trauma, and readers who might be triggered by such discussion ought to reconsider reading the book.Kamstra also frequently pauses to explain the feminist vocabulary she is using, and provides a helpful Glossary of terms at the back of the book, defining difficult terms like “Microaggression,” and “White Privilege” for the reader.Kamstra also establishes a mantra for the book from the outset: Demolish, Repair, Restore. By this she means that one ought to rid oneself of previous dogmas and unpleasantness from one’s religious experience, do whatever work is necessary to rehabilitate oneself from these trauma, and then build a new framework from which to proceed. Each chapter ends with a “demolish, repair, restore” section which gives guidance to the reader on how to take the various challenges mentioned in the chapter, break them down, and build back up from the rubble.Additionally, she provides prayers or spiritual exercises to build one up at intervals through the book.

Kamstra has an online following in the “deconstruction” community, as indicated on the cover of her book under her name: “TikTok’s beloved RevKarla.” The TikTok profile she mentions has over seven-hundred-thousand followers. This seems to indicate that there is an inbuilt audience for her book to whom she has probably already expressed the various messages and themes included in the book.Nevertheless, this manuscript reads like a book in search of an audience. In most respects, this is a very personal autobiography, explaining her specific struggles and life circumstances, and then assuming the reader will directly relate to them, offering advice to reconstruct the damages she faced.It seems, however, that the message of the book is tailored only to those who grew up in a very similar church environment as her and underwent the sorts of personal struggles she faced. Nothing is more indicative of this than the point in the story where she feels as if she is committing a rebellious act by picking up a C.S. Lewis book, about which she states, “I knew that no bona fide, card-carrying Evangelical would be caught with one of his books in their home.”This shows how incredibly narrow her audience must be, given that Lewis’s Mere Christianity sits at number one on the “Top 100 Christian Books” as measured by the Worldview Institute, with a further two of his books in the top ten, and the rest of his books featured somewhere on the list. Lewis is extremely well-read and well-regarded in Evangelical circles, but according to her, the most well-regarded authors were Rick Warren, Joyce Meyer, Charles Stanley, and Tim LaHaye; all of whom are well-read in a specific subset of American churches without the global reach and acclaim of writers like Lewis (also, only one of these three are featured in the Top 100).This is no doubt true of the church circles in which she trafficked prior to leaving the church for her current “Spiritual-but-not-religious” status, but under-represents the broader Western church as a whole.However, if her personal experiences with the church are not more generalizable than they seem, her hefty TikTok following would need to be accounted for in some other way. A brief perusal of her channel demonstrates that her videos center around political themes and more general criticisms of Evangelicalism – both popular subjects for the young, politically active, post-Christian audience of TikTok.While the author admits that each person’s deconstruction experience is very individual, all of the coaching revolves around her personal experiences and conflicts she faced in her personal life.So the degree to which this book fulfills its stated purpose of offering wisdom to those undergoing deconstruction will largely depend on how much the reader is able to relate to her particular experiences and views.The book makes no obvious attempt to expand its reach beyond those who already understand her personal background, views, and experiences, so this book is probably written with her online followers in mind, with them as the target audience.

I am a conversion and deconversion researcher, and so all of my reading is done with my research in mind. What this book did for my research is to confirmed what I call the “Modal-Typical Church,” meaning those environments most likely to produce deconverts. Her church hit these markers, which include a church which encourages or enforces isolation of its members away from outside ideas or influences, a ridged literalist approach to scripture, demanding high levels of certainty in one’s beliefs, emphasizing the supernatural world, and high demands to conform one’s behaviors to church standards.Autobiographies are always helpful insofar as they provide case studies that add further data to the pile I already have.In this case it seems that deconstruction (meaning a generic questioning of the religious teachings one has received) and deconversion (meaning discarding one’s Christian identity in favor of an Atheist identity) both follow the same model and trajectory, the only significant difference being in how one’s rejection of one’s former Christian identity is expressed after the fact.

While readable, the book assumes the reader holds views and experiences similar to those of the author, and adopts a familiar more than a persuasive tone. This is not a book written to persuade, but rather to reflect and console. The degree that you would enjoy reading this book will largely depend on how agreeable you find the narrative and themes I have outlined above.