A Texas school district scrubbed a lesson about the Commonwealth of Virginia from its curriculum, reported Axios on Thursday — because the state flag depicts a woman's bare breast.
"Lamar CISD, a school district around 30 minutes from Houston, last fall removed a section about Virginia from its online learning platform used by 3rd-5th graders, Texas Freedom to Read Project co-director Anne Russey tells Axios," said the report. "The reason: The bare breast on Virginia's flag, a picture of which was included in the lesson, violated the district's recently adopted ban on any 'visual depictions or illustrations of frontal nudity' in elementary school library material."
The school district uses the online learning platform PebbleGo Next for its elementary schoolers, which is where the offending material originated.
"PebbleGo's lesson about Virginia does, in fact, include an image of the state's flag, as well as a picture of the state seal, which also shows the breast. The lesson notes that the state's seal and flag depict the Roman goddess Virtus standing over a 'defeated tyrant,' along with the state's motto, 'Sic semper tyrannis.'"
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This violates Lamar CISD's recent passage of a ban on "visual depictions or illustrations of frontal nudity."
This is not the first time that Republicans have blocked out mild nudity that is part of government imagery and symbols. Famously, in 2002, former President George W. Bush's then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had the partially-naked "Spirit of Justice" statues covered up by drapes while standing in front of them to deliver a speech in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice, at a taxpayer expense of $8,000.
In recent years, Republicans have cracked down in many states on content available in schools and school libraries, with a particular eye for books that mention LGBTQ or racial issues. Some schools have fought back, with Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, also in the Houston area, rejecting the state Board of Education's effort to scrub lessons about Cesar Chavez and Rosa Parks.
