Last fall, while accompanying her 7-year-old daughter to “Math Night” at her elementary school in North Hanover Township, New Jersey, Angela Reading was shocked to see what was on the school bulletin board in the hallway. It was filled with posters drawn by students and touting LGBTQ identities like androgyne, nonbinary, lesbian, gender-fluid, genderqueer, bi[sexual], pansexual, and polysexual.
When her daughter asked her what “polysexual” meant, Angela decided to speak up. That night she posted on her personal Facebook page her objections to the sexual and gender content at school. She said that elementary-age students are too young for such subjects. She wrote that the content was “perverse and should be illegal.”
Apparently, because families at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, a nearby military base, had children at the school, a base officer, Lt. Col. Christopher Schilling, posted on Facebook that Angela’s comments “caused safety concerns for many families.”
Schilling contacted the local police chief who then asked Angela to remove her Facebook post. Angela said the police chief told her, “I don’t want Homeland Security coming after me. Take the post down.”
Then Schilling posted that he was making sure federal security forces were “working with multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to monitor the situation to ensure the continued safety of the entire community.” He wasn’t exaggerating. Angela said she learned later that Schilling had reported her to the Department of Homeland Security.
Things quickly spiraled out of control. Angela said she and her husband were ostracized and that she was characterized as a “terrorist” and “right-wing extremist.” They were both forced to resign as school board members. They had to pull their children out of public school.
She also told the New York Post that she became the subject of multiple law enforcement investigations.
Finally, Angela and her husband had had enough and contacted the Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based, not-for-profit, public interest law firm. The group is now representing them in a federal lawsuit that was filed in March.
Christopher Ferrara, the couple’s attorney, summarized the chilling nature of the lawsuit.
The core of this case is that a local police chief, acting at the request of military personnel at the Joint Base, obtained the removal of Mrs. Reading’s Facebook post, and then attempted to have other posts removed, after which Joint Base personnel engaged in a coordinated referral of Mrs. Reading to various law enforcement and security agencies. … This was accompanied by a campaign to portray Mrs. Reading as a security threat such that, as Defendant Schilling put it, “I think we need to keep the pressure on until her [Mrs. Reading’s] disruptive and dangerous actions cease…” – meaning, her fully protected speech with which the Defendants disagreed. This case exemplifies the weaponization of government against conservative parents. …
