Cindy Martin, the chairwoman of a "grassroots" parental rights group called the Mama Bears, won a federal First Amendment case against a school district after "exposing highly sexualized pornographic books" and spoke with Fox News Digital about the legal victory.
"It was an incredible experience as a mom to experience the First Amendment play out. So for any citizen, I feel like it was just an incredible experience to be able to truly start to understand what that was and what our rights are," Martin said on Wednesday.
Forsyth County School District [FSC] earlier this month was forced in federal court to pay over $100,000 in legal fees after banning moms Alison Hair and Cindy Martin from exposing pornographic material at their school board meetings. In 2021, a friend told Martin about possible sexually explicit books in FCS. She did not believe it at first. When she did the research herself, she was "shocked."
"I was very, very shocked because they were right there," Martin, a mother of four, said. Martin said that "there were highly sexualized pornographic books" in the school system.
"I could not believe it," she continued. "So I thought to myself, you know, there's got to be other moms out there who want to do something. I just put out a notice on social media and said, Hey, does anybody else want to challenge these books with me? Because I knew I couldn't do it alone. And sure enough, moms started raising their hands. And it just was a grassroots movement of moms who wanted to protect their kids."
The Mama Bears formed in the fall of 2021 to protest "pornographic books" in FCS, speaking out at school board meetings and organizing other concerned parents on a Facebook group chat room.
One of the books they spoke out against was called "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," authored by Jonathan Safran Foer and published in 2005. The book is about a 9-year-old boy whose father was killed in the 9/11 attacks. Other books they've protested include "A Court of Mist and Fury" by Sarah J Maas, "What Girls Are Made Of" by Elana K. Arnold, and "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood.
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Last February, Mama Bears member Alison Hair read pages from the book "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" that was available at her son’s middle school library at an FCS Board meeting.
"I know that you give someone a blow job by putting your penis ..." she read.
Hair was interrupted by one of the board members from reading more text from the book. FCS was considering a revision of their book policy since parents were concerned about obscene content in books. However, during the public comment period, they objected to Hair's reading of sexually explicit content from the book. Afterward, Hair demanded to use her allotted time to speak during the public comment period since she was cut off by the board member. Hair attempted reading from the book a second time at a school board meeting the next month.
Her actions prompted the board to send her a letter, banning her from school board meetings until she complied with school board policies. The FCS Board claimed that Hair's actions had violated their public participation policy at school board meetings.
Martin said that the prominent Moms For Liberty group, which played a major role in the parental rights movement across the country, reached out to the Institute For Free Speech to help the Mama Bears fight the school district because they believed their First Amendment rights were violated.
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"We couldn't believe it because we thought we knew our rights were violated, but we thought nobody's going to care. We're just a group of moms trying to talk to our school board, our local school board in this tiny little town," Martin said. "So we feel like it was God. And they contacted us. They reviewed our case. They felt like we had a very good chance to win it. And they said they wanted to represent us."
The Institute For Free Speech filed the lawsuit in July 2022 on behalf of Hair, the Mama Bears of Forsyth County, and the Mama Bears chair. FCS is a public school district in Cumming, Georgia. FCS serves over 51,000 students and is the largest employer in the county.
According to the Institute For Free Speech, a federal judge in November ruled FCS Board's public participation policy unconstitutional and barred them from enforcing it. The judge also ordered the district to end its ban on Hair from speaking at board meetings.
Furthermore, this month, FCS was ordered to pay the Mama Bears' attorneys $107,500 and the plaintiffs' nominal damages of $17.91.
"The payment for legal fees was handled by our insurance company," FCS told Fox News Digital.
The payment of $17.91 symbolized the year when the First Amendment was ratified, Martin said.
Martin continues to read excerpts from books at every school board meeting. Currently, Hair speaks on free speech issues and children reading sexualized content. They work in tandem to get the point across.
"I got my check last week, and I also through Amazon, ordered a copy of the Bill of Rights. So I'm getting a frame, and I'm going to be framing the Bill of Rights next to my check for $17.91," Martin said.
"We have incurred a lot of backlash from people who don't agree with us," she added. "But guess what? We won for them as well. This was for everyone to have the freedom to speak whatever they want to their government officials. So whether they like it or not, this was a win for them as well. And I'm proud of that. I'm happy to represent all people to be able to speak freely before their government officials."
