[The Pentagon has attempted to ban books from schools on military bases, citing concerns over “divisive concepts” and “gender ideology,” leading to the removal of titles about race, gender, and LGBTQ+ issues. A federal judge ordered these books to be returned to the shelves, however, ruling that the removals were not based on pedagogical concerns but on improper partisan motivation, National Public Radio reports. The affected schools serve the children of military personnel, and the initial bans impacted a wide range of materials, from children’s books to Advanced Placement psychology texts, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.]
“PENTAGON’S
ATTEMPT TO BAN BOOKS FROM BASE SCHOOLS
by Nick Schifrin, Dan
Sagalyn, and Morgan Till
[On 6 February 2025, the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA, the Pentagon agency responsible for planning, directing, coordinating, and managing pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade educational programs), announced it would remove books related to “gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics” from its schools.
[The DoD stated that the books were “incompatible with the department’s core mission” and cited the need to remove “divisive concepts.” The order affected more than 100 schools serving children of active-duty and civilian military personnel, reports the ACLU. (The action was a direct result of the overarching Pentagon directive to eliminate materials related to diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI], as were earlier operations in the libraries of the service academies.) The approximately 596 books and 41 curricular materials removed included books with “left-leaning ideology” on topics like racism, gender identity, LGBTQ+ history, and even some civics and historical texts.
[Titles removed included Julián Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love, Alice Oseman’s graphic novel series Heartstopper, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds, as well as such well-known and award-winning titles as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Maya Angelou’s autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
[The policy also resulted in the cancellation of cultural observances like Black History Month and Pride Month events, and the removal of posters of historical figures like Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and First Lady Michelle Obama. The effort faced significant backlash from military families, free speech advocates, and organizations like PEN America, who characterized the actions as sweeping and ideologically driven censorship.
[The ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of students in DoDEA schools, reports Virginia Mercury, an independent, nonprofit online news organization covering Virginia state government and policy.
[On 20 October 2025, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria ruled in favor of the students, ordering the immediate return of the removed books and materials. In the “Memorandum Opinion,” the judge wrote that DoD “violated Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by removing library books at DoDEA schools and making changes to curricular material in implementation of various Presidential Executive Orders.” The judge stated the removals were not for pedagogical concerns but were motivated by “improper partisan motivation.” As a result of the ruling, the books are being returned to the school libraries.
[(Here I remind readers that on numerous occasions, both on Rick On Theater and elsewhere, I’ve acknowledged that I am as near a First Amendment absolutist as you can get. I hold with the character Stephen Hopkins, the irascible delegate to the Continental Congress from Connecticut in the musical 1776, who says: “Well, I’ll tell y’—in all my years I never heard, seen, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about. . . . Hell yes, I’m for debatin’ anything . . . !”)
[The federal judge’s preliminary injunction is limited only to the five schools on U.S. military bases in Virginia, Kentucky, Italy, and Japan attended by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. This decision was based on a recent Supreme Court ruling that limits the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions. The ACLU is exploring options to expand the scope of the injunction to all 161 DoDEA schools worldwide.
[The preliminary injunction is not the final ruling on the entire case; a hearing on the full merits of the lawsuit will follow. DoDEA and the Department of Defense are still involved in the active litigation and have generally declined to comment on specifics while the case is pending.
[The transcript below is from the PBS News Hour segment on 23 October 2025.]
Geoff Bennett [Co-anchor of “PBS News Hour”]: The Trump administration made it clear from its earliest days this year that it wanted to change the culture of the U.S. military. One effort targeted books about race, gender and sexuality in the libraries of military-based schools that service members’ children attend.
But, this week, a federal judge ruled that the books taken off the shelves had to be returned and the curriculum of the military changed had to be restored.
Before the ruling, Nick Schifrin and producer Dan Sagalyn traveled outside Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to speak to military families that fought through the courts for our series Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy, part of our Canvas coverage.
Jessica Henninger, Military Spouse [in a park with her children]: I can read to you while you eat your snackie.
Nick Schifrin: For Jessica Henninger, reading is fundamental.
Jessica Henninger [reading]: “A perfect plan, you say? A perfect way to spend the day?” [From Mac and Cheese and the Perfect Plan by Sarah Weeks (Harper, 2012).]
Nick Schifrin: And she’s tried to spend her days reading with her kids to help them better understand the world.
Jessica Henninger: Mac says: “I will get some milk for you.” Cheese says: “Let’s take some crackers too.”
Girl [Henninger’s daughter]: Yes, that’s what we have.
Jessica Henninger: You do have crackers.
I remember as a child growing up in a very small community. Books were really the only opportunity that I had to open up my world to different ideas and things outside of what I understood.
Nick Schifrin: Henninger is a soldier’s spouse and the parent of five . . .
Jessica Henninger: If it gets scary, let me know.
Nick Schifrin: . . . who let us visit her family near Fort Campbell recently as long as we kept the kids anonymous. She supported her five children through play and education.
All of them are attending or graduating from Defense Department elementary and high schools, no matter where they have been based, from Kentucky to Vicenza, Italy.
Jessica Henninger: Our kids have consistently gotten a fantastic education, no matter where we have been stationed. And to just really be immersed in that diversity, I think, is a wonderful strength of what we have in the military.
Man [at a graduation ceremony]: I now declare you graduates of Fort Campbell High School.
Nick Schifrin: The Defense Department runs 161 schools across 10 time zones, with 67,000 children of service members and civilian department employees. Classes run from pre-K through 12th grade.
Man: The military may choose where we go, but we choose what we do to make our lives meaningful. [He was off camera, but sounded like a young man, probably a graduating senior addressing his classmates.]
Jessica Henninger: I always vetted out the education systems when we would move places to make sure that my children had a top-notch education and that they were going to be set up for success later on in life. And so that is part of the reason why I got involved in this lawsuit.
Nick Schifrin: In April, Henninger and five other military families serving on three continents filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense’s Education Activity, or DoDEA, for — quote — “quarantining library books and whitewashing curricula,” calling it — quote — “systemwide censorship.”
Among 596 books the schools removed, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste,” and the AP psychology textbook, which has a gender and sex module, also removed, “A Queer History of the United States for Young People” [Michael Bronski], “When a Bully is President: Truth and Creativity for Oppressive Times” [Maya Christina Gonzalez], and “You-Ology: A Puberty Guide for EVERY Body” [Melisa Holmes].
The schools also removed portions of the middle school sex education course.
Jessica Henninger: The determination about what is appropriate for our children to consume in the libraries and the curriculum has always been left up to the experts, the people in the school who cultivate the libraries and the curriculum.
And I think that’s where it should be. Teaching an awareness of where we came from and making sure that we don’t make those same mistakes again, that’s not political. That’s education.
Nick Schifrin: At this point, are you considering removing your kids from DoDEA or have you heard of any cases of families thinking, you know what, we want out of the system?
Jessica Henninger: I had a very serious conversation with my husband where I told him that if our children’s education seemed like it was going to be hijacked by political ideation, that I would not feel comfortable keeping our children in the DoDEA system.
That’s a heavy conversation to have to have with your significant other who is in the military and doesn’t have a choice in where they go. Potentially talking about splitting up your family, it’s heavy.
Donald Trump, President of the United States [video clip of a speech at the Congressional Institute]: It will stop our service members from being indoctrinated with radical left ideologies [House Republican Conference, 27 January 2025].
Nick Schifrin: The changes come from a series of January executive orders that targeted — quote — “un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist and irrational theories, divisive concepts that American founding documents are racist or sexist and gender ideology.”
And in a court filing, the administration wrote: “The curriculum and book reviews were undertaken to implement DoDEA’s current pedagogical approach to teaching schoolchildren regarding gender and sexuality and to better promote an inclusive environment” and — quote — “Curating a library collection or developing a teaching curriculum is an act of government speech. It is therefore not subject to rigorous scrutiny under the First Amendment’s free speech clause.”
Corey Shapiro, Legal Director, ACLU of Kentucky: This is a public school. They are entitled to the same First Amendment rights as any student in any public school in this country. It’s always important to shine a light on what the government is doing.
Nick Schifrin: Corey Shapiro is the American Civil Liberty Union’s Kentucky legal director and one of the lawyers who sued DoDEA and Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Their focus is what they call war fighting. Their focus is on removing what they see as an ideology. If that’s how they think, don’t they have the right to say, well, we believe that this is a threat to our kids and we’re in charge of the system, so therefore we can change it?
Corey Shapiro: What they don’t necessarily have the right to do and the First Amendment protects is a student’s ability to access that information. And in the library in particular, the idea that the government can somehow determine what ideas can and cannot be even just accessed by students, that’s where the First Amendment steps in and protects those kids’ ability to access that information.
Nick Schifrin: This week, the court agreed, writing — quote — “The implementation process of book removals appears to this court to be inconsistent, unstructured and nontransparent.”
The judge ordered the books returned and the curricula restored, but only in the five schools listed in the lawsuit. It’s not clear yet if the administration will appeal, but this is a larger fight for Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Pete Hegseth, U.S. Defense Secretary: I remember coming home from public school in like 10th grade and saying: “Dad, why is Ronald Reagan always the bad guy in the textbooks?” [On an episode of the Shawn Ryan Show, 7 November 2024. The Shawn Ryan Show is a podcast that features interviews with military personnel and veterans.]
Nick Schifrin: Long before he became secretary, Hegseth criticized government education as too liberal.
Pete Hegseth: I grew up in a conservative, God-fearing regular old small-town America Minnesota, because the textbooks are written by lefties in New York City. Get your kids out of government school systems right now, if you can, if you have any way. Save money, move, get a second job, don’t take the vacation, sell the boat, whatever, drive for Uber.
Figure out what you need to do to get your kid out of the government school system because it’s about saving your kid right now.
Nick Schifrin: For Henninger and her family, they have to believe in government schools because it comes with their choice to serve the country. After graduating from a DoDEA school, their oldest daughter joined the military.
Jessica Henninger: My children have the same rights to freedom of education as every other student in this country. Just because their father is in the military doesn’t make their rights any less important.
Nick Schifrin: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Nick Schifrin in Clarksville, Tennessee [home of Fort Campbell].
[Nick Schifrin is PBS News Hour’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Correspondent. He leads News Hour’s daily foreign coverage, including multiple trips to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion, and has created weeklong series for the News Hour from nearly a dozen countries.
[The PBS News Hour series “Inside Putin’s Russia” won a 2017 Peabody Award and the National Press Club’s Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence. In 2020 Schifrin received the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Arthur Ross Media Award for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis of Foreign Affairs. He was a member of the News Hour teams awarded a 2021 Peabody for coverage of COVID-19, and a 2023 duPont Columbia Award for coverage of Afghanistan and Ukraine.
[Prior to PBS News Hour, Schifrin was Al Jazeera America’s Middle East correspondent. He led the channel’s coverage of the 2014 war in Gaza; reported on the Syrian war from Syria’s Turkish, Lebanese and Jordanian borders; and covered the annexation of Crimea. He won an Overseas Press Club award for his Gaza coverage and a National Headliners Award for his Ukraine coverage.
[From 2008-2012, Schifrin served as the ABC News correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2011 he was one of the first journalists to arrive in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after Osama bin Laden’s death and delivered one of the year’s biggest exclusives: the first video from inside bin Laden’s compound. His reporting helped ABC News win an Edward R. Murrow award for its bin Laden coverage.
[Schifrin is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a board member of the Overseas Press Club Foundation. He has a Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a Master of International Public Policy degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
[As the deputy senior producer for foreign affairs and defense at the PBS News Hour, Dan Sagalyn plays a key role in helping oversee and produce the program’s foreign affairs and defense stories. His pieces have broken new ground on an array of military issues, exposing debates simmering outside the public eye.
[Morgan Till is the Senior Producer for Foreign Affairs and Defense (Foreign Editor) at the PBS News Hour, a position he has held since late 2015. He was for many years the lead foreign affairs producer for the program, traveling frequently to report on war, revolution, natural disasters and overseas politics. During his seven years in that position he reported from—among other places—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Haiti, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Canada and widely throughout Europe.]
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