Attorney General Alan Wilson leads 18-state brief supporting efforts to exclude racially or sexually divisive materials from public schools

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) - South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson announced today that he is leading an 18-state effort to support states’ efforts to keep racially or sexually divisive materials out of public schools.

He’s leading a friend-of-the-court brief filed in an Oklahoma lawsuit that’s at the 10^th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. In that suit, Black Emergency Response Team and the Oklahoma NAACP are suing the state of Oklahoma over its law that prohibits the teaching of certain racist and sexist concepts in K-12 schools.

“I won a lawsuit against a similar law here in South Carolina, and I’m proud to lead this brief in support of Oklahoma’s law,” Attorney General Wilson said. “Our schools are supposed to be places of learning and collaboration, not indoctrination into woke ideologies that assign blame or condemnation based on race or sex.”

In the brief, the attorneys general argue that the First Amendment “protects the right of citizens to speak freely, not the right to compel others—private persons or the government—'to supply information.’” They point out that “the Eighth Circuit held that the Free Speech Clause did not require the government to ‘retain certain materials or instruction in the curriculum of its primary and secondary public schools.’”

The attorneys general ask the Court to rule in favor of the state of Oklahoma and uphold its law.

Joining Attorney General Wilson in the brief are the attorneys general of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas.

You can read the brief here.