Fired Over Johnny The Walrus?

**John Bickley** (0:00)
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**John Bickley** (1:04)
As students go back to school, the issue of banned books is once again in the headlines. While pop star Dua Lipa has recently launched her own banned books display that includes some widely available books, one Oregon social worker found himself out of a job because of his own book display, which included Matt Walsh's Johnny The Walrus.

**Georgia Howe** (1:23)
In this episode, we talk with Alliance Defending Freedom's Tyson Langhofer about the case of Rod Tice who found himself in hot water over three children's books that only encouraged children to accept how they were born.
I'm Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. This is a Legal Wire edition of Morning Wire.

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**Georgia Howe** (2:52)
Joining us now to discuss the Oregon book banning cases, Tyson Langhofer of Alliance Defending Freedom. Welcome on, Tyson.

**Tyson Langhofer** (2:58)
Hey, thanks so much for having me.

**Georgia Howe** (3:00)
So we've been covering the ban to books debate as it's sort of flared up in the past. It goes away, it comes back. But now that the new school year has started, we're starting to see this become an issue again. And we've seen some headlines recently about this. We wanted to look at this really interesting case that actually relates directly to us here at The Daily Wire.
First, what exactly is this case of this fired social worker about?

**Tyson Langhofer** (3:27)
Sure, so Rod Tice was an education specialist and a licensed clinical social worker for over 17 years at the Intermountain Education Service District. And he gave testing to students who were struggling and so forth. And he had a great career. His colleagues loved him. He loved his job, did a great job.
The issue arose when he decided to display three different books.
He Is He and She Is She by Ryan and Bethany Bomberger, and then Johnny The Walrus by a guy you might be familiar with, Matt Walsh. Hey, I've heard of him. Yeah, you may have heard of him. So Rod displayed those books as decoration in his office. All you could see was just the covers. He never used them in his work, never used them with students. And those messages are really simple, like boys are boys, girls are girls, and every student should love how they were made.

**John Bickley** (4:17)
So how exactly did this turn into Rod getting into trouble?

**Tyson Langhofer** (4:21)
You know, he displayed the Johnny The Walrus book for more than two years, not a single complaint from a student, a parent, teacher, but after he began displaying the He Is He and She Is She books, a single teacher took offense to the covers of the books, did some research on what the books said, and complained. The district unfortunately ran with that, and they said that the books actually were a bias incident. They labeled it a bias incident. They said it was a hostile expression of animus to promote a binary view of gender.