A Texas school district has been criticized for banning the Virginia state flag from its curriculum for elementary schoolchildren. The action, taken by the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District outside Houston, is cited as the result of the flag’s showing of the Roman goddess Virtus falling toga that shows her left breast.
The figure, on Virginia’s state seal, depicts Virtus standing over a fallen tyrant with the Latin motto ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis’ (Thus always to tyrants). The emblem has a historical past that goes back to 1776, when Virginia sought to portray strength during the American Revolution by depicting the goddess more of a warrior than a deity at the time.
As reported by Axios, Lamar school administrators took the Virginia material off PebbleGo Next, an online educational tool that students from 8 to 11 use. The Texas Freedom to Read Project, which opposes book banning and censorship, criticized the removal, saying it had “unlocked a new level of dystopian, book-banning, and censorship hell in Texas.”
District Cites Policy Against Nudity
In response to a public records request, the district confirmed that the representation of Virtus broke its library policy, which bans ‘visual depictions or illustrations of frontal nudity’ in elementary-level educational content.
As a consequence, students in the district are no longer able to access lessons on the state of Virginia on the platform—raising alarms about wider implications of such content restrictions.
This is not the first controversy to surround Virginia’s seal. In 2010, then-Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli changed the lapel pin seal to conceal Virtus’s bare breast, during debates over what constitutes sexually explicit material in schools.
At the time, critics complained. University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said, “When you invite ridicule, it tends to come. And it will come here, nationwide. This is high art, for goodness’ sake.”
Virginia officials had, in 1901, decided to show the bare breast in order to stress that the woman standing over the tyrant was unmistakably female, as the seal developed over the years from its wartime origins.
