By Jeff Cleghorn- Georgia Record
October 13, 2024
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Part 2 of a 3-part series
Georgia Equality Board Member and “Joy is all ages” Activists Target Oconee County Mother of Four
Oconee County, Georgia – Julie Mauck, a married mother of four, is fighting back after coming under attack by a Georgia Equality board member and a “Joy is all ages” activist following comments by Mauck during an Oconee County Library Board of Trustees meeting on July 10, 2023.
Mauck is founder of the Oconee County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a national group for “moms, dads, grands, aunts, uncles, and friends” speaking out for parental rights in education.
Danielle Carmella Bonanno is a Georgia Equality board member and ran a group called The Athens Pride & Queer Collective, in nearby Clarke County. Bonanno is a man, who identities as a “transwoman, activist, and recovery addict."
Bonanno identifies as a leader in the Georgia LGBTQ+, including serving on the Human Rights Campaign steering committee.
“Danielle holds significant positions in organizations at the forefront of LGBTQ+ advocacy and business. As the Vice-President of OUT Georgia Business Alliance and a board member of Georgia Equality and the Equality Foundation of Georgia, she extends her impact,” states Bonanno’s biography on Georgia Equality’s website.
Fiona Bell is a woman, who goes by Felix Bell, who identifies as a transman and Clarke County activist. Bell is a former teacher at Coile Middle School and serves on the Athens-Clarke County Public Safety Civilian Oversight Board.
Mrs. Mauck contacted The Coalition for Liberty and retained the Vogel Law Firm PLLC, with Jonathan A. Vogel as legal counsel. Mauck filed a lawsuit against Bonanno, Bell, and the Athens Pride group, in June 2024. The lawsuit alleges violations of Georgia’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act, tortious interference with business relations, and libel. Mrs. Mauck’s lawsuit also seeks punitive damages and attorney fees.
“Defendants engaged in extremist, cancel-culture tactics with an ultimate goal of censorship of view with which they disagree,” Mauck alleges.
The dispute arises from the June 2023 Library Board of Trustees meeting during which Mauck asked the board to move a book titled “Flamer” from the children section to the adult section of the library. Bonanno and Bell believe the book is appropriate for children to access and opposed Mauck’s request.
Bonanno and Bell also objected to Mrs. Mauck's statement that the “+” in the LGBTQ+ acronym is inclusive of pedophiles.
“LGBTQ+ is an acronym for sexual affiliation,” Mauck stated to the Library Board. “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Queer. And the Plus is there to be all inclusive, down to pedophiles,” she further explained.
Felix Bell attended the Library Board meeting carrying a large sign that read: “Joy is all ages” (a “sexual innuendo message,” according to Mauck’s lawsuit) and “Never Again” (a reference with the pink triangle worn by homosexuals in Nazi death camps).
“Flamer,” a book written by Mike Curato, is “about a young teenage Boy Scout who is bullied while coming to grips with his homosexuality.” The book contains descriptions and cartoonish illustrations of graphic sexual banter between children.
Curato’s website indicates he has written fourteen children’s books, most appearing to be for toddlers and elementary age children with titles like “If I were a fish” to “everyone’s favorite polka-dotted elephant, Little Elliot.”
Curato describes Flamer as a “young adult graphic novel.”
During a June 26, 2024, NPR interview, Curato said he “wrote Flamer as a way to help young queer kids, like he once was, better understand and accept themselves.”
The optics of an adult man writing sexually about Boy Scouts became clouded one year after Flamer’s 2020 publication.
The Boy Scouts, in 2021, announced a $850 million settlement of lawsuits involving 84,000 pedophilia complaints.
Like Mauck, parents in school districts around Georgia and the country are speaking out against what they view as sexualized messaging placed into children’s books by LGBTQ+ writers like Curato.
“We won’t be silent anymore” is how a new Cobb County group, Citizens Taking a Stand Against Pornography in Schools, puts it, as reported by The Georgia Record on October 8.
The objectionable passages from Flamer include:
According to the website www.booksinschools.com, Flamer also includes frequent use of profanity and derogatory terms:
After hearing from seventeen speakers with varying viewpoints, the Oconee Library Board agreed with Mrs. Mauck and moved the book Flamer to the adult section of the library.
Later that same day, July 10, according to Mauck’s lawsuit, Danielle Bonanno emailed Mrs. Mauck’s real estate broker (Mauck is a real-estate agent) accusing Mauck “of being an anti-LGBTQ+ community member, being vocal about her discriminatory views, and engaging in harassment towards our community, including queer children and families.”
Bonanno’s email further accused Mauck of “specifically referring to LGBTQ+ individuals as pedophiles,” and urged Mauck’s broker to “take appropriate action,” threatening to escalate the situation to involve the Georgia and National Realtor Associations if Bonanno’s demands went unmet.
Transgender activist Felix Bell also contacted Mrs. Mauck’s first real estate broker, making similar accusations, writing in an email: “I am unable to recommend this business to anyone, and in fact directly caution anyone against it, until the position of the business is known. I hope you will join us on the right side of history by ceasing work with Ms. Mauck immediately.”
Thereafter, Mauck’s real estate broker let her go and she was unemployed for a period before finding a new real estate broker. Bonanno then contacted the Mauck's second real estate broker with a similar warning about Mauck, leading to the new broker also firing Mauck, according to the lawsuit.
Bell also proceeded to file an ethics complaint against Mauck with the Georgia Board of Realtors. The National Association of Realtors Code of Ethics added a "hate speech" prohibition in 2020. “Realtors must not use harassing speech, hate speech, epithets, or slurs,” the ethics code reads.
Following a four-hour hearing, the three-member Ethics Hearing Panel determined the allegations against Mauck were not related to her work as a realtor, but nonetheless ruled her words were “discrimination.”
Mauck successfully appealed against the adverse ethics ruling within the Georgia Association of Realtors, who rejected the Ethics Panel’s finding. The appeal hearing tribunal wrote, “The findings of facts does not support a possible violation of the Code of Ethics.”
Mrs. Mauck has since gotten her own broker’s license, forming her own company Freedom Realty USA.
Mauck’s use of the word “pedophile” crossed over into “hate speech” as the Board of Realtors Ethics Panel saw it, despite Mauck’s showing during the hearing that Bell’s accusation was not true. Mauck did not call all LGBTQ+ people pedophiles, what she said was the “+” part of the LGBTQ+ includes pedophiles.
Ironically, according to Mrs. Mauck’s lawsuit, the Ethics Panel Chairman asserted during the hearing his belief that “pedophiles are a protected class because it is a sexuality” (referencing the Realtor Code of Ethics application to sexual orientation). The chairman seemed to be arguing that pedophiles are included in the LGBTQ+, who boast of “inclusiveness” for all sexualities.
The Ethics Panel Chair also stated, “The truth does not matter, when the truth results in hurt feelings,” Mauck’s pleadings allege.
Pedophile groups have, in fact, historically considered themselves part of the "queer movement." They even have their own flag, similar to those of the other assortment of identities (like “nonbinary” or “androgyne”), genders (like “genderqueer” or “demigender”) and sexualities (like “polysexual” or “pansexual”) of the LGBTQ+.
Today’s activists continue to argue pedophilia is just another sexual orientation. They advocate substituting the word “pedophile” with “minor attracted person,” as a “less stigmatizing” term. A transgender professor at Virginia's Old Dominion University made news headlines in 2021 over the professor’s “MAP” advocacy.
Activists also advocate for ending sex-offender registries and lowering the age of consent. They argue such registries are “public shaming” and “dehumanizing.”
California LGBTQ+ activists successfully pushed a 2020 bill to lower criminal penalties for adults having anal or oral sex with children aged 14 or older, if within ten years of the offending adult’s age.
In 2016, an Advocate.com article oddly declared “Injustice: How the sex offender registry destroys LGBT rights.”
During the 1980’s and 90’s, the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was a member of International Gay and Lesbian Association (IGLA). They had booths at gay pride festivals, marched in gay pride parades, met inside gay community centers, and advertised in gay magazines.
The pro-LGBTQ+ group, American Civil Liberties Union, even defended NAMBLA's "free speech" rights in a wrongful death civil lawsuit filed by the parents of a Massachusetts 10-year-old boy who was raped and murdered in 1997 by an adult male.
Prominent “gender identity” and queer theorists, from the late Dr. John Money at John Hopkins to Judith Butler, have spoken or written sympathetically of sexual behaviors involving adults and children.
No prominent queer theorist has ever spoken out publicly against pedophilia.
A 2024 book, authored by seasoned investigative journalist and former CNN Political Director Christine Dolan, Shattered Innocence - A Shared Global Shame, chronicles Dolan’s nearly 25 year investigation of human trafficking around the world.
Dolan writes about “the movement to decriminalize pedophilia” after infiltrating a 2019 Baltimore area conference for “MAPs” that was not open to the press, but only open to therapists. A conference participant told Dolan and her colleague as the full-day conference was ending, referring to the other “MAP” conference attendees, “Everyone in that room is gay.”
At that meeting, Dolan and her colleague sat with the therapists. They witnessed a MAP leader address the audience. He admitted that he had spent 10 years in jail for his "relationship" with his "friend." He admitted to Dolan and those sitting at the therapists' table that his friend was an 8 year-old-boy. This MAP was married and admitted his wife knew about his sexual proclivities. He asked the therapists in the room to advocate for MAPs, whose ultimate goal is to decriminalize pedophilia in America. The MAPs want their behavior to be recognized as an acceptable and legal sexual orientation. The convicted felon also presented himself to be connected to a lobbying group in America whose goal is to do away with sexual offender registries.
Dolan and her colleague were briefed by Bob Hamer, a renown retired undercover FBI agent before they entered the conference. Hamer had infiltrated NAMBLA about 20 years ago. When Dolan reported back to Hamer following the conference, he told her she hit the "motherload." Dolan reports in her book that there were more women than men attending the conference although the majority of MAP speakers were men.
These activists want acceptance from the LGBTQ+ community, claiming “people are sexual from womb to tomb, that sex is fluid, and that minors can agree to sexual behavior.” All terms that Dolan heard inside the conference.
Mrs. Mauck’s warning to the Oconee County Library Board rests on the pro-pedophile activists’ decades long demands that “inclusion” include them.
Defendants Bonanno and Bell are unremorseful.
They are “refusing to amicably resolve this matter with an apology and a promise to stop making false and deceptive statements,” Mauck’s pleadings allege.
Instead, the Defendants “are accusing Mrs. Mauck of violating their free speech rights.”
Bonanno, Bell, and Athens Pride retained the international law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP to represent them. The pleadings reflect four lawyers working on the case, with Brian M. Underwood, Jr. as lead counsel. They filed a 200-page Motion to Strike Mauck’s Complaint and are also refusing to produce Discovery requested by Mauck’s lawyer.
The Defendants’ pleadings include sworn statements from Bell and Bonanno, yet neither affidavit contains a condemnation of pedophile people, behavior, or ideology. Neither do their affidavits express concern for child safeguarding or acknowledge its importance.
Incidents of pedophilia involving LGBTQ+ continue to be reported, including "drag queens" and "transwomen."
A 2022 Georgia case involves LGBTQ+ activists accused of creating pornography using their nine and eleven year old boys. The couple adopted the children from a Christian special-needs adoption agency. The accusations include incest and pimping their sons out to other pedophiles. Despite widespread media coverage, the Walton County child sex abuse case was met with deafening silence by activists.
“I have deep rooted concerns relating to children’s access to literature,” Bell’s affidavit declares. “I staunchly oppose efforts to limit or restrict” children accessing “materials touching on matters of LGBTQ+ identity.”
Bonanno and Bell justify having contacted Mrs. Mauck’s employers as necessary to protect LGBTQ+ home buyers from being “accosted” by “prejudices” from realtors.
A hearing on the competing motions is set for October 15, 2024, at 2 p/m at the Clarke County courthouse before Judge Lawton E. Stephens.
Others raising similar alarms about child safeguarding include the new group Gay Against Groomers which opposes the “sexualization, indoctrination, and mutilation of children under the guise of radical ‘LGBTQIA+’ activism.”
Gays Against Groomers Georgia chapter leader, Ellynn Riddell from Rome, expressed frustration at the transgendered activists targeting of Mrs. Mauck.
“Gays Against Groomers stands firmly with Julie Mauck, as she courageously defends children from sexually explicit materials in Georgia's school libraries. It is unacceptable for extreme gender activists to distort her words and attack her character; she deserves to maintain her livelihood without fear of retribution for her beliefs,” said Riddell in a statement to The Georgia Record.
“We offer Julie our unwavering support and commend her courage in her lawsuit against Danielle Carmella Bonanno, president of the Athens Pride & Queer Collective. The First Amendment protects our right to speak out against harmful content, and anyone advocating for children to be exposed to sexually explicit material must be held accountable. We urge a thorough investigation into those promoting such agendas.”
Ms. Riddell concluded, “Julie, you are not alone in this fight!”
The Georgia Record contacted Georgia Equality executive director, Jeff Graham, for comment but has not received a response by the time of publication.
You can read Mauck's complaint here.
Mauck Lawsuit 2024.06.24-ComplaintDownload
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Sixth generation Georgian, Army vet, and lawyer, Jeff Cleghorn became a gay rights advocate in 1993. He worked on the staff of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, in Washington, DC, from 1997 through 2003, and served on SLDN's Board from 2007 through 2013. Cleghorn also served on the Boards of Lambda Legal and Georgia Equality, and is a past president of Georgia's Stonewall Bar Association. He now speaks out against transqueer ideology and its harms to children.
