Missing is all the bans for classics like "To Kill a Mockingbird" which enraged history revisionists with older-language. This article tries to frame the data that the majority of book cancellations were targeting LBGTQ books but forgets to mention the banning of classic literature.
It's because the majority of book cancellations are targeting LGBTQ books or books talking about issues minorities have to deal with. To Kill a Mockingbird is one book out of hundreds being banned.
> At first blush, the reports could seem sensational, a narrative driven by political campaigns that could be decided in schools. But the growth in efforts to suppress books is real. Last November, the American Library Association warned of “widespread efforts to censor books in U.S. schools and libraries,” while The New York Times reported that the association received “330 reports of book challenges” — attempts to remove books from library shelves and classroom curricula — last fall. For comparison, the association reported about 240 book challenges in the entire year of 2017.
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> Beyond school board meetings, where parents, students or teachers can voice their concerns, the movement to restrict material has spread to state legislatures. One Texas Republican, Matt Krause, recently released a list of 850 books that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” Krause asked schools to investigate whether they possessed copies.
Yes, kids learning about gay people is so traumatizing for them that gay rights must be stripped to protect the children. This is totally a rational line of thought often held by people who in no way are bigoted against LGBT folk.
Those like the person you responded to are against any representation of LGBTQ people in society. They like to throw around words like "groomers" and "agenda", but they don't care that they're trying to do the same thing to queer people. They truly believe things like "people are not born gay, God doesn't make people gay". They truly believe that the only reason people are gay is because "someone taught them to". They truly believe that all people are born straight. Thus, they believe that any representation of queerness is an affront to nature, whatever that means. They still claim to this day that there is no queerness in nature.
They don't care that the science points to structured and informed transition being the best option for many trans people. They don't want there to be any trans people. There's no science behind the right-wing view, just hate and bigotry. They think that people are going online, watching a few TikTok videos, and suddenly saying "I'm trans! I want surgery and hormone blockers now!" when that is quite literally never the case. These are kids who are already internally struggling with their own gender feelings versus their body, and there are two types of responses. Loving parents accept their kids for who they are, and assure them that they will always be loved. Parents who are more worried about being "embarrassed" or "ungodly" will tend to suppress this instead, attempting to force the kid into their mold, instead of allowing their kid to be their true self.
These are people who were most likely prevented from learning actual critical thinking skills. They honestly don't understand how to think things through with logic, instead they inject their emotions into the issue, and you can never effectively fight emotion with logic. Logic can't be made "more logical", but emotional appeals can sure be made "more emotional", so emotion often wins out. Emotion is a quite visceral thing that we don't even fully understand. I'm certain that we feel emotion before we even exit the womb, long before any notion of logic could even exist for us.
I don't have an answer, but it's clear that these people simply do not care about the life experience of the "other", and in this case the "other" is the queer population.
restricting children's access to sexually suggestive books in tax payer funded schools seems appropriate. the media/press is trying to malign one side into being against free speech and pro-censorship, which is so ironic ... more culture war BS all around
Of course. Except the books being removed from school libraries are more like "Gender Queer", which includes a page showing two minors giving a blowjob and doesn't cover anything. Why do you think minors need hardcore porn in the libraries so badly?
Any reasonable person can agree with literal porn being banned. What percentage, exactly, is porn out of all the books being banned?
The thing is that LGBT+ content tends to be conflated with sexual content.
We both know that the vast majority of these books aren't banned because they're obscene. They're being banned because people don't want any mention of LGBT+ people or topics, with flimsy excuses.
> We both know that the vast majority of these books aren't banned because people don't want any mention of LGBT+ people or topics. They're being banned because they contain obscene sexually explicit material in them.
Seems just as reasonable... So no, not clear at all.
The fundamental dishonesty of these book bans is conflating books with sexual content with "hardcore pornography".
These bans are happening in high school. Be honest with yourself and admit what you already know: High schoolers are horny. Restricting them from books that discuss sexuality in a realistic way, combined with "abstinence only" sex education still common in these places, makes it more likely that their first exposure with sexual media is actual hardcore pornography, and I don't feel like I need to explain to you why that's bad.
What’s your limiting principle here? Should schools also carry old Playboy magazines? They’re less sexually explicit than drawings of two underage kids blowing each other. Are the straight kids not horny? Should there also be straight porn in schools?
You can’t just drop sexually explicit images in a book then cry afoul when parents and taxpayers don’t want it in their public schools. They didn’t allow hustler and playboy and they’re trying to not allow this. They have a pretty consistent standard unlike the groups that advocate for such material to be made available to kids and teens.
If I post the blowjob scene from Gender Queer here u/dang is going to ban my account, but you’re free to google it and say whether or not it’s more explicit than a woman baring her breast.
While we’re at it, how un-feminist and objectifying to imply that a woman’s body should be overly sexualized. Isn’t treating men’s and women’s nipples differently how we train kids to objectify women? If anything we need more Playboy in schools to destigmatize a women’s bare body. #FreeTheNipple
Yes, a blowjob is more explicit than a bare breast. This is not relevant to the topic currently being discussed, which is about how dishonest it is to compare a depiction of a sex act in a memoir about coming to terms with one's own identity and sexuality with pornography.
You’re hiding behind it being a memoir as if that’s a meaningful distinction or somehow the interest in discovering identity outweighs the harm in having sexually explicit material in schools.
If Riley Reid put out a graphic memoir about tearing down taboos in sex and confronting “slut shaming” you wouldn’t advocate for it to be in schools.
If you’re trying to claim I’m making some sort of false analogy or moral equivalency then you should try to answer my original question: what is the limiting principle? Because if it’s as weak as “it’s a memoir that’s about discovering identity” it’s not only a weak argument that few would agree with but it opens the door to a lot of other stuff that you’re already trying to rule out.
What if Playboy helps some boys discover their straight identity? Is that not worth discovering? Some young girls might find Playboy helpful in discovering their lesbian identity. Wrap a story around it and it’s apparently good to go for schools.
My "limiting principle" is "not being porn." I'm not going to try to fully define porn, otherwise I'd be here all day, but I think one obvious requirement is that it is designed primarily to cause sexual arousal. Based on the excerpts from Gender Queer that I've seen posted to support its ban, this is a test that it plainly fails.
It is unclear what harm you believe Gender Queer might cause to teenagers.
In the words of Sandra Day O'Connor "I know it when I see it."
The problem you've highlighted with defining what porn is is not a new debate and as you've admitted we'd be here all day - and likely still not agree on a definition. The problem with your definition is that what people find arousing is a pretty wide spectrum and would include things that are not traditionally regarded as porn.
Going back to our thought experiment, at what point would my theoretical graphic memoir of Riley Reid no longer be porn? What would the words to picture ratio have to be? You can make this same argument about Gender Queer; does the inclusion of the illustrations add any significant value to a memoir about someone discovering their identity?
As far as whats appropriate for minors in a public school setting, society decided a while ago that once sexually explicit material is included, there is no countervailing interest. This is a pretty black and white standard that until recently all parties found agreeable. If you are advocating for changing that standard, you'll have to defend why children/teens/minors have more of an interest in seeing illustrations of a minor boy performing oral sex on another minor boy than seeing an adult woman in the nude. Claiming it not being porn can be argued both ways for both.
Are you saying there aren’t any age-inappropriate, sexually explicit books in school?
Because what I’m seeing on social media is parents at school board meetings reading NC-17 level books that are in their elementary school kids classrooms.
Is that not a thing? I mean, I only see it on social media, so it could me disinformation?
He asks a good question. Back before the internet it was pretty normal for some kid now and then to manage to swipe one of his dad’s issues of Playboy or Penthouse and share it with the other kids in their neighborhood.
So we have plenty of experience that says seeing the occasional sexually explicit photo or drawing doesn’t harm kids.
Isn't there a lot of literature about how kids exposed to sexually explicit material go on to do risky sexual behavior as teens and do them earlier? Also about abusers literally grooming kids for sex by showing them porn? Pretty sure all this was standard discourse at least since the early 2000s.
I didn't ask about sexually explicit material though - "explicit" and "suggestive" are quite different. My expectation is that most kids (below the age of 12 or so) wouldn't even recognise a lot of sexually suggestive language for what it was anyway.
The only book I saw mentioned
that may be considered sexually explicit was one about a boy suffering rape and incest. I'd accept it's probably not appropriate for a school library to have a book like that freely available to students of all ages. But I don't get the impression that's a representative sample.
We could also argue whether teaching about the "benefits" of dog eating would have negative effects. The goal of such "educators" is to uproot the morals early and normalize the abnormal things.
Sex is abnormal now?
FWIW I don't see any need to push descriptions of sexual activity into kid's faces, most of them are unlikely to find it terribly interesting anyway and there's something to be said for the fact that we can enjoy a short period of our life without being unduly influenced by sexual desire. But the idea that we need to ban books from school libraries just because they hint of a more complex adult world where sexual impulses are part of life (even in ways that inevitably affect the children who live with and around them) seems very hard to justify.
Obsession with sex is abnormal, just like obsession with food. I'd buy the "complex adult world" argument if the schools equally taught about the dangers of meth addiction, with graphic depiction of those addicts to explain where those "impulses" lead. Right now it looks like the books are trying to whitewash those impulses, make them look good even.
On a related note, I never understood why people of a certain political persuasion tend to be against any mention of sexuality even towards teenagers. I've seen more than one such person say that "14 or 15 year old people shouldn't be talking about sexuality". Apparently we shouldn't ever be talking to people who have gone through or are going through puberty about sexuality.
The whole problem is that people have not properly been taught about sex, because educational institutions have for years, in different areas, been hamstrung (like with all the "abstinence-only" education in areas like the bible belt), and parents aren't the best sexual educators (because on a personal level, they don't want to even think about that sort of thing). Cue the trope of the angry father telling the daughter "you're not dating until you're 30".
The vast majority of people over the last 60 years have been taught more from some form of pornography (whether it be the stack of Playboys under Dad's bed, or the teenager screwing with the horizontal and vertical hold on their TV to try to watch Skinemax, to today's young people having access to internet porn). Some of us came out ok, but some people (depending on which porn they learned from) didn't.
The problem with education being too centralized, is that it results in a choke point for power grabs and indoctrination, if we're not careful. Perhaps sexual education should be totally independent from the rest of secondary education?
> Each attempt to ban a book by one of these groups represents a direct attack on every person's constitutionally protected right to freely choose what books to read and what ideas to explore.
I don't think school library book banning is the biggest threat to free speech today; it's mass internet censorship.
What would you propose as a way to fix censorship of books by Amazon? I can't think of anything other than government regulation in some form, so I'm confused about why the government censoring books in public schools wouldn't be equally concerning.
I wouldn't propose anything, when I want a book that Amazon doesn't sell I still know how to get it. The reason I mentioned it in comparison is a school library has a)limited space and b) children who shouldn't be exposed to everything under the sun at an early age. With Amazon, there is no such excuse.
The idea that "A kid at school should not be aware of anything their parents don't want them to be aware of" is mind numbingly stupid. How many gay kids have grown up under homophobic parents? How many little girls are told to be subservient to men and know their place? How many kids live in a household that consistently talks about "those thugs" and other clear racism? These kids all exist and it is stupid to think we should allow those kinds of parents to teach these things to the next generation as if you have some god given right to be a bad person just because you had unprotected sex.
I would also hate if a school wasn't allowed to talk about the holocaust because a german student's dad felt oppressed, and I also hate that the southern states seem to be hell bent on continuing to spread propaganda about the civil war to keep the lost cause myth alive.
Just because a parent THINKS "being gay" is sexually suggestive doesn't mean that it IS. The world is full of black people, trans people, women, gay people, weird people, dumb people, straight people, sad people etc, and it is morally reprehensible to not teach kids to respect them as fellow human beings just to please someone who has a closed mind. Some day little timmy might have to go to work with someone who doesn't fit into your tight knit idea of what a normal person is, and we shouldn't saddle timmy with your poor opinions about who deserves the pursuit of happiness. You either think every human deserves a basic amount of respect and dignity or you don't.
We literally had to go to court in this country just to teach kids that evolution is a thing. This is just more of the same.
>“should not be aware of anything their parents don't want them to be aware of”
there’s plenty of things you don’t want kids doing or acting out because they aren’t mature enough yet to know what they’re doing, it’s also OK to disagree on topics of morality, freedom goes both ways
> Just because a parent THINKS "being gay" is sexually suggestive doesn't mean that it IS.
But categorically, actually being gay is. By any dictionary, the word “gay”classifies a very specific sexual preference. Sexual preferences are fundamentally sexual in nature, and parents absolutely have the prerogative to gatekeep the kinds of content their children are exposed to, especially sexual content. I realize you might have your objections to this but it doesn’t make it any less true. The law is clear on this fact.
Is a book containing a husband and wife sexually suggestive, as it shows a heterosexual couple? Is a book containing a nuclear family even more sexually suggestive, since it implies the husband and wife must have had sexual intercourse to produce the child?
i hate to break it to you, but we understand very little of human sexuality as it is. kids, especially as they grow up under parents with ideas like yours, struggle a lot with their identity when they are queer. they're not being coached or groomed, this is such a ridiculous and inflammatory take that does not belong on HN.
have you ever as a teenager thought you may be different? did you have the language to explain how you felt? did you have an authority figure you could confide in? did your parents act hostile towards you or people who you felt you aligned with?
i hope your kids don't end up queer because i fear how they would be treated and how sad they would feel with how much vitriol you seem to have for anything non-cis non-straight. and by the way, the proper term is transgender person.
I'm less concerned about people wanting to ban sexually explicit books from children^, and more concerned about all the cultural vandals altering authors works (i.e. Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, the goosebumps series).
^ Its an entire meme now of parents reading these books out at school board meetings and being cut off due to the inappropriate nature of the works.
Unfortunately there are lots of good books that are appropriate for kids being banned along with books that are definitely not appropriate for kids. I remember seeing Maus being banned which I consider to be appropriate for kids
Thank you for posting the content of the actual books. It’s kind of funny to me that people upthread are upset about the ‘blowjob’ scene when the characters involved immediately decide it’s not very exciting after all. Not exactly the hedonistic lgbt recruitment pamphlet they were trying to conjure in the imagination. Maybe telling kids that realistically sex is just a bit weird and gross and boring is more effective than banning it, who knows!
I think people are concerned that that content is not appropriate for grade school children. I think they would raise the same objections if it wasn't about a same sex couple.
There are two different sides fighting. On one you have people arguing against "ABC for LGBTQI" targeted at five year olds. On the other side you have people trying to ban classics such as Tintin and Pippi because they use "old" words or stereotypes.
The last time I checked, this pearl-clutching over "book bans" was about books being dropped from library shelves or school reading lists, not from the books actually being prohibited for purchase or reading.
Come on, folks, censorship is when you use coercive power to completely prevent access to a resource, not when you curate a list and it doesn't happen to make the cut.
> The choice of what to read must be left to the reader or, in the case of children, to parents. That choice does not belong to self-appointed book police."
Does it belong to people selecting books in these school libraries even when it goes against the wishes of the parents?
While no one should be able to censor what book adults can read, the school libraries are tricky.
It was easier to have a consensus on what society at large was finding acceptable when the viewpoints in society converged. Now on one had we have parents who things taking their kids to drag shows is open-minded and surgical sex change in kids should be unconditionally supported, on the other we have various religious groups with their own dogmas.
What we expose the kids to obviously does have an influence (at least statistically) on what they will think in the future. So there's a big political power in controlling it.
So do we just limit everything to subset super-majority finds acceptable?
In what period of time did this convergence of societal viewpoints occur? I think one would have to overlook significant subsets of society at any given time to make that claim.
I recall reading a similarly titled article about how schools are banning books. It ends up that the school just changed their curriculum, so one book was no longer required reading. I think that book was the Holocaust comic book maus. but I may be mistaken.
With these lgbt books bans, people express their vague fear of a dark ideology in the far future that will, in short, put animalistic desires on the pedestal.
