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[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

‘Banned’ Books: Parents should counter activist insanity on LGBT books.

If you’ve been to a mainstream bookstore or library in the past few months, you’ve probably encountered a “Banned Books” display. These high-visibility collections serve as totems of progressives’ defiance in their latest imagined controversy: the belief that conservatives are banning books related to LGBT issues from public school libraries. “Banned Books” displays usually feature some traditional texts that may have been pulled from schools at some point in their publication history (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, etc.). But the recent wave of sexually-explicit LGBT titles are always positioned so prominently that a person can only assume that the displays are in reaction to right-wing prudes trying to force their retrograde views on an increasingly progressive populace.

But are LGBT books being “banned”? Not really. Every library curates its collection, making careful choices about their holdings in the limited space they have. While it’s true that many schools decided to pull titles like Gender Queer, This Book is Gay, Flamer, Let’s Talk About It, and All Boys Aren’t Blue from the shelves, this is not a “ban.” These books remain widely available in bookstores and public libraries that are unaffiliated with schools.

So why are leftists pretending otherwise? The claims of “bans” allow LGBT activists to frame routine decisions about which books are appropriate for a school library as evidence of “hate,” discrimination, and “exclusion.” Certainly, some books are being excluded—but this doesn’t mean that LGBT students are. The trendiness of LGBT identity among impressionable young adolescents suggests that there are social rewards from belonging to this category. In fact, schools take pains to include those students, a reality underscored by the open promotion and celebration of LGBT groups in classrooms.

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The old books like the one that shows “two mommies” were aimed at children generally—irrespective of their sexual orientation. Indeed, the very thought that children have a “sexual orientation” is novel. To the extent that such an idea did exist in the past, it was little talked about, and it was certainly not discussed with children—whether in classrooms, books, or other media. Dispensing with the silence of the old books when it came to what being gay entails, today’s LGBT books for children are aimed at children who are presumed to be gay (or “bi,” or “non-binary,” or “transgender”). The new books don’t seek to help kids understand the behaviors of adults. Instead, they seek to instruct children on how to take part in them. This hints at some troubling assumptions: not only do the authors take as given that the adolescent reader wants to engage in these activities (but doesn’t know how)—they assume the child should be educated on how to do so, which implies that these are positive behaviors for young people to undertake.

Because these new books don’t seek to introduce kids to the existence of the LGBT community but rather give graphic instruction on how to participate in it, it should come as no surprise that these books (which were initially ordered by activist librarians) are being removed from some library holdings. This isn’t a “ban.” It’s a simple recognition of what reading material and ideas are appropriate for schools to promote to young adolescents.