Book bans have been a real problem in history, typically by totalitarian governments — whether Marxist, fascist, theocratic, or otherwise. But parents who don’t want their young children given explicit tutorials on how to practice the latest sexual fads are not Robespierres in training. They just want the bare minimum of decency and commons sense applied when schools choose which reading materials to provide.
You’d be excused for thinking otherwise if you followed only progressive media and social media influencers though. Popular Twitter personality Jess Piper warned her followers, for example, that while she hates fear mongering and hyperbole, “Nazis didn’t start with camps — they started with books.”
Locally, mainstream media organizations across North Carolina (WUNC, Border Belt Independent, The Charlotte Observer, The News & Observer, Blue Ridge Public Radio, WBTV, WFDD, WHQR, and WRAL) joined together this month to release a piece on the danger of book bans in our state.
The piece does not go into detail about any of the explicit sexual content that parents tend to actually complain about. Instead, it just frames the whole issue as about a handful of parents who oppose books on those of diverse backgrounds, like the single instance where a parent complained about a book on Islam in Robeson County.
The article makes sure to also note that there is a Parents Bill of Rights being debated at the legislature, insinuating that these allegedly closed-minded parents may soon be given even more power over their children’s education.
The American Library Association has tracked the reasons for recent book challenges, and as you can see below, they found that the biggest concern among parents, by far, is about sexually explicit material.
If your first instinct is to assume that the parents are unhinged and freaking out about a book where two kids briefly kiss, I challenge you to research the three most “banned” books — “Gender Queer,” “Lawn Boy,” and “All Boys Aren’t Blue” — all of which contain sexually explicit scenes involving children.
Consider “Lawn Boy,” published by Chapel Hill, North Carolina’s Algonquin Books. The book includes pre-pubescent boys giving each other oral sex in the bushes outside church youth group, described in detail. The author, Jonathan Evison, wrote a response, saying that the book wasn’t intended for kids, but he’s still proud to have ended up on the Banned Books list.
My protagonist, Mike, has a sexual experience at a youth group meeting at the age of ten with another ten-year-old boy… There is graphic language in this scene, which depicts sexual acts. It is worth noting that the book, which was intended for an adult audience, found some crossover success due in part to winning an Alex Award from the ALA’s Young Adult Library Services Association for “books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18″. In addition to the aforementioned sexual passages, Lawn Boy was found to have contained “44 f*cks and 42 sh*ts,” and I would argue that not one of them was wasted.
The other books being excluded have very similar themes, as they involved young children in explicit sex scenes. Because many of these are graphic novels, there are also very explicit pictures that accompany the stories. The fact that the sexual acts in all three books are homosexual is supposed to show that people are only complaining because they are “homophobic.” But any parent worth their salt won’t want ANY images of sexual acts being given to their children, especially by adults, even more especially by adults fighting not to have to disclose discussions about sex to parents.
A school is not “banning” a book by excluding it from a reading list or a library bookshelf. There is limited space, and no book is owed a place. Schools are creating a very curated catalogue of books out of all existing books. They should prioritize books that will be most beneficial to the students. When they include some books, that by definition means not including others. Of course, pornographic material should be the first thing excluded.