If you hold that book up to the same standards it probably has be banned too right? Lots of sexually explicit content in that one.
Edit: Instead of downvoting maybe do a little research first? Here's a story about a lawsuit in Utah aiming to remove the bible from schools based on the same silly grounds they are banning other books: https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2023/03/22/utah-parent...
The law in question (in MO) does not deal with text descriptions, but only images, so unless it was a illustrated Bible, it would not apply. It also exempts sex education and science books.
These arguments are no different than when governments try to have backdoors installed in technology. They say it's about protecting the kids to make the new laws hard to argue against without looking like a monster, but in reality the laws are tools for them to do more nefarious things. If a politician ever uses "protecting the children" as a justification, that should be a huge alarm bell in your head that means you should really consider what arguments you would have against their suggestion if kids weren't involved.
Nobody was ever trying to show 1st graders sexually explicit material in libraries. This is a tool to suppress ideas about things like LGBTQ.
Why are you defending the bigots in charge of the state that wish to marginalize their fellow man?
TFA contains no examples of children being shown "sexually explicit material" by educators in public employ. I've never heard of it happening in Missouri, and I have lived here for decades. Thread parent has shown no indication of bigotry. You don't seem to be discussing this issue in good faith.
> The proposal, approved close to midnight by the House Budget Committee, would cut the entire $4.5 million in state aid that libraries were slated to get next year. The proposed library cut, along with other changes to the state’s roughly $50 billion budget, will now head to the full Missouri House.
What does this mean for libraries? $4.5 million can't have been enough to fund a statewide library network so presumably libraries are getting funding from elsewhere.
A quick search suggests there are 171 public libraries in Missouri. This works out to $26,315 per library. I'm sure that money is appreciated but that can't be significant.
And then you can look up or estimate the total spend for each of those community's libraries.
Likely this means approximately nothing for most suburban, urban, and exurban/college town/resort town/etc. library systems. Those communities can easily cover the difference, and their libraries have large enough budgets that a 20K hit is barely felt. Might lose some overtime or a very part-time librarian, or reduce some fringe services, or most likely just re-appropriate a rounding error's worth of local funds to make up the difference.
Very well might mean a death sentence or significant service degradation for many of the state's rural libraries.
You are probably right that it is not evenly distributed. But this seems entirely on-brand for a state like Missouri. How many libraries have been ruined by these antics already?
According to some cursory searches, Washington State (where I live) has 2,500 libraries for 7.7 million people and Missouri has somewhere between 171 and 400 libraries for 6.1 million people.
At some point the horse dies and the stick is no longer motivational.
> Are the politicians pushing for this from rural areas?
Predominantly.
> Seems like either they are serving their constituents, or they'll be voted out next time?
It satisfies an immediate vengeance, but is very "cut off my nose to spite my face" for rural Missourians. In 10 years when the "drag queens in libraries" moral panic is long forgotten, these communities will lament the loss of their libraries.
Your question is deep, and gets to the heart of why we even bother electing representatives in the first place.
If reps are only there to channel the emotional state of their constituents, then what's the point of having representative democracy? If representation does not come with some expectation of leadership, then representation is a poor proxy for public will with no upside. If elected officials have no moral responsibility or practical expectation to lead -- and are just reactionary automata -- then get rid of the politicians and do everything via the ballot box.
As a european that frequently discusses political topics with people from the US, I recall times when conservatives over there were all about "small government" and "freedom of speech" and how they would literally fight for those rights (that's what the second amendment was written for in their eyes).
Where are those people today? Why are they not more vocal? Or were these values always just a veneer for something else that now comes to light?
Small government is code for cutting welfare spending and regulation of business activities.
Freedom of speech is code for a lot of things. In conservative circles it means the right to burn books, incite insurrections, and eventually burn crosses on the lawns of people of color and have women wear red robes and white headscarves.
The state unanimously passed a law to exclude sexually explicit books from public school libraries. A reasonable thing to do. The library association and the ACLU decided they wanted to sue the state. The state, in turn, removed the relatively small amount of funds allocated for the libraries. FaFo. All of this is in the article.
Suing to dispute the constitutionality of a law is also a reasonable thing to do. Cutting funding prior to the adjudication of the legal dispute seems like a legislative attempt to pre-empt the judicial process.
'FaFo' is shorthand for 'Fuck around and find out', yes? I'm not sure this internet tough guy approach is going to persuade anyone.
Why is this reasonable? Children come in touch with porn at earlier and earlier ages and they may be very confused by that.
The school provides a good space to learn something a bit more realistic about sexuality at the appropriate ages. But of course as a european I know that the US in parts has extremely prude ideas (your censorship also affects us).
That being said, there are many modern nations where kids learn about sex in school for a while now, and they didn't develop psychological trauma or anxiety because of that (quite the opposite). It isn't as if there are no studies done in that field.
But prude morality seems to trump everything. Some don't seem to realize that supressing sexuality is something religions tend to do for a reason (and it is not the good of their hearts).
if you frequently discuss these topics you should be aware that those were always just nice sounding soundbites that were never rooted in any kind of conviction
Not that I'd agree with them, but I don't see the inconsistency: cutting funding of libraries is smaller government. The question of whether school book bans violates the First Amendment is a contested one, and has some interplay with the current pushes on left and right to control what is available online. Basically, it revolves around whether you think determining what content is in a school library is censorship, or just one of the functions of government. The U.S. Supreme Court was divided on it the last time it came up. https://reason.com/volokh/2023/02/27/does-the-first-amendmen...
Jokes about fascism aside, you can tell that our social climate is in a very unhealthy and unstable spot when something that was previously a community staple has been relegated to the outskirts and can be attacked with not only impunity from criticism but cheers from the supporters.
Knowledge and truth itself are being eroded; on the one hand, very intentionally and precipitously by politicians and corporations enacting authoritarianism for power, and in a more insidious way by ChatGPT and its ilk which can convince you of hallucinations as easily as fact.
When I was young 2 decades ago, I already perceived we had peaked, so it's interesting to watch how clear signs of it are becoming everyday news
They have no realistic public policy platform. The culture warrior drama is all to keep the base energized since their tribal behavior is the only hope of winning elections.
> $4 million is a lot of money for a library and completely unnecessary in current economic conditions
It's a total of $4.5 million across all libraries in the state. In other words, nothing.
Libraries aren't a luxury, they are a valuable community resource, especially in tough economic times. This is a place where people can get access to the Internet and education, which helps them get jobs, which allows them to support themselves and ultimately pay taxes.
It's comically evil to cut such a small amount of money for the state's public libraries under pretty much any circumstance (The total budget is ~50 billion dollars). Libraries should be considered some of our crowning achievements: (nearly) free and unprivileged access to as much knowledge as we can cram into a single building.
Unfortunately, one of the primary political parties is actively waging war on education and information.
You're missing that most of these people want to kill sexual education too. They are openly against modern education, and think the father of the household should have final say on anything and everything.
Some of the material that was available in school libraries shocked even me as a gay man. Here are two pages from a book (Gender Queer) that caused a bunch of this controversy:
(Caution: these links might be NSFW, but they are blurred)
(Edit: only one page is from Gender Queer, another is from a different book that was removed.)
If a parent wanted to give this book to their child at an appropriate age, that'd be fine, but just hanging out on a shelf at primary schools with very young kids seems like too much.
I really wish schools would focus on the basics: reading, mathematics, writing. There are too many educators that are trying to mold them into indoctrination facilities for politics and new theories of identity. There is plenty of time to do that at university.
> Some of the material that was available in school libraries shocked even me as a gay man. Here are two pages from a book (Gender Queer) that caused a bunch of this controversy:
> (Caution: these links might be NSFW, but they are blurred)
> If a parent wanted to give this book to their child at an appropriate age, that'd be fine, but just hanging out on a shelf at primary schools with very young kids seems like too much.
> I really wish primary schools would focus on the basics: reading, mathematics, writing. There are too many educators that are trying to mold them into indoctrination facilities for politics and new theories of identity. There is plenty of time to do that at university.
I've read that book and it's not aimed at children. No sane educator or library person would offer that to a young child.
Also what you're leaving out is that behind the pixelation isn't a penis but a strap on. The second image isn't contained in the book at all.
>>> If a parent wanted to give this book to their child at an appropriate age, that'd be fine, but just hanging out on a shelf at primary schools with very young kids seems like too much.
>> I've read that book and it's not aimed at children. No sane educator or library person would offer that to a young child.
> That's the problem: <lists articles>
The first article is about 2 high schools.
The second article is about a high school.
The third article is about a high school.
The fourth article is about a high school.
The fifth article is also about a... wait for it!... a high school.
High schools are not primary schools and high schoolers are not young children.
(Also: the whole conversation is hilariously non-unique to libraries. 90% of male teens watch porn, and that's probably an under-estimate given that porn is embarrassing/stigmatizing... I promise you there are exactly zero high schoolers in this entire country who have access to this book in their school library who do not also have infinitely easier access to near-infinite amounts of actual porn.)
> (Also: the whole conversation is hilariously non-unique to libraries. 90% of male teens watch porn, and that's probably an under-estimate given that porn is embarrassing/stigmatizing... I promise you there are exactly zero high schoolers in this entire country who have access to this book in their school library who do not also have infinitely easier access to near-infinite amounts of actual porn.)
So should the high school library have a hentai section next to the manga? Hustlers on the magazine rack next to Newsweek? Lots of teens vape, so no one should have a problem with vape juice vending machines in the cafeteria, right? Wouldn't it make sense for the school district to have a PornHub subscription to supplement ProQuest?
The fact that teens do some thing does not at all imply it's appropriate for a school setting.
There is a clear difference between Hustler and a graphic novel that contains some sexual representations.
You are employing an old and tired strategy: latching onto any lewd expression and then dismissing the rest of the work whole cloth as purely pornographic. This is exactly the same strategy as was used in e.g. the Howl obscenity trial [1].
Anyways, I reject the premise. These books aren't attacked because they contain pornographic scenes. These books are attacked because of the people, identities, and viewpoints they represent and affirm. It's about bigotry, not the kids. As evidenced by the fact that these comments even crop up on articles such as this one, where the article isn't even about school libraries [2].
Sex and sexuality are deeply important parts of being human and it's possible to have uncensored discussion of this part of humanity without reaching for Hustler or hentai. I'm saddened that there are apparently people who aren't able to distinguish between uncensored discussion and straight up porn. Who cannot read or think or talk about sex without their brains pulling up hentai and pin-up girl style pornography. What an impoverished experience of humanity these people must have. No wonder they are so angry all the time.
> Anyways, I reject the premise. These books aren't attacked because they contain pornographic scenes. These books are attacked because of the people, identities, and viewpoints they represent and affirm. It's about bigotry, not the kids.
And most of the time the people referencing the book haven't even read it is what drives me nuts. It'd be so easy to pick things that were actually in the book but they always have to go one step too far and make shit up. We live in a world where these idiots read something and blindly share it without doing a shred of research. Anything that supports their bigoted views.
> There is a clear difference between Hustler and a graphic novel that contains some sexual representations.
Not in this case. Those images are 100% graphic porn (of the cartoon/hentai variety). I saw the pictures upthread. Porn that presents itself as "educational" is still porn (IIRC, that's also a actual real-people-having-sex porn genre).
> These books aren't attacked because they contain pornographic scenes. These books are attacked because of the people, identities, and viewpoints they represent and affirm.
You do realize those aren't mutually exclusive? The wrong people attacking it on the wrong grounds is not justification for stocking pornography in a school library.
> Not in this case. Those images are 100% graphic porn (of the cartoon/hentai variety). I saw the pictures upthread. Porn that presents itself as "educational" is still porn (IIRC, that's also a actual real-people-having-sex porn genre).
As I said, the first picture is taken out of context and the second one isn't even in the book. This book is porn the same way other educational material about anatomy and sexuality are porn.
Such images are shown in books about human sexuality, or sex guides. The purpose of those books is not to tittilate in an erotic sense, but to provide information or education.
To go further, almost everyone agrees that a cartoon of a man and woman having sex in the missionary position for the purpose of procreation is not necessarily pornographic; this is a standard sort of picture in age appropriate sex education materials.
Granted, these images concern sexual reproduction. However this only makes me question why people deem that image appropriate, but images of other positions or acts not worthy of learning about in other contexts.
The fact is that we do learn about sex at school for other reasons. "Safe sex", consent, and in many cases contraception are all taught.
So hypothetically, if we're fine with images to educate about reproduction, and images to educate about consent or safe sex for nonreproductive purposes, what makes the images in the book so different as to deserve to be forbidden knowledge?
> Such images are shown in books about human sexuality, or sex guides. The purpose of those books is not to tittilate in an erotic sense, but to provide information or education.
How-to sex guides and the like are not appropriate for a high school library.
> To go further, almost everyone agrees that a cartoon of a man and woman having sex in the missionary position for the purpose of procreation is not necessarily pornographic; this is a standard sort of picture in age appropriate sex education materials.
Is it? I don't recall having been shown anything like that.
And I would say a cartoon of two characters having sex and showing penetration would necessarily be pornographic. A medical illustration wouldn't (think stiff, cutaway diagram, narrowly focused on the necessary parts), but that's not a "cartoon."
> Granted, these images concern sexual reproduction. However this only makes me question why people deem that image appropriate, but images of other positions or acts not worthy of learning about in other contexts.
I think you need to figure out the difference between sex education and a sex guide on your own. You're playing fast and loose with categories, and getting yourself tied in knots as a result.
>How-to sex guides and the like are not appropriate for a high school library.
I wasn't saying they necessarily are; I was saying that such a representation isn't necessarily pornographic.
>Is it? I don't recall having been shown anything like that.
I do, even if it was many years ago.
>I think you need to figure out the difference between sex education and a sex guide on your own.
I have figured it out; the fact is that there is a continuum of representations of sex between a cut-out diagram of the interior anatomy of a penis penetrating the interior anatomy of a vagina, a diagram showing how a condom is applied, a picture of one adult on top of another in a book in a "How are Babies Made" sort of book for children, and showing how sex with a strap-on works. I don't see any reason to consider any of these necessarily pornographic - as all lack the primary intention to titillate.
It's so lazy to just see that picture out of context and decide that young people shouldn't read the book. Context matters and it's part of that author's story. Had you read the book you'd know that this wasn't an enjoyable act for the protagonist or a how-to for the reader but part of their difficult youth trying to figure out their sexuality and identity. Many people might feel like this and I'm convinced having this book available to them will make the lives of LGBTQ youth easier to cope with.
And again, this wasn't even a penis in that picture. This is definitely not a book to be considered porn. And if you haven't read it, I don't think you can convince anyone otherwise.
>> No sane educator or library person would offer that to a young child.
Those seem to all be about high school libraries.
My recollection of high school is that by the time we reached it we'd seen far more than what's in that book, and we wouldn't have thought the book was a big deal.
But maybe it is different in high school nowadays. We didn't have the internet. Maybe kids now have such an overwhelmingly amount of wholesome entertainment via the internet that by the time they reach high school they have yet to get around to looking at sex stuff, so it would be a big shock to them?
Parents who don't like what their school libraries stock should lobby their school board, vote for school board members who share their views, and maybe even run for school board. There's a whole nice, approachable, local body to deal with all this, basically everywhere in the US. It's arguably one of the closest-to-the-people and easiest-for-constituents-to-influence governing bodies that exists in this country.
[EDIT] "Wait, so why's that not what the outlets and politicians who are complaining about this, are advising as the right way to approach this?" because the entire point of making this non-issue an issue in the first place was to boost state and national level candidates, not to do anything useful or appropriate—a state governor can't grandstand about "get mad, and go... um... vote in your school board elections!" in a way that'll be effective at building their national profile or driving broader GOTV for their side.
> Parents who don't like what their school libraries stock should lobby their school board, vote for school board members who share their views, and maybe even run for school board.
Maybe they should do that too (and I believe that's actually not uncommon), but it doesn't preclude or de-legitimize other political action to address the problem.
In any case, tactical criticism such as yours is almost always noise. It usually amounts to a veiled instruction to surrender, and in any case would be constructed against any tactic chosen (e.g. "whatever it is you're doing, it's not the right way and you should stop and do some other thing). Also, opponents are motivated to give poor tactical advice and typically do so.
> because the entire point of making this non-issue an issue in the first place was to boost state and national level candidates, not to do anything useful or appropriate
Come on. All sides are grandstanding all the time nowadays, even on this particular issue. Complaints about it are almost always soaked with myside bias.
> Come on. All sides are grandstanding all the time nowadays, even on this particular issue. Complaints about it are almost always soaked with myside bias.
Agreed, but exactly one side made this fake issue A Thing.
Somewhat off-topic, but the other day a school principal in Florida was forced out of a job because some parents were upset that their 6th-graders were exposed to an image of Michelangelo's David - in an art history class: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11894493/Tallahasse...
There's an overlap between these sort of hyper-reactionary people and politically motivated street toughs, who are likely to keep escalating such situations because it's strategically effective.
Somehow one doubts that a new "Kindergarten is Mostly Hardcore Porn Appreciation" charter elementary would escape legislative attention in our increasingly authoritarian climate...
A "Kindergarten is Mostly Singing Songs about Jesus" charter elementary, OTOH? We may have a few hundred of those already.
It applies to PEOPLE of all ages. The law is about public libraries, NOT public school libraries. 100.00% of FY 2022's allocation went to NON-school public libraries.
If they are willing to go to such extremes to censor books how do they feel about the internet? The internet has a reach that is orders of magnitude greater than books, but I never hear about lawmakers attempting to shut down the internet or part of the internet. Is it just too decentralized to even attempt or is their pursuit of book censorship just for show to impress their followers?
Well recently they went after a journalist for "hacking the government website" after he ran an article about how they had a bunch of people's SS#s in the source code of one of their webpages so I'm not sure Missouri is too keen on it either.
Just a nitpick, but "source code" might imply that it was something secretive. The guy found SSNs of teachers in MO served up publicly on a state website within the page's HTML. The governor went on a crusade against this guy because he didn't understand it, and despite being told by numerous experts that there was no case, he kept it going.
The worst part was that this guy was beyond reproach - he went out of his way to notify people and said he wouldn't mention it to news outlets etc until the issue was resolved. It was a clear case of the governor misusing his power to prosecute a free press that he didn't like using a pretext he knew was incorrect. While it's funny to poke at the governor for this, I personally believe it should have caused his removal from office.
State education officials initially wanted to thank Renaud for discovering the problem that, as investigators would learn, has existed undetected since 2011. And an FBI agent who looked at the incident informed the state that it was “not an actual network intrusion,” noting that the website in question “allowed open source tools to be used to query data that should not be public.”
State officials made it clear the information was on a public site, it was not encrypted or password protected and the reporter was not anywhere he wasn’t allowed.
The governor decided to blame a government failing on the reporter who discovered it.
Despite all this, Parson convened a press conference to label the reporter a “hacker” and demand a highway patrol investigation. He accused the Post-Dispatch of trying to use the security flaw to embarrass him, and his political action committee launched ads to raise money off Parson’s attacks.
Generally if you are out-of-touch enough to think libraries are important facets of societal knowledge that require sexual policing rather than a book warehouse with free wifi than you are out-of-touch enough to think the internet only consists of Facebook and google searches to Facebook
there are well establish web blocking & policing tools. most libraries use them.
and most of the people there to use the internet don't have access to the web on their own -- they're not going to be the most internet savvy users.
it's not impossible for Jim-Bob the toothless iterant to get to the Pronz on library computer -- i'm sure it happens, in much the same way i'm sure it happens on school computer lab systems -- but it is certainly the minority.
tbh i'd be more worried about doomscrollers and kids playing online games burning bandwidth and bogarting the systems
Well, that fight is happening on the scale of entire nations, isn't it? States wouldn't logically have jurisdiction over it because it's interstate commerce, but at the federal and international level, it's definitely at issue.
Libraries are a lot more than just places to check out books. Most libraries provide Internet access and other information services, such as classes and workshops. So by cutting this funding they may well be depriving people of Internet access.
> but I never hear about lawmakers attempting to shut down the internet or part of the internet
It's not censoring books; rather a state choosing which books to publicly fund in school libraries. No one is banning parents from buying those books on their own dime.
Schools are publicly funded by taxes; those taxes are apportioned by elected representatives. The legislature has the right to dictate what the money can and can't be used for. That's not censorship.
Not everyone can afford to just buy whatever books they want, but they still pay taxes. It's a huge cop-out to say "oh it's not banning the books completely, just removing the only method by which tons of people are able to access that literature."
It's a huge violation of the spirit of libraries. It is effectively censorship. I guaranteed that the bible, despite portraying just about every subject they are trying to hide, is present in every single school library in the state.
Saying that kids only get free access to the books the state legislators agree with is absolutely censorship.
What's been really jarring about this issue is that everyone is calling it a "book ban", when it demonstrably is not. It's removing certain (in some cases pornographic) material from school curricula and libraries. Maybe you can steelman an argument that goes something like "if they remove this from school curricula and libraries, they'll try to remove it from the [everywhere else] too". This is of course silly. Plus, you can just go actually read the text of these laws.
The other cases are borderline. Not truly “porn”, but definitely something a parent might object to. I don’t get the backlash here at all. Parents can inform what goes into curricula and that’s what’s happened here.
Also, a nakedly unconstitutional attempt to control the inventory of a private company is not exactly the greatest example of an escalating.
> calling it a "book ban", when it demonstrably is not. It's removing certain (in some cases pornographic) material from school curricula and libraries.
Removing certain books from all the libraries is what we call "banning" those books. That's literally what the term means.
> you can just go actually read the text of these laws
Here, kid, no Judy Bloom for you, but you can read the law that prohibits her book? That's just sick.
It's a state trying to pull all state funding for public libraries (not just school libraries--all public libraries) because a couple library associations are suing over the constitutionality of an earlier law. And the law they are now trying to pass to defund the libraries is possibly not constitutional under the state constitution since that requires the state to fund public libraries.
Sure—and, traditionally, local school boards have dealt with all that just fine. Which, given the fraction of funding that comes from local property taxes in most districts, seems appropriate to me.
This is big government stepping in to override decisions of local governments that they disagree with.
My point is that it's perfectly normal in a democracy for a higher level authority to decide to intervene in lower level activities. People seem to get mad when they read a report about a town or city or state far away from where they live that has chosen to do things they disagree with.
> It's not censoring books; rather a state choosing which books to publicly fund in school libraries. No one is banning parents from buying those books on their own dime.
It's censorship and an infringement on the basic constitutional rights of public employees to independently make purchasing decisions for the government.
It's the same as choosing to include one bible and pointedly not another.
I object to my taxes you mentioned being used in that manner. I pay for education not indoctrination and ignorance. A large, perhaps the largest function of education is to expose the mind to the variety of the world. Selectively masking off parts of it is literally creating ignorance not education.
I don't think the Tiktok discourse from politicians is in entirely good faith either. The chair in the committee hearing yesterday was making lofty denunciations of the sort they would condemn if they came from the other party.
Where should the line be drawn? As a parent of kids in elementary and middle school, I don't want them reading about anything sexually explicit. Maybe in high school but I feel something should be done to evaluate what reading materials are seen by children. We didn't do it with social media, we didn't do it with pornography, and we bear the results of that nonintervention.
What is the best argument for allowing elementary school children to read about sexaul intercourse?
Perhaps the answer lies in teaching kids (young adults?) in an objective, strictly-educational manner as the time dawns for it to become relevant in their lives.
Of course that solution would be objected to by both sides. The social leftists think it's literally a death sentence to trans children to not teach 6-year-olds about anal sex, and populist conservatives think sex ed in any capacity is degenerate pedophilia.
Every public forum, ever. No Twitter discourse would be complete without it. Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill had social leftists crying foul of targeting trans children by banning sexually explicit material in Kindergarten through third grade.
The line should be drawn wherever parents, teachers, and librarians choose to draw it. Politicians should not be involved. Top-down meddling has destroyed public education in USA, and this is just more of that. At some point we should stop making public schools worse.
Aren't politicians involved whenever the will of the voters is being enacted? What if most parents in MO support what the politicians are doing? What if they called their representatives and asked them to take action against libraries?
If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
> If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
Bad assumption. That's a fundamental POV difference between "I pay taxes to fund the public education system" and "I pay taxes to pay for kids to go to some school". The notion that those tax dollars belong to the parents and not specifically the public school system depends on which of those you think is, or should be, the case.
For my part, if the money's not exclusively funding the public school system, I don't want to pay any taxes toward schools. Talk about bottom up!
[EDIT] FWIW I'm actually for allowing districts to experiment with this, because I doubt mine would do it and I think the results would be hilarious, but would prefer not to have to move to another state to avoid it, so would rather the red parts of my state not impose it on my district.
I live in one of the most rural counties in Missouri, where libraries could actually close as a result, and I doubt I could find one parent in ten among my neighbors who wants the legislature to waste time on this cynical grandstanding. The problem with our libraries is not that there is pornography there. One notes that both of the execrable politicians quoted in TFA represent suburban districts on the Kansas border. I'm sure there are people in the Ozarks who agree with them, but overall we've got different priorities.
The unwarranted assumption you make in this comment is that legislation in USA reflects the will of the population. That is very rarely the case, and this is a perfect example. No one in this state woke up this morning worried about porn in an elementary school library.
I support vouchers, because even imperfect improvements are improvements. If a child isn't being served by a school, even poor parents should be able to do something about that. We can imagine a world in which the public schools offer enough options to help every child, but we don't live there yet.
> Aren't politicians involved whenever the will of the voters is being enacted? What if most parents in MO support what the politicians are doing? What if they called their representatives and asked them to take action against libraries?
Indeed. I think jessuastin probably meant something like nationalized identity-driven politics. It's a valid difference.
> If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
I like choice but not vouchers. There are basically two issues with vouchers.
The first is that they're usually implemented in a fashion that is simultaneously regressive (on income) and re-distributive (on geography). Ie, they're often implemented as pure grift.
The second, and more important, is that we already have experimented with a hybrid public/private system where some public funds flow to private options! The result is runaway spending and the market driving emphasis toward a bunch of bullshit cost disease stuff instead of actual learning outcomes. No matter how bad our public K12 system is, you will never convince me that our higher ed system is better, and that's what an American public/private hybrid system would, empirically, end up converging to.
I could get behind a voucher system that (1) gives each kid the same amount of cash and also (2) caps all tuition and fees for any school receiving even a dollar of voucher cash.
I'd also be okay with just not providing state funding for education at all, but it'd be a sort of terrible world for most families and I genuinely wonder how many people realize how bad things would get for most families...
Well.. to that I would say that parents HAVE drawn a line and teachers and people without children, perhaps such as yourself, are pushing back. Parents, IMO, should be the ones to draw the line. Not the teachers, not the state, and not third-parties that are fighting a political war.
As for top-down meddling, I agree with that. The Department of Education has been the worst thing for America's education system, not to mention half-baked federal policies on healthy eating.
The issue is that teachers and the administration are the government in most places. So if we are to have less meddling it would be to empower the parents to make decisions - to draw the line as you say - and force the schools and the teachers to follow that line.
Parents have some measure of authority in their homes, although sometimes the law acts in the interests of e.g. abused children. Public employees on public property don't take direction from parents, nor should they. Public school employees are managed by an elected body called the school board. Since school boards meet in the actual communities they govern, they are often somewhat democratic in nature. If parents don't like this situation, they can keep the children home where bookshelves, if they existed, would contain nothing but bibles and the "Left Behind" series. (Too bad about algebra and English...)
State legislatures are mostly not democratic. Rather than implementing the will of their constituents, state legislators spend their time campaigning and representing for those who fund their campaigning. TFA is just another example.
"...to draw the line as you say..."
To be clear, you introduced this banal cliche, and I used it once in response.
And that's your prerogative to actually parent your children and keep an eye on what they check out and what they're doing online. However, pushing your values onto the community at large because you're worried about your middle school child knowing what sex is.
The books these conservatives want to ban aren't porn, they're complex stories about complex topics that your kids may have to deal with themselves. If you don't want them reading that stuff do your job as a parent.
This law in question (in MO) is very explicitly about porn. It does not apply to the text, but to images, and specifically exempts scientific and sex education material.
From the article:
"The law, which was approved last year as part of a larger package addressing sexual assault survivors’ rights, prohibits images in school materials that could be considered sexually explicit, such as depictions of genitals or sex acts."
They're not talking about porn, they're talking about any coming of age story that deals with sex at all.
I have no evidence that school libraries were stocking porn or that this law was necessary.
However, this law applies to more than just libraries. I know of at least one case when I was in High School where a teacher was accused of giving a student a Play Boy magazine and I believe this case played a part in that teachers dismissal.
I never said that I felt the law was necessary, only that I read it and that it is not what is being portrayed here.
Given at least one of yours has made it through elementary school, and we'll assume you're in-touch with what your children are reading in-class and for fun: do you recall any book your child brought home or read in school, or even was just in the elementary school library, that you didn't feel was age-appropriate?
I wouldn't assume any elementary-school librarian is stocking the kind of books you're concerned about, and I think it's possible you're being fed a line by politicians and the media, to drum up outrage and support for a narrative.
Then you're okay with the status quo and can ignore the ongoing moral panic about school libraries. The books that people are flipping shit about are not currently and never have been available in elementary school libraries. Also, almost all non-high-school libraries are curated for age appropriateness already. I'm sure someone will be able to dig up the one exception that proves the rule, but 99.9999% of the frothing-at-the-mouth articles about school libraries that you will find online or on cable news are about high schools.
Or, in the case of this article, about public, non-school libraries.
(I guess an elementary school kid or middle school kid could order a book via the inter-library loan system, but that's sort of a stupid caveat since typing pornhub.com into a smartphone or desktop browser is several orders of magnitude easier than knowing about and learning how to use the ILL system.)
The best argument that none of this fucking matters a bit is that local decision makers—many of them elected—are and have been doing an overall totally fine job of sorting this out, and that it wasn't a problem on anyone's radar until certain politically-aligned media outlets decided to start a moral panic to GOTV.
First, we’re not talking to kids about intercourse. We’re saying kids need to have some amount of knowledge about this stuff that is appropriate for their age.
For example, small kids who are put into the care of strangers need to be aware that adults are not allowed to touch them without permission. They need to know the proper names for their private parts because it’s more difficult to understand if a kid is being abused when they’re using strange euphemisms. They need to understand that they shouldn’t be ashamed to tell an adult if someone touches them in a way that makes them uncomfortable.
Are these conversations I want to have with my young child? Hell no! But they’re necessary for a kid his age. I wouldn’t be doing my job as a parent if I didn’t teach him these things.
The reality is that it’s going to be a series of age appropriate conversations every few years, because he’s going to need to know a little more as he gets older.
And if parents are sending their kids into the world without this kind of age appropriate information then they’re putting their kids at serious risk for abuse. Frankly, this is the kind of situation where I’d be glad that schools and libraries are making age appropriate materials like this available for kids; to help the kids whose parents aren’t doing their jobs.
All the more reason for zlibrary to exist, to work around silly local yokel politicians relegating their constituency to ignorance for their own agendas by book burnings. Good thing anyone can buy their way into politics, isn't it?
The truth is that the assertion that elementary schools are trying to expose children to pornography is outright untrue, because of course it is. Conservatives have simply decided to equate that with allowing children to freely see same-sex relationships portrayed in the same way as opposite-sex relationships have been portrayed to them forever. It's a lie that only serves to divide people and try to convince them of the outdated notion that non-straight people are child abusers, and therefore that the republican party is the anti-child abuser party.
In the end, the only hope the republican party has to survive as the older generation passes is to rely on lies of this nature to divide enough people that vote based on moral outrage instead of fact.
Someone will reply to this with a list of news articles purporting to contradict you, and all of those articles will be about controversies surrounding books available in high school or public libraries.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadEdit: Instead of downvoting maybe do a little research first? Here's a story about a lawsuit in Utah aiming to remove the bible from schools based on the same silly grounds they are banning other books: https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2023/03/22/utah-parent...
Nobody was ever trying to show 1st graders sexually explicit material in libraries. This is a tool to suppress ideas about things like LGBTQ.
Why are you defending the bigots in charge of the state that wish to marginalize their fellow man?
What does this mean for libraries? $4.5 million can't have been enough to fund a statewide library network so presumably libraries are getting funding from elsewhere.
A quick search suggests there are 171 public libraries in Missouri. This works out to $26,315 per library. I'm sure that money is appreciated but that can't be significant.
You can see where aid goes here: https://www.sos.mo.gov/library/development/stateaid/default
And then you can look up or estimate the total spend for each of those community's libraries.
Likely this means approximately nothing for most suburban, urban, and exurban/college town/resort town/etc. library systems. Those communities can easily cover the difference, and their libraries have large enough budgets that a 20K hit is barely felt. Might lose some overtime or a very part-time librarian, or reduce some fringe services, or most likely just re-appropriate a rounding error's worth of local funds to make up the difference.
Very well might mean a death sentence or significant service degradation for many of the state's rural libraries.
According to some cursory searches, Washington State (where I live) has 2,500 libraries for 7.7 million people and Missouri has somewhere between 171 and 400 libraries for 6.1 million people.
At some point the horse dies and the stick is no longer motivational.
Predominantly.
> Seems like either they are serving their constituents, or they'll be voted out next time?
It satisfies an immediate vengeance, but is very "cut off my nose to spite my face" for rural Missourians. In 10 years when the "drag queens in libraries" moral panic is long forgotten, these communities will lament the loss of their libraries.
Your question is deep, and gets to the heart of why we even bother electing representatives in the first place.
If reps are only there to channel the emotional state of their constituents, then what's the point of having representative democracy? If representation does not come with some expectation of leadership, then representation is a poor proxy for public will with no upside. If elected officials have no moral responsibility or practical expectation to lead -- and are just reactionary automata -- then get rid of the politicians and do everything via the ballot box.
Iowa is pulling the same stunts, and then acts all surprised when they have trouble hiring teachers.
Where are those people today? Why are they not more vocal? Or were these values always just a veneer for something else that now comes to light?
When you hear talk about the establishment versus populist wings of the GOP, this is what's being referred to.
Freedom of speech is code for a lot of things. In conservative circles it means the right to burn books, incite insurrections, and eventually burn crosses on the lawns of people of color and have women wear red robes and white headscarves.
'FaFo' is shorthand for 'Fuck around and find out', yes? I'm not sure this internet tough guy approach is going to persuade anyone.
The school provides a good space to learn something a bit more realistic about sexuality at the appropriate ages. But of course as a european I know that the US in parts has extremely prude ideas (your censorship also affects us).
That being said, there are many modern nations where kids learn about sex in school for a while now, and they didn't develop psychological trauma or anxiety because of that (quite the opposite). It isn't as if there are no studies done in that field.
But prude morality seems to trump everything. Some don't seem to realize that supressing sexuality is something religions tend to do for a reason (and it is not the good of their hearts).
Not if the funds are just spent elsewhere.
Knowledge and truth itself are being eroded; on the one hand, very intentionally and precipitously by politicians and corporations enacting authoritarianism for power, and in a more insidious way by ChatGPT and its ilk which can convince you of hallucinations as easily as fact.
When I was young 2 decades ago, I already perceived we had peaked, so it's interesting to watch how clear signs of it are becoming everyday news
It's a total of $4.5 million across all libraries in the state. In other words, nothing.
Libraries aren't a luxury, they are a valuable community resource, especially in tough economic times. This is a place where people can get access to the Internet and education, which helps them get jobs, which allows them to support themselves and ultimately pay taxes.
Unfortunately, one of the primary political parties is actively waging war on education and information.
According to the article the total budget is $50 billion.
(Caution: these links might be NSFW, but they are blurred)
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Screen...
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Screen...
(Edit: only one page is from Gender Queer, another is from a different book that was removed.)
If a parent wanted to give this book to their child at an appropriate age, that'd be fine, but just hanging out on a shelf at primary schools with very young kids seems like too much.
I really wish schools would focus on the basics: reading, mathematics, writing. There are too many educators that are trying to mold them into indoctrination facilities for politics and new theories of identity. There is plenty of time to do that at university.
> (Caution: these links might be NSFW, but they are blurred)
> https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Screen...
> https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/Screen...
> If a parent wanted to give this book to their child at an appropriate age, that'd be fine, but just hanging out on a shelf at primary schools with very young kids seems like too much.
> I really wish primary schools would focus on the basics: reading, mathematics, writing. There are too many educators that are trying to mold them into indoctrination facilities for politics and new theories of identity. There is plenty of time to do that at university.
I've read that book and it's not aimed at children. No sane educator or library person would offer that to a young child.
Also what you're leaving out is that behind the pixelation isn't a penis but a strap on. The second image isn't contained in the book at all.
Stop spreading misinformation.
That's the problem:
https://www.wlky.com/article/gender-queer-book-louisville-jc...
https://foxchattanooga.com/news/nation-world/high-school-lib...
https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/news/2022/05/10/lgbtq-me...
https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclu...
https://wgme.com/news/local/turner-community-members-weigh-i...
There's plenty more, and even more that had it but were forced to remove it after parent backlash.
>> I've read that book and it's not aimed at children. No sane educator or library person would offer that to a young child.
> That's the problem: <lists articles>
The first article is about 2 high schools.
The second article is about a high school.
The third article is about a high school.
The fourth article is about a high school.
The fifth article is also about a... wait for it!... a high school.
High schools are not primary schools and high schoolers are not young children.
(Also: the whole conversation is hilariously non-unique to libraries. 90% of male teens watch porn, and that's probably an under-estimate given that porn is embarrassing/stigmatizing... I promise you there are exactly zero high schoolers in this entire country who have access to this book in their school library who do not also have infinitely easier access to near-infinite amounts of actual porn.)
So should the high school library have a hentai section next to the manga? Hustlers on the magazine rack next to Newsweek? Lots of teens vape, so no one should have a problem with vape juice vending machines in the cafeteria, right? Wouldn't it make sense for the school district to have a PornHub subscription to supplement ProQuest?
The fact that teens do some thing does not at all imply it's appropriate for a school setting.
You are employing an old and tired strategy: latching onto any lewd expression and then dismissing the rest of the work whole cloth as purely pornographic. This is exactly the same strategy as was used in e.g. the Howl obscenity trial [1].
Anyways, I reject the premise. These books aren't attacked because they contain pornographic scenes. These books are attacked because of the people, identities, and viewpoints they represent and affirm. It's about bigotry, not the kids. As evidenced by the fact that these comments even crop up on articles such as this one, where the article isn't even about school libraries [2].
Sex and sexuality are deeply important parts of being human and it's possible to have uncensored discussion of this part of humanity without reaching for Hustler or hentai. I'm saddened that there are apparently people who aren't able to distinguish between uncensored discussion and straight up porn. Who cannot read or think or talk about sex without their brains pulling up hentai and pin-up girl style pornography. What an impoverished experience of humanity these people must have. No wonder they are so angry all the time.
[1] https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Howl_Obscenity_T...
[2] See https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages/LibraryDevelopment/FY22WebP... and https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages/LibraryDevelopment/FY22WebP... $0.00 of the funds discussed in this article go to school libraries.
And most of the time the people referencing the book haven't even read it is what drives me nuts. It'd be so easy to pick things that were actually in the book but they always have to go one step too far and make shit up. We live in a world where these idiots read something and blindly share it without doing a shred of research. Anything that supports their bigoted views.
Not in this case. Those images are 100% graphic porn (of the cartoon/hentai variety). I saw the pictures upthread. Porn that presents itself as "educational" is still porn (IIRC, that's also a actual real-people-having-sex porn genre).
> These books aren't attacked because they contain pornographic scenes. These books are attacked because of the people, identities, and viewpoints they represent and affirm.
You do realize those aren't mutually exclusive? The wrong people attacking it on the wrong grounds is not justification for stocking pornography in a school library.
As I said, the first picture is taken out of context and the second one isn't even in the book. This book is porn the same way other educational material about anatomy and sexuality are porn.
There isn't a context that could make that first POV/frontal view picture of someone getting a blowjob not-porn.
If that's appropriate for school, so is hentai.
To go further, almost everyone agrees that a cartoon of a man and woman having sex in the missionary position for the purpose of procreation is not necessarily pornographic; this is a standard sort of picture in age appropriate sex education materials.
Granted, these images concern sexual reproduction. However this only makes me question why people deem that image appropriate, but images of other positions or acts not worthy of learning about in other contexts.
The fact is that we do learn about sex at school for other reasons. "Safe sex", consent, and in many cases contraception are all taught.
So hypothetically, if we're fine with images to educate about reproduction, and images to educate about consent or safe sex for nonreproductive purposes, what makes the images in the book so different as to deserve to be forbidden knowledge?
How-to sex guides and the like are not appropriate for a high school library.
> To go further, almost everyone agrees that a cartoon of a man and woman having sex in the missionary position for the purpose of procreation is not necessarily pornographic; this is a standard sort of picture in age appropriate sex education materials.
Is it? I don't recall having been shown anything like that.
And I would say a cartoon of two characters having sex and showing penetration would necessarily be pornographic. A medical illustration wouldn't (think stiff, cutaway diagram, narrowly focused on the necessary parts), but that's not a "cartoon."
> Granted, these images concern sexual reproduction. However this only makes me question why people deem that image appropriate, but images of other positions or acts not worthy of learning about in other contexts.
I think you need to figure out the difference between sex education and a sex guide on your own. You're playing fast and loose with categories, and getting yourself tied in knots as a result.
I wasn't saying they necessarily are; I was saying that such a representation isn't necessarily pornographic.
>Is it? I don't recall having been shown anything like that.
I do, even if it was many years ago.
>I think you need to figure out the difference between sex education and a sex guide on your own.
I have figured it out; the fact is that there is a continuum of representations of sex between a cut-out diagram of the interior anatomy of a penis penetrating the interior anatomy of a vagina, a diagram showing how a condom is applied, a picture of one adult on top of another in a book in a "How are Babies Made" sort of book for children, and showing how sex with a strap-on works. I don't see any reason to consider any of these necessarily pornographic - as all lack the primary intention to titillate.
And again, this wasn't even a penis in that picture. This is definitely not a book to be considered porn. And if you haven't read it, I don't think you can convince anyone otherwise.
Those seem to all be about high school libraries.
My recollection of high school is that by the time we reached it we'd seen far more than what's in that book, and we wouldn't have thought the book was a big deal.
But maybe it is different in high school nowadays. We didn't have the internet. Maybe kids now have such an overwhelmingly amount of wholesome entertainment via the internet that by the time they reach high school they have yet to get around to looking at sex stuff, so it would be a big shock to them?
It doesn't belong in a high school library either.
I thought they were exaggerating when they said it that book was pornography, but holy shit it was literally true.
What's next? A hentai section in the school library next to the manga?
[EDIT] "Wait, so why's that not what the outlets and politicians who are complaining about this, are advising as the right way to approach this?" because the entire point of making this non-issue an issue in the first place was to boost state and national level candidates, not to do anything useful or appropriate—a state governor can't grandstand about "get mad, and go... um... vote in your school board elections!" in a way that'll be effective at building their national profile or driving broader GOTV for their side.
Maybe they should do that too (and I believe that's actually not uncommon), but it doesn't preclude or de-legitimize other political action to address the problem.
In any case, tactical criticism such as yours is almost always noise. It usually amounts to a veiled instruction to surrender, and in any case would be constructed against any tactic chosen (e.g. "whatever it is you're doing, it's not the right way and you should stop and do some other thing). Also, opponents are motivated to give poor tactical advice and typically do so.
> because the entire point of making this non-issue an issue in the first place was to boost state and national level candidates, not to do anything useful or appropriate
Come on. All sides are grandstanding all the time nowadays, even on this particular issue. Complaints about it are almost always soaked with myside bias.
Agreed, but exactly one side made this fake issue A Thing.
There's an overlap between these sort of hyper-reactionary people and politically motivated street toughs, who are likely to keep escalating such situations because it's strategically effective.
A "Kindergarten is Mostly Singing Songs about Jesus" charter elementary, OTOH? We may have a few hundred of those already.
The worst part was that this guy was beyond reproach - he went out of his way to notify people and said he wouldn't mention it to news outlets etc until the issue was resolved. It was a clear case of the governor misusing his power to prosecute a free press that he didn't like using a pretext he knew was incorrect. While it's funny to poke at the governor for this, I personally believe it should have caused his removal from office.
https://missouriindependent.com/2022/02/23/claim-that-report...
excerpt:
https://mashable.com/article/texas-abortion-website-bill
and most of the people there to use the internet don't have access to the web on their own -- they're not going to be the most internet savvy users.
it's not impossible for Jim-Bob the toothless iterant to get to the Pronz on library computer -- i'm sure it happens, in much the same way i'm sure it happens on school computer lab systems -- but it is certainly the minority.
tbh i'd be more worried about doomscrollers and kids playing online games burning bandwidth and bogarting the systems
> but I never hear about lawmakers attempting to shut down the internet or part of the internet
They definitely like to meddle there too.
Schools are publicly funded by taxes; those taxes are apportioned by elected representatives. The legislature has the right to dictate what the money can and can't be used for. That's not censorship.
It's a huge violation of the spirit of libraries. It is effectively censorship. I guaranteed that the bible, despite portraying just about every subject they are trying to hide, is present in every single school library in the state.
Saying that kids only get free access to the books the state legislators agree with is absolutely censorship.
so what was going on in all those other cases?
>they'll try to remove it from the [everywhere else] too"
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/05/gop-lawmaker-petitions-c...
hey look they've already started escalating. Now, that one got dismissed but yeah, your "steelman" is not in fact "silly"
Also, a nakedly unconstitutional attempt to control the inventory of a private company is not exactly the greatest example of an escalating.
Removing certain books from all the libraries is what we call "banning" those books. That's literally what the term means.
> you can just go actually read the text of these laws
Here, kid, no Judy Bloom for you, but you can read the law that prohibits her book? That's just sick.
That's worse than censorship.
This is big government stepping in to override decisions of local governments that they disagree with.
It's censorship and an infringement on the basic constitutional rights of public employees to independently make purchasing decisions for the government.
Because any parents could pay for private school on their own dime.
It's the same as choosing to include one bible and pointedly not another.
I object to my taxes you mentioned being used in that manner. I pay for education not indoctrination and ignorance. A large, perhaps the largest function of education is to expose the mind to the variety of the world. Selectively masking off parts of it is literally creating ignorance not education.
What is the best argument for allowing elementary school children to read about sexaul intercourse?
Of course that solution would be objected to by both sides. The social leftists think it's literally a death sentence to trans children to not teach 6-year-olds about anal sex, and populist conservatives think sex ed in any capacity is degenerate pedophilia.
Where... where has any leftist said that?
If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
Bad assumption. That's a fundamental POV difference between "I pay taxes to fund the public education system" and "I pay taxes to pay for kids to go to some school". The notion that those tax dollars belong to the parents and not specifically the public school system depends on which of those you think is, or should be, the case.
For my part, if the money's not exclusively funding the public school system, I don't want to pay any taxes toward schools. Talk about bottom up!
[EDIT] FWIW I'm actually for allowing districts to experiment with this, because I doubt mine would do it and I think the results would be hilarious, but would prefer not to have to move to another state to avoid it, so would rather the red parts of my state not impose it on my district.
The unwarranted assumption you make in this comment is that legislation in USA reflects the will of the population. That is very rarely the case, and this is a perfect example. No one in this state woke up this morning worried about porn in an elementary school library.
I support vouchers, because even imperfect improvements are improvements. If a child isn't being served by a school, even poor parents should be able to do something about that. We can imagine a world in which the public schools offer enough options to help every child, but we don't live there yet.
Indeed. I think jessuastin probably meant something like nationalized identity-driven politics. It's a valid difference.
> If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
I like choice but not vouchers. There are basically two issues with vouchers.
The first is that they're usually implemented in a fashion that is simultaneously regressive (on income) and re-distributive (on geography). Ie, they're often implemented as pure grift.
The second, and more important, is that we already have experimented with a hybrid public/private system where some public funds flow to private options! The result is runaway spending and the market driving emphasis toward a bunch of bullshit cost disease stuff instead of actual learning outcomes. No matter how bad our public K12 system is, you will never convince me that our higher ed system is better, and that's what an American public/private hybrid system would, empirically, end up converging to.
I could get behind a voucher system that (1) gives each kid the same amount of cash and also (2) caps all tuition and fees for any school receiving even a dollar of voucher cash.
I'd also be okay with just not providing state funding for education at all, but it'd be a sort of terrible world for most families and I genuinely wonder how many people realize how bad things would get for most families...
As for top-down meddling, I agree with that. The Department of Education has been the worst thing for America's education system, not to mention half-baked federal policies on healthy eating.
The issue is that teachers and the administration are the government in most places. So if we are to have less meddling it would be to empower the parents to make decisions - to draw the line as you say - and force the schools and the teachers to follow that line.
State legislatures are mostly not democratic. Rather than implementing the will of their constituents, state legislators spend their time campaigning and representing for those who fund their campaigning. TFA is just another example.
"...to draw the line as you say..."
To be clear, you introduced this banal cliche, and I used it once in response.
The books these conservatives want to ban aren't porn, they're complex stories about complex topics that your kids may have to deal with themselves. If you don't want them reading that stuff do your job as a parent.
They're not talking about porn, they're talking about any coming of age story that deals with sex at all.
However, this law applies to more than just libraries. I know of at least one case when I was in High School where a teacher was accused of giving a student a Play Boy magazine and I believe this case played a part in that teachers dismissal.
I never said that I felt the law was necessary, only that I read it and that it is not what is being portrayed here.
I wouldn't assume any elementary-school librarian is stocking the kind of books you're concerned about, and I think it's possible you're being fed a line by politicians and the media, to drum up outrage and support for a narrative.
Or, in the case of this article, about public, non-school libraries.
(I guess an elementary school kid or middle school kid could order a book via the inter-library loan system, but that's sort of a stupid caveat since typing pornhub.com into a smartphone or desktop browser is several orders of magnitude easier than knowing about and learning how to use the ILL system.)
First, we’re not talking to kids about intercourse. We’re saying kids need to have some amount of knowledge about this stuff that is appropriate for their age.
For example, small kids who are put into the care of strangers need to be aware that adults are not allowed to touch them without permission. They need to know the proper names for their private parts because it’s more difficult to understand if a kid is being abused when they’re using strange euphemisms. They need to understand that they shouldn’t be ashamed to tell an adult if someone touches them in a way that makes them uncomfortable.
Are these conversations I want to have with my young child? Hell no! But they’re necessary for a kid his age. I wouldn’t be doing my job as a parent if I didn’t teach him these things.
The reality is that it’s going to be a series of age appropriate conversations every few years, because he’s going to need to know a little more as he gets older.
And if parents are sending their kids into the world without this kind of age appropriate information then they’re putting their kids at serious risk for abuse. Frankly, this is the kind of situation where I’d be glad that schools and libraries are making age appropriate materials like this available for kids; to help the kids whose parents aren’t doing their jobs.
In the end, the only hope the republican party has to survive as the older generation passes is to rely on lies of this nature to divide enough people that vote based on moral outrage instead of fact.