LGBT activists have been “flooding the zone” with inappropriate books for minors containing sexual content or dangerous gender ideology. Most parents are neither aware of how bad this is nor what to do about it.
I remember years ago when I first saw a pastor on the news who was reading obscene, sexually-charged language from a “children’s book” at a school board meeting. The book was from a public school, and it was so obscene that the board stopped the pastor from reading further. “If you find this too obscene for the people here,” said the pastor, “then why do you permit children in our schools to read this?” Indeed. Why is it more important to expose children to inappropriate content than it is to protect them from it?
Since then, there have been many such confrontations before school boards across our nation. But the dispute is not about a single book, but many books. Most people, including parents, do not know how big the problem is.
A few years ago, a Democrat friend of mine accepted a challenge to see for herself how bad the problem was. She had been a lifelong schoolteacher, and she was sure it was probably only a few books at most. She was sure that our schools would never allow such books in their libraries. To her amazement, she found scores and scores of children’s books in local public schools that presented adolescent sex and gender ideology as normal. That spurred her to start an organization to try to stop this in our state.
What harmful content is in these books? It is a spectrum of age-inappropriate content, targeted to all ages.
At the elementary level, the inappropriate content is about boys wearing girls’ clothes, drag queens, growing into a different gender, and creating new personal pronouns. This is not pornographic, but it is gender-subversive that can cause confusion in a lot of young minds. Once a child starts down that road, it can cause damage that is very difficult to undo.
But there is also lot of sexual content, primarily aimed at middle- and high-schoolers. Whether heterosexual or homosexual sex, it’s still obscene, not suitable for our kids. These books describe sex, sexual abuse and assault within the text, but there are also graphic novels that depict sexual encounters. Most people would call that pornographic and inappropriate for kids.
Clearly, the line between books for kids and books for adults is being erased.
There are so many inappropriate books now that pro-family groups have created content rating scales. One of the most prevalent scales goes from 0 (For Everyone) to 5 (adult only). Level 4 contains explicit sexual activities. The actual description of Level 4 is not for polite company. Level 5 is even worse, containing “deviant content.”
In the most populous county in my state, there are 88 different titles in public school libraries rated 4. (To clarify, these are all different titles, not multiple copies of the same book.) There are six different titles rated 5.
Most parents are unaware of this. As long as their kids get their homework done and stay out of trouble, they probably think everything is fine. They do not realize that their kids can get a lot of harmful “education” just by visiting their school library. Studies have shown that early exposure to obscene/pornographic content can lead to early engagement in sexual activity, increased risk of STDs, unintended pregnancies, distorted body images, and trauma.
Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, decided this year that every parent has the right to opt their children out of any content that runs counter to the parent’s deeply held religious beliefs. Schools now face the possibility of many parents opting out of this content, which could create an administrative and educational headache for each school. The most prudent approach would be for each school to simply remove all inappropriate content, so they do not have to process so many opt-out requests. This could begin to resolve the problem of harmful and obscene books, but only if many parents fill out and submit their opt-out instructions. Parents would no longer have the daunting task of trying to face school boards and challenging individual books. Instead, they simply make their opt-out instructions known to their school. And then it is the responsibility of the school to comply.
Fortunately, there are plenty of sites that have lists of inappropriate books and show the specific problems with those books. We should let our kids wait until they are adults to make their own choices about this content. Until then, let them be kids.
John Long is a retired business architect and now helps organize Christians for impacting our current culture. He also writes satire at Chicken Dentist.
Image: Boston Public Library