The book banners are at it again

There is a depressing article on Miller-McCune about groups pushing for books to be banned in schools and their increasing success.  While I talk about appropriateness of content on this website it is so individual parents can decide what is appropriate for individual students, be informed of their kids are reading so they can have frank discussions about the content so their kids can learn from the mistakes and successes of the characters they read about.

Deciding that because a book isn't appropriate for your child so it shouldn't be in a library is crazy.  Not every book is right for every child, but it is not your job to decide what is right for other children.  Now things have gotten worse, instead of just one person throwing a fit and trying to get books thrown in the trash there are groups that are banding together to protect children from the "horrible influences" that they feel that these books show.  Well trained librarians are those who should choose which books belong in libraries.

“There are organized groups on the internet whose purpose is to remove books from libraries because they believe they may be inappropriate for children,” says Deborah Caldwell-Stone of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association. “Traditionally, when books are challenged, it’s usually a single parent. But we have found that groups are organizing around the principle that professional librarians don’t have the expertise, that they’re pushing porn on our kids.”

Many of these book banners will take a one or two page passage (sometimes even a paragraph) and completely overlook the context of the behavior and decry them pornography.  Most of these parents have not even read the books that they are banning.  A book like Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney for example may contain sexual content and rape but the message the book is one that is important for middle school aged students.  Books are being challenged because they have homosexual characters, because they have sex or profanity.  

“Books written for an adult audience are not frequently challenged,” says the ALA’s Caldwell-Stone. “The vast majority that are challenged are written for young people or provided to young people as part of an AP class. [Grounds include] profanity, sexually explicit, simply talking about having sex, or homosexuality. Books have been challenged simply because they had a homosexual character, and there was no sex in them. Unsuited to age group is a big complaint.”
“We have always seen a lot of challenges around sex,” Bertin adds. “Of course, gay and lesbian sex is even a hotter topic. Teenage sex is a big thing. And the sex issue ties in with religion, which goes by the code name of family values — these are not the values we want to teach our children, we don’t want them to know about casual sexual activity.”

As much as some want to deny that teenage sexuality exists the reality is that it does.  Novels allow kids to understand sexuality in a far deeper way than television or movies (or even hearing stories from fellow classmates) ever will.  Young adult novels often pry into the emotions behind sex and the tragedy that can come from making bad decision, it allows readers to step into the emotions of wonderful or horrible moments and then step away and reflect.  To make their own judgments. 

We can not prepare our kids to enter an adult world if we keep the realities of the adult world secret from them.  If we deny that there are those outside that are different than us.