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WARNING: This post includes images and text from books in public school libraries and readings from those books that will get you a one-way trip to HR if you are caught viewing or listening to them at work. They are only presented to document what is available to your children and to keep the usual suspects from claiming that people who object are overreacting. Use your own judgment and proceed with caution.
It isn’t often a post is started with two disclaimers, but in this case, it seems prudent to do so.
Earlier this week, the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne rolled out a strategy for promoting the sexual grooming of young children in our public schools. The article is titled Book banning is bad policy. Let’s make it bad politics.
It starts, as does most progressive messaging, with a bald-faced lie that seems reasonable if you look at it with really thick glasses in a dimly lit room. Next, Dionne quotes a far-left George Soros/Ford Foundation-funded AstroTurf group no one has ever heard of called “More in Common“:
“We found that Americans of all political orientations want their children to learn a history that celebrates our strengths and also examines our failures. Americans overwhelmingly agree that the experiences of minority groups are an important part of that history. And they agree that if students are better informed about America’s past there’s a better chance of not repeating past failures.”
I think that’s a fair statement so long as we can agree on the definition of “celebrates,” “strengths,” “failures,” “experiences,” “important,” “informed,” “past,” and “failures.” But I doubt that we can.
To bolster the point, he relies on a poll commissioned by the equally leftwing American Library Association.
Contrast this with a Hart Research Associates and North Star Opinion Research survey for the American Library Association in March. It asked: “Would you support or oppose efforts to remove books from local public libraries because some people find them offensive or inappropriate and do not think young people should be exposed to them?” It found 71 percent were opposed.
Again, imminently agreeable if we can define “offensive or inappropriate,” and “some people.”
Dionne goes on to frame the issue as one of “right wing” parents.
These dueling surveys tell us that the right wing can win these battles only with the most lurid, over-the-top arguments that have little to do with the movement’s real objectives, a wholesale war on anything that smacks of “progressivism,” with a particular animus directed against LGBTQ people. “There is an appeal to the idea that parents should have some control over what their children learn,” Hart Research’s Guy Molyneux, who has polled extensively on educational issues, told me. “But parents don’t want a situation where the most upset parent determines what other children learn or what books are in the school library.”
The vast majority of parents want their kids’ schools to be open and welcoming settings for education, not battlefields in culture wars designed primarily to goose conservative turnout at election time. Opponents of book bans represent this mainstream. We should not be afraid to claim it.
Indeed, I think most would agree that we would prefer schools not be a battleground, but we are not being allowed to make that choice.
The most important point is that the move to ban books is not a right-wing thing. It is a left-wing and racial essentialist thing. The banning of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, etc., is not a right-wing plot. These are precisely situations where “the most upset parent” actually determined the American literature curriculum for entire school districts and measurably contributed to the mal-education of public school students.
The real target of Dionne’s ire is the campaign by public school parents to have overtly pornographic books extolling deviant sexual practices pulled from schools and public libraries. We’ve covered that topic before several times here at RedState.
Georgia School District Blows off Parents’ Concerns About Explicit Reading Materials
Sex Shop Owner Grooming Kids Through Books in Libraries
Your School District’s Librarians Might Not Be Your Friends
San Diego School District Adds 2,000 LGBTQ+ Books for Elementary Students
What do I mean by “overtly pornographic” and “extolling deviant sexual practice”? If you find yourself throwing up a little in your mouth, don’t say you haven’t been warned.
The quote in this tweet is from Dionne’s article. This book is present in many school libraries and has been the only “banned” book that I can find evidence of the left supporting.
Randi Weingarten, President of the 2nd largest teacher’s union, wants pornographic books like “Gender Queer” to be available to your kids in school. pic.twitter.com/7pBSnMkuv0
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 20, 2022
This is literally in the book, Gender Queer, that you were holding that @libsoftiktok to you to task for https://t.co/LWkb3FDXe9 pic.twitter.com/mBHwolyPlQ
— Grandville (@GrandvilleOR) December 21, 2022
This book only skirts the federal law banning child pornography because it involves drawings, not photographs, and thus becomes “fictional” kiddie porn.
But, as the man said, “wait, there’s more.”
Trust me, I’ve got dozens more, but I think these make the point.
Sometimes commonsense and decency wins. But, frequently, it doesn’t.
In Downers Grove, students rallied for high school librarians when two parents tried to remove Gender Queer and drew support from Proud Boys. They voted to keep the book, and the students won the 2022 @IllLibraryAssoc #IntellectualFreedom Award. #WeAreILA https://t.co/LPzhdrSjZc
— Kristin Pekoll (@KPekoll) December 21, 2022
Dionne is supporting sexually explicit material distributed to children, sometimes included on mandatory reading lists, under the guise of protecting our libraries or something. The sexual content in these books is both clinical in detail and gratuitous. He’s not against banning American classics, or at least he’s never expressed his opposition to that practice in the same way he’s supporting pornography in libraries frequented by children.
I think it is fair to say that if the same pollster for the American Library Association had framed their questions around sexually explicit and pornographic materials, he would have received a markedly different answer than by using the anodyne “offensive and inappropriate” label.
Under the previous management at Twitter, using the word “groomer” in any context other than looking for someone to cut your dog’s hair would draw a ban. But it is difficult to see why any of these books are in public libraries, schools, or otherwise if the intention is not to draw kids into sexual behavior and to portray unhealthy sexual activity as normal. That is sort of the definition of “grooming.”
Of course, Dionne and the groomer gang want to remove this issue from state and, in particular, local politics. They know it’s indefensible. But they are willing to defend books that support their agenda — the mainstreaming of the alphabet soup of deviant behaviors into classrooms — while attempting to ban those books that run afoul of their own sensibilities.
If “Gender Queer” is removed from a library for explicit sexual content, it’s “book banning,” but if “Harry Potter” is removed over JK Rowling’s “transphobia,” it’s just curation and building a more inclusive collection. https://t.co/HPAHlIFq0G
— Daniel Friedman (@DanFriedman81) December 20, 2022
Conservative candidates need to be prepared for this dishonest defense of child endangerment. They should not be afraid to fight school board and county elections across the country based on opposing this garbage. I think they’ll be surprised to find a lot of support from communities that aren’t thought of as being “right wing” (WATCH: Muslim Parents Revolt at School Board Meeting Over Sexually-Explicit LGBT Agenda).
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