Comment by anon7000
3 days ago
And frankly, it’s a library. Every group should have access to books they’re interested in. But that doesn’t mean those groups should be able to ban books they don’t like, even if 75% of people want to ban them.
3 days ago
And frankly, it’s a library. Every group should have access to books they’re interested in. But that doesn’t mean those groups should be able to ban books they don’t like, even if 75% of people want to ban them.
My local library has stacks and stacks of steamy Christian romance and I’ve never once complained about them being a waste of money or space.
But the same library orders one copy of Heartstopper and all hell breaks loose.
I honestly cannot understand how having LGBTQ books in a library even affects people who don't like them. Just don't read the books. It's not like their eyeballs are being glued open and they're being forced to read them. Book banners are such weirdos.
It's obvious. They probably don't even go to the library, they just want control over other people. They don't want other people reading books which could help them out, they want those people to go to church where they can be told they will burn in hell instead.
Evangelicals presumably don’t want their children to be influenced by the environment that having those materials present would foster. They’d much rather have their children influenced by real-life sexual predators present within their church, who upon being discovered (multiple times) choose to address the situation with prayer and allow the predator to remain within the church and around children without ever reporting them to law enforcement. But that’s just my experience.
You've met evangelicals who would much rather have their children influenced by sexual predators than books? Or you're trying to make a snarky comment, so you're tying together two unrelated things, both of which evangelicals would like to avoid?
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Were any of these books in the kids' section? That could be one reason.
Also, we shouldn't dilute the meaning of the term "book banners" to refer to anyone who doesn't want a particular book in a particular place (even if that place is a public library). In the US, we are spoiled to have zero actually banned books. Anyone who wants to is free to purchase any book they want, as long as it's for sale somewhere. People who don't want books that have sexual content (which a disproportionate number of sexuality-focused books do) in the kids' section might be fine with those books existing in a different section, or in a private bookstore. True "book banners" would want to enforce a ban on them existing anywhere. This is a subset — and quite possibly a small one — of the former group.
It's not just "sexual content". Take a look at any of the ban lists, like the one provided by the ACLU (https://www.aclu.org/cases/e-k-v-department-of-defense-educa...) from earlier this year. Many of the books are related to slavery, civil rights, climate change, and media literacy, and the orders banning them apply to schools on every military base around the world.
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What counts as sexual content? Does any book with gay or trans characters count because that's what people are trying to ban. Maybe we should ban the Bible from libraries because it has plenty of sexual content as well.
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No. It seems like there was an age appropriate sexual health book for 9-12 year olds
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Perfectly_Normal
I have another comment on this thread where I linked a lot of related information about this.
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