Comment by 0x3444ac53
2 days ago
The important thing to note is that the book is being called "pornography" by the Clean Up Samuels group. It is explicit, but it is not pornographic. There are many many other books they want to ban completely simply because they features trans or gay characters.
While digging for this there does seem to be a young adult novel about a young gay man that does feature sexually explicit content (although it doesn't appear pornographic at all). The library keeps it in the "New Adults section. Which requires that anyone under age get explicit permission from their guardian to access, and they even created a new kind of library card to help moderate said access.
Your distinction between "explicit" and "pornographic" is important, and often not well understood (or actively ignored) by book opponents. There is nothing wrong with explicit, but age appropriate content. You can't really properly teach someone about sex without getting explicit, after all. A book that says "When two people love each other, they go into the bedroom together, and uhhhhh.... , and then a baby arrives!" is not really doing the job.
By "access" you mean check out to take home, or take off the shelf to peruse?
Does it really matter? If a parent is so intent on restricting their child's access to certain text, then maybe they should accompany their child to the library.
This feels less and less like you're interested in discussing this and more like you're grasping for some kind of "gotcha" argument. I'm probably not going to respond again unless it feels productive.
I guess I feel like you're not engaging in good faith when you use ambiguous terms like "access" in order to make it seem like books are inaccessible to kids, when in fact they aren't.
If you think that asking to clarify that is a "gotcha" question, so be it. I view the original statement as intentionally misleading, and aimed to be kind in asking for a clarification instead of just calling out your misleading statement.
1 reply →