When I was teaching, every few years the school district had to select a new textbook. The process would include the district narrowing it down to a few likely candidates. The books which effectively covered your student benchmarks were listed, and parents would have an opportunity to look them over. So did teachers. The final textbooks were then selected with this feedback in mind.
After a book was chosen, there were of course dozens of books that were not chosen. No one ever accused the schools of censorship or book banning because they chose to have one book over another.
Not so much anymore. Now school librarians are “enraged” because schools are not allowing them to promote books that openly discuss fellatio between a 12 year old boy and a grown man, called Lawn Boy. There is also the story about two teen boys who wake up to discover they are in space before embarking on a gay love affair, or stories about how hard it is to be a teen transgender. They complain about parents not wanting their children to read about fathers raping their daughters.
This is just a way for librarians to attempt to get grooming past parents who don’t want their children educated in how to be sexual deviants. This particular story even goes on to complain that complaints about CRT are actually just “amorphous conspiracy theories” that gained traction in conservative circles last year, before going on to blame these “book bans” on deep-pocketed rightwing donors who are carrying out a campaign to ban books from school libraries, often focused on works that address race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities.
You will note that none of the “banned books” these librarians are fighting for are things like the Bible, Rush Limbaugh’s “The Way Things Ought to Be,” or other books from the right.
Librarians are claiming that they are “banding together” to fight “book bans.” Look- the books aren’t being banned. The parents and others who pay the taxes that fund your library and your job have decided that they don’t want to use their money to fund their children reading stories with passages in them like this one:
What if I told you I touched another guy’s dick? What if I told you I sucked it? I was ten years old, but it’s true. I put Doug Goebbels’ dick in my mouth. I was in fourth grade, it was no big deal. He sucked mine too. And you know what, it wasn’t terrible.
Citation from “Lawn Boy”
You want to publish a book like that, fine. It isn’t illegal. This isn’t a First Amendment issue. No one is restricting your speech. The First Amendment prevents the government from restricting you from speaking your mind. What it doesn’t do is require that the government fund it.
When you are a librarian in a government funded facility, you are an agent of the government. While you are acting as an agent of the government, you are not acting in your individual capacity. This is why clerks of court can’t refuse to issue a marriage license. This is why a judge can’t have a sign with the 10 commandments mounted on the front of his desk in the court room. It’s also why teachers can’t explain gay sex to children and why librarians don’t get to push children to read “how to” books on sucking dick.
I will fight against using taxpayer funds to provide that book to children, you sick fucks.
