Books that contain explicit sexual material should prevail over parents’ efforts to remove them from school libraries, according to a website that fights against what it calls “censorship” of books.
BookRiot recommends books as part of its “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the action steps we’re taking to walk the walk.”
Some of the books the organization advocates for keeping in libraries include “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, which has drawings of people having sex; “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George Johnson, which gives a vivid description of two male children having sex; and “Out of Darkness” by Ashley Hope Perez, which includes at least one passage describing a sexual assault against a minor.
Opposing Porn Is Racist?
Attempts to remove books from school libraries is “about white supremacy,” the BookRiot guide says. “It’s about power. Calling it anything less than that diminishes the responsibility there is on gatekeepers to uphold intellectual freedom and the First Amendment.”Teachers, librarians, and other educators are the “gatekeepers,” says the BookRiot website.
The BookRiot guide blames news media for spotlighting parents’ concerns about books they deem too graphic to be made available to children. The tool kit suggests using local news media as “a tool of support” to help prevent parents from being successful in attempts to remove books from school libraries.
It advises citizens, teachers, educators, librarians, and administrators to take specific actions to prevent parents from having books removed.
BookRiot’s advice includes instructing citizens to “contact local media and local authorities about hate groups when they emerge. These groups work to target policies they don’t like with the goal of maintaining white supremacy. Call them out on social media, then follow it up with evidence of hateful actions where you can.”
It tells educators and librarians to consider doing away with “Banned Books Week,” because highlighting books removed from school libraries draws attention to them. Instead, the site advises, they should display the books year-round and celebrate “a week dedicated to protecting the First Amendment.”
In another article about working to fight “book banning,” BookRiot argues that showing children pictures of people having sex isn’t a problem.
Another article argues that, according to Supreme Court precedent, a work must be pornographic as a whole to qualify as pornography.
“Cherry-picking pages and passages to prove obscenity isn’t how the law works,” BookRiot advises on its website. “In fact, ‘Gender Queer’ is a sterling example of how obscenity laws like the ones in the U.S. protect freedom of speech and expression. Indeed, sex is discussed and illustrated. But it is sliver (sic) of the story as a whole, constituting no more than two percent of the entire text.”
Legal Protections
According to lawyer Jeff Childers, a legal adviser to County Citizens Defending Freedom, BookRiot uses “straw man arguments.”
A work is pornographic if it has porn in it, he said. The porn percentage doesn’t matter.
“Imagine a kid’s Bible with a Penthouse centerfold in the middle of it. That would only be one page of obscene material,” he told The Epoch Times. But it would still be considered porn.
BookRiot’s argument about pornography entirely misses the main point, Childers stated.
“The Supreme Court says you can pass an obscenity law right in your town. You can make an ordinance that says, ‘No obscene materials in the library,’” Childers said.
“The Supreme Court has never said that school libraries have a right to present obscene materials to a minor, if they capsulize it into a larger work.”
Moreover, despite BookRiot’s claims, no one is trying to ban books, Childers said. Conservative activists want to remove pornographic books from public libraries to protect children, he said.
“Nobody’s suggesting that the book be modified, that the book be burned, that the book be destroyed, that the book be blacklisted,” said Childers. “They know they’re in the wrong, so they’ve gone to this extreme form of the argument.”
It’s unlikely that libraries will face legal consequences for having obscene books on their shelves, he added. Most authorities don’t want to prosecute librarians for obscenity.
Parents Versus Pornography
On the other hand, parents and activists have proven eager to confront libraries. According to figures from the American Library Association (ALA), a record-breaking 1,597 books were challenged or removed from libraries in 2021.“I thought, ‘This is abusive content for children to have, especially without parental consent,’” Polk County, Florida, parent Hannah Petersen told The Epoch Times about some of the explicit books found in her school district’s libraries.
When she learned that some of the books included graphic descriptions of bestiality and child rape, she was shocked.
“I thought maybe there would be a couple of swear words,” she said. “I just did not expect it to be what it was.”
One book in Polk County’s libraries is “Forever” by Judy Bloom. It includes an extremely graphic sex scene between minors, according to an analysis on BookLooks. It also offers the number for a Planned Parenthood hotline.
Fighting the System
After discovering explicit content in school libraries, Petersen and other parents brought criminal allegations to the local sheriff’s office, as previously reported by The Epoch Times.School officials pulled the books from libraries and created a committee to reevaluate them. The committee included two parent-appointed representatives. The rest were school officials, Petersen said.
Only the parents attempted to remove books, Petersen said. The others voted to keep the books in school.
“The final determination was that they voted to keep the books in all schools,” Petersen said. “In fact, they even suggested some of the books be moved to a lower grade, and that younger children should have access to them. So we definitely felt defeated.”
Petersen said schools should use an “opt-in” system for graphic books, only allowing children with permission from parents to check out books deemed problematic by some. Currently, parents must request that their children not get access to certain books they find objectionable.
However, this system only stops children from checking out books, he said. Any child can still read the book inside the library.
“If the child is in the library, they’re not kept behind the desk,” he told The Epoch Times.
The school hasn’t bought any more of the discussed books with graphic content, Kennedy said. Moreover, some of the books with graphic content got checked out and never returned.
One of the worst discoveries of Petersen’s fight has been learning that children can take books from library shelves and read graphic descriptions of child rape.
“It’s so graphic and in-depth,” she said, “that it honestly just shattered me to think about children, who maybe have experienced something like that in real life, reading it, as it’s being presented as entertainment.”
