It’s a tough time to be a school librarian. Stock your school’s shelves with pornographic books, and you run the risk of unreasonable parents complaining and calling for your resignation. What happened to freedom and diversity of thought?
People are sensitive to book banning. That’s a good thing. But special considerations apply to the catalogs in school libraries. It’s foolish to pretend, like the librarians featured in today’s New York Times story, that removing books like Gender Queer: A Memoir from schools due to sexually explicit material is a slippery slope to censorship. “You can imagine our librarians feel scared,” said Ami Uselman, the director of library and media services for Texas’s Round Rock Independent School District, “like their character was in question.”
Librarians would be in the spotlight less if they did their job and selected age-appropriate books that provide educational value, rather than ones that promote a progressive social agenda. I have no sympathy for anyone who loses her job because she wanted to put pornographic material within the reach of minors. While not a license for harassment, it’s absolutely fair for parents to question decisions, speak out at school board meetings, and publicly push back.
This is not about viewpoint diversity. It’s about protecting children. Parents have always had the responsibility for overseeing what their children are exposed to: in movies, video games, activities, social life, and yes, books. Schools have parents sign permission slips for the smallest things, from attending assemblies to riding the school bus or watching a PG-rated film in class. Apparently, some subjects are now too sacred for the Left to warrant caution: encouraging a child to undergo a gender transition, using opposite-gender pronouns, and adding sexually explicit content to the reading list.
In California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Fourth of July ad pleading with Floridians to move to his state — the land of liberty, where children can access hormone blockers without parental knowledge — he criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for “banning books,” citing the more than 40% of math books that were rejected by a Florida Department of Education review due to inclusion of critical race theory or the embrace of Common Core standards. Again, refusing to fund divisive ideologies or subpar education methods with state dollars shows local parents and leaders exercising discretion, not censorship. There’s no contradiction in arguing for robust free speech protections in the public square and also acknowledging that the school library exists to serve a different purpose.
First Amendment complaints about parental involvement in curricula are disingenuous. Parents may, out of concern for their children’s well-being, desire they not be exposed to certain explicit material in school, but they’re not storming the local Barnes and Noble to demand they remove these products from the shelves. It’s progressives, by and large the ones complaining, who are trying to cut off access to books like Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which was banned from Target’s shelves and has been the cause of internal turmoil and protests among Amazon employees. Violate the woke orthodoxy to protect children, and you’re the villain. Give underage minors free access to pornographic graphic novels, and you’re a saint.
Librarians should know better. If they really wanted to serve their students, they’d be promoting the classics of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Austen rather than Gender Queer.
Katelynn Richardson is a Summer 2022 Washington Examiner fellow.
