Never again will it be said that Senate committee hearings are boring.
Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing entitled “Book Bans: Examining How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature.” In attendance among the lawmakers was Illinois Democratic Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who several months back supported a bill that would allow state grant funding to be withheld from libraries that do not follow American Library Association guidelines.
The objective of the hearing was to assess which books should remain in public libraries and school libraries. Progressives have widely backed the talking point that Republicans want to ban books that feature a “person of color” or a member of the “LGBT” community, often completely misrepresenting the concerns of parents and outright lying by saying conservatives want to get rid of books like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye.
This false narrative completely ignores the elephant in the room: that elephant being the insidious push of sexual content on our nation’s young people.
Not willing to allow these lies go unchecked, Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, decided to read excerpts from two of the books, All Boys Aren’t Blue and Gender Queer, which have garnered national attention for being exceptionally graphic and yet widely available for children in libraries.
Without sharing the text of these books, let me assure you that the passages Kennedy read, in his characteristic Southern drawl, were extremely graphic and lascivious. Ironically, after Kennedy had finished reading, Giannoulias remarked: “With all due respect, Senator, the words you spoke are disturbing, especially coming out of your mouth, it’s very disturbing. But I would also tell you that we’re not advocating for kids to read porn.”
Giannoulias was uncomfortable with Kennedy’s reading of a graphic novel that displays, with both words and pictures, sexual acts between an adult and a minor of the same sex. This makes perfect sense because these images are not suitable for adults, let alone children. However, our society has been lulled into a wholesale acceptance of any sort of alternative behavior, so long as we are “making people feel seen” and people are “in love.” That being said, Giannoulias was unable to clearly define which books should be withheld from circulation amongst children and which should not. An absence of consistency was clearly on display.
But the question remains and will still be the touchpoint of debates as the election cycle continues. Who gets to decide what books remain within arm’s reach of our country’s children? If adults in the Senate feel uncomfortable reading the words in Gender Queer, why are we making it accessible for children in any capacity?
I am reminded of the video stores that my family would visit when I was young. We would frequent a locally owned shop to get a VHS movie once a week. They had a small room off the right wing of their main video section and everyone, including the children, knew that it was off-limits to anyone younger than twenty-one. In fact, once when I saw a teenager try to sneak back there, the store owner quickly yelled at him and threatened to call his parents. We all knew it was material that was inappropriate for children, and for adults too, but that is another article.
The difference between the 1980s and the 2020s is that there is now a wholesale push to make degenerate material easily available to the youth in our country, and there is one political party that will go to great lengths to protect the right of libraries and schools to provide such material. One must ask why progressives promulgate the idea of book bans when all that is being asked is for volumes like Gender Queer to be put behind the red curtain and labeled inappropriate for children, which it clearly is.
