Jennifer Pippin, a mother and book challenger in Florida’s Indian River County and a founding chairman of Moms for Liberty, attributed the concern over LGBTQ books not to homophobia but to the texts’ sexually explicit nature.
What's going on with all the Book Bans?
“Objection to sexual, LGBTQ content propels spike in book challenges”
From the Washington Post, 23 May 2023
The Washington Post has a very informative article today that talks about the book bans. Great information … that like great information tends to do, challenges any notion I had that questions like this might be simple. In fact, I have to say, given the information in this article, that I even agree with some of the complaints against some of the books.
As a centrist liberal with relatively old-fashioned and probably straight-laced notions of sexual norms, I mean, I agree that one of the people quoted in this article very well could have a good point. To quote the article,
“In the past 10 to 13 years, the LGBTQ books have gotten very sexually graphic,” she said.
Pippin mentioned the frequently challenged “Gender Queer,” a memoir about being nonbinary, which depicts oral sex and masturbation.
“If that book was made without the strap-on dildo,” Pippin said, “that book wouldn’t be challenged.”
The WaPo actually substantiated that 62 percent of the more than 1,000 complaints were about what the complainants felt was inappropriate sexual content. And I have to say that I'm not a big fan of literature that includes strapping on a dildo at any primary or secondary school level. That kind of content would be wholly inappropriate for grade school children, and judging from my own teaching experience, would be disruptive for secondary students, whose reactions would probably entail a lot of stupid jokes and even higher levels of cynicism.
But on the other hand, many of the complaints were about LGBTQ+ mentions or content. And what we all kind of know, I think, is that there are certain people are likely to engage in fanatic campaigns against anything that offends their own prudish and parochial little moral systems … and boy, did the WaPo study bear that out, by exposing that of the 1000+ plus complaints they examined, more than half of them came from only 11 people.
Anyway definitely worth a free read linked to this post.