You don’t always follow a professional parent’s precepts about their line of work.
But, mostly you do. Even if you didn’t always get along with them, you’d probably take their side in a bar argument.
Like: “Well, my dad is an astrophysicist, and he says there is indeed further evidence for quark-matter cores in massive neutron stars, so I say you’re wrong.”
My late mother was no astrophysicist, but she did have a master’s degree in a science — library science, that is.
She was an expert in books and information and how we can best provide them to the public, and I’m all for leaving it to the professionals.
We don’t need a loving-hands-at-home ad hoc committee of everyman nosy parkers telling the astrophysicists how to find a black hole, and we don’t need one to tell children’s librarians what books to stock on their shelves.
Put all the books out there for the kids to read — almost all; children can discover the Marquis de Sade’s “Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue” at a later date if they are so inclined — and let the young readers figure out who tells the best story and who makes the best argument.
Up in Fresno County, for instance, there is a move to appoint a library review committee that looks to be set up for the sole purpose of censoring children’s books. But there is a bill before the California Legislature that would outlaw such groups in our state, and while I rarely agree that there oughtta be a law — there should be far fewer laws, in fact — this is one that out of necessity I think is needed to keep busybodies’ apparently idle hands from becoming the devil’s workshop.
So to speak.
From CalMatters’ Alexei Kosoff: When “Fresno County Supervisor Steve Brandau heard a complaint from a constituent that Clovis librarians had put together a graphic Pride Month display for the children’s section, he was concerned enough to check it out. It wasn’t the type of material that he thought should be available alongside books about skunks and pirates. ‘I don’t like a kid going in there and seeing “I can choose to be a boy or girl,” Brandau said. ‘It didn’t seem age-appropriate, especially without the parent being involved.’”
He was “horrified,” he said, that the library was promoting Pride Month.
Well, I don’t know, I’m horrified when I hear little kids, obviously aping their parents’ views, telling their friends that some behavior is “just so gay,” but I don’t go around forming a committee to censor them.
“Somehow in the ‘we need to protect kids’ platform that they have stated, trans kids, LGBTQ kids, have not been considered part of that population that they need to protect,” Clovis mom of two Tracy Bohren says of the plan to form the censorious committee.
Brandau counters with what you’d expect: “We have age limits for movies. We have age limits for alcohol. And it’s not unreasonable to have age limits on sexually graphic material.”
No, it’s not. But he’s set up a straw man. The libraries aren’t putting porno on the shelves. They’re putting out what we as a society long ago decided was better than the centuries of silence: sex education for pubescents and adolescents at precisely the time when education rather than rumor and conjecture is what they need. Which now includes gender education, even when us old folks sometimes scratch our heads about the intricacies of the latter.
Statewide restrictions against school libraries stocking any books that discuss homosexuality or masturbation have passed in Utah, Idaho, South Carolina and Tennessee in recent weeks.
Those are not the states in which we live.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
