The news that’s captured my thoughts the last number of days has been the teachers and librarians that are emptying their libraries of books so they don’t run afoul of a new policy that says they could be charged with a felony for exposing kids to offensive books. All materials need to be reviewed and approved to be allowed in these libraries without the teachers being under threat of criminal charges.

The issue is that children might be exposed to books that are “patently offensive” and these books may arouse immoderate or unwholesome interest or sexual desire.

Yup, those are vague words. Yes, conservative groups have been strategic about placing people that agree with them in crucial places in libraries and schools which means they get to decide what books are prurient.

They Don’t Care About Kids

All of this is done to protect “the kids” from the scary LGBTQ+ community. Because a book about a gay kid will harm children indefinitely and make them wonder if they really need to buy into the misogynistic culture that is around them. Not buying into the culture of conservative parents…must be harmful to society…right? Your kids growing up and realizing you were wrong about something and not sharing your views…that can’t happen. It’s a terrible no good, very bad thing.

The truth is the LGBTQ+ community makes parents feel uncomfortable. Instead of the parents wondering if they should work on themselves and expand the love that Jesus¹ taught, they assume that people that force them to rethink their long-held bigoted beliefs must be wrong and stamped out. Then they dredge up the appropriate passage in the Bible to support their bigoted beliefs while ignoring all the stuff about loving your neighbour as yourself.

If They Did Care About Kids

Did you know that more than 6000 kids were killed or injured by gun violence in the United States in 2022? According to the report linked, one of the big contributing factors is “increasing access to firearms”.

Since we’re talking about books in schools, let’s only look at gun violence at schools then to see if we have a big drop off…well, I guess we do. Out of those 6000 kids killed or injured only 31 of them happened at schools in the 50 school shootings that happened in 2022.

The solution to this epidemic of kids dying due to guns hasn’t been to remove all the guns or face a possible felony charge. Clearly, more “good” people with guns are needed.

So how about traffic deaths? Turns out that the night more people are walking, Halloween, is the night that you’re three times more likely to be struck and killed by a car. In fact, the only thing that kills young Americans more that cars is guns.

Despite this being the second biggest killer of kids, roads are still designed in a way that makes it easy to run people over.

While my research wasn’t extensive, I could find no reports of LGBTQ+ gains/groups killing kids. Though I did find a bunch of reports of parents killing their own children because they came out as gay. Or how about some random men that killed a gay kid.

If we really cared about the kids we’d reduce access to guns. We’d redesign our roads so that the most vulnerable among us were not easily killed by thousand-pound death machines. We’d spend time educating people that everyone is a person no matter their orientation.

This is usually a members only post. If you want to get my research notes as I work on a book about how we don’t actually care about kids, you should become a member.

1. I say Jesus because many of these groups are conservative Christian groups. I grew up in the Church and they talk a big one about Jesus is love, but only if current Christians approve of whatever it is you’re doing. ↩