You probably don’t need to hear this from me, but I’ll say it anyway: Keep an eye out for what your kids are reading, especially if they’re younger than 12 or so.
Unfortunately, many newly enacted laws in places like Texas, Florida and Missouri misinterpret that advice and take it to unhealthy extremes.
According to the American Library Association and PEN America, attempted school book bans have doubled since 2021, with 1,269 attempted bans last year. The new laws mostly target books that deal with sexual orientation and gender identity, and consider any book “pornographic” if it depicts sex acts for readers younger than Grade 7. Recent targets include “Speak” (1999) by Laurie Halse Anderson, a book based on the author’s history of being sexually assaulted as a 13-year-old girl.
Classics like “The Diary of Anne Frank” have also been removed from school libraries.
And even the dictionary. (In Florida. Of course.)
But surprisingly, grammar-school bookshelves all across America still hold one book that eclipses all the rest when it comes to the kind of “pornography” those book-banning laws attempt to shield our kids from.
In this book, a gang of homosexuals try to rape two men visiting at a house. To spare his visitors, the host offers his two virgin daughters to the gang instead. They refuse his offer, and the man hits the road with his daughters, leaving all that trouble behind. Later, he gets drunk and has sex with his daughters, impregnating both of them. An even more cringe-and-ban-worthy detail: It was the girls’ idea to get daddy drunk and seduce him.
Yikes!
A slam-dunk for draconian book bans, right?
But hold on, because the book is The Holy Bible, and all this “pornography” takes place in the very first chapter.
It is the story of Lot (Genesis 19:1-38). Most only remember that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt because there’s a lesson to be learned from her disobedience: If an angel of the Lord gives you direct orders, just do what he says, dammit!
I won’t quote Genesis in more detail, because I wouldn’t want for this newspaper to be banned from grammar schools. But you can check it out for yourself — that is, if you have a Bible safely secured in your home, locked up to keep its “pornographic” passages of rape, homosexuality, and incest away from impressionable young eyes.
If you don’t have a copy, ask your kid to check it out for you from his school library.
Then read further in Genesis. Before Lot’s tale is the story of a man having sex with and impregnating a serving girl out of wedlock because he wants a son his infertile wife can’t provide. Later, when his wife unexpectedly becomes pregnant, that man embarks on a plan to burn his bastard son to death. That man’s name is Abraham.
Should kids younger than 7th grade have access to literature like that? Why, with such violence, perversion, and “pornography,” is the Bible still on the shelves for children younger than 12 to read?
The answer, of course, is that the Bible is greater than the sum of its parts. Taken as a whole, the Bible holds great value in our culture by teaching valuable, life-affirming messages, despite a number of horrific, uncomfortable passages. With adult guidance and open discussion, even those sordid scenes may provide valuable lessons for our children to absorb.
One such lesson: Those tales were written thousands of years ago in lands thousands of miles away. “Things change over time” is a valuable enough lesson to teach with the Bible.
Another valuable lesson: “Cultures may differ drastically from each other.”
Ironically, those are precisely the messages that many of the banned books try to convey.
I am aware that some readers will be furious at me for pulling the Bible into an issue like pornography, but turning a blind eye to scenes of rape, homosexuality, and incest in Genesis doesn’t make those scenes go away, and all-or-nothing laws like those in Texas, Florida, and Missouri demand categorically that any book containing those themes must be banned.
Such laws refuse to consider whether a book with sex in it might also “taken as a whole” have some redeeming “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” (SCOTUS decision Miller v. California, 1972).
No rational person would argue that the Bible should be removed from school bookshelves because of the “pornography” contained therein. Rational persons should argue that other literary works be afforded the same considerations that we grant to the Bible — the understanding that context matters, and that all works of literature are greater than the simple sum of their parts.
It is the job of parents to monitor and guide what their children are reading, not to spark government overreach to ban books from school libraries that other parents might approve for their children to read.
Yes, we should all keep our eyes out for what our kids are reading. That doesn’t mean that their eyes should be shielded from reading it, but that we should add our eyes to theirs, and open discussions with them about what lessons may be learned by being exposed to realities of life, even uncomfortable realities. Maybe especially uncomfortable realities.
Because if you think that banning those uncomfortable tales from school libraries will keep your children from encountering them, you’re fooling yourself.
And when they do encounter those uncomfortable elements—through the Internet or in person as they move through society—who will you have to blame if you haven’t helped prepare them for it through their reading, or at least allowed trusted schoolteachers to prepare them for it?
For without that preparation, the best they can hope for is to be a “stranger in a strange land.” (Exodus 2:22)
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
