WaPo's Apologia for School Library Porn
Call someone a “book banner” and you’ve already almost won the argument. It’s no wonder, then, that Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne recently advised his fellow liberals to lean into the culture war controversy over what books do and don’t belong in school libraries. He suggests “moving from offense to defense,” by insisting that an “effort to close the minds of the next generation will not make its members stronger.” Against this powerful moral argument, Dionne notes that “the right wing is eager for parents to think that progressives support the equivalent of hardcore porn in school libraries.”
But is the right wing right? A three-thousand-word news article published last week in the Washington Post suggests that the answer depends on your definition of “hardcore porn.”
Reporter Hannah Natanson’s story about Lawn Boy, the second most challenged book of last year, was titled: “A mom wrongly said the book showed pedophilia. School libraries banned it.” To Natanson, the story of the parental backlash against this book “illustrat[es] how misinformation germinates.” She traces how one Virginia mother misread a key passage, believing it to depict oral sex between a ten-year-old and an adult, which helped to spur parental objections across America. But, actually, Natanson explains, the key passage just depicts oral sex between two ten-year-old boys. Pages 19, 91, 174 and 230 relate, as Natanson writes, “how the boys meet in the bushes after a church youth group gathering, touch each other’s penises and progress to oral sex.”
Even the book’s author doesn’t think his book is appropriate for children. Jonathan Evison told the Post that he never meant for his book to be included in school libraries and said that he thought it was given an award for its appeal to teens because the American Library Association confused it with another children’s book of the same name. “Nobody below a teenager is ready for that book,” Evison told the Post. “It’s got a lot of adult stuff.”
Adult stuff like: (page 44) “‘What if I told you I touched another guy’s dick?’ I said. … ‘What if I told you I sucked it?’ … ‘I was ten years old, but it’s true. I put Doug Goble’s dick in my mouth.’” And (page 73) “All I could think about while he was chatting me up over the rim of his cappuccino was his little salamander between my fourth-grade fingers, rapidly engorging with blood.”
Instead of relating any direct quote, Natanson frames her article as a case study in conservative reaction against books depicting racial and sexual minorities. Natanson laments that Lawn Boy is “the quintessential target for the book-banning movement: It is a coming-of-age novel centered on a gay character of color, Mexican American Mike Muñoz.” According to Natanson, the real story isn’t how a book depicting oral sex between ten-year-olds got into school libraries, but rather about “how concerns about public education spread, fueled by conservative media coverage” and how there’s “little room left for nuance or forgiveness in the American political debate.”
A less ideological reporter might have been a bit more forgiving of parents who object to objectively sexually explicit material. Or been more accurate in the nuances she chose to emphasize. The data Natanson collected demonstrated that, contra her narrative, less than a third of book challenges alleged that Lawn Boy depicted pedophilia. Almost every challenge was made on the grounds that the book was “sexually explicit.” Which it certainly is.
Why, exactly, does the education establishment deem sexually explicit content to be appropriate for children? The answer can also be found in the Post article. Even though the author believes that his book is not appropriate for children, he questions the motives of parents who agree with him. He told the Post that these parents, “don’t like a marginalized, non-White, non-cisgender character trying to be comfortable and find their place in the culture. I think the end game of these people is they want to keep the status quo.”
Either that, or they just don’t want their school libraries to carry sexually explicit materials.
It would be interesting to put the sexually explicit passages above, or the infamous picture from the most-challenged Gender Queer depicting a teenager performing oral sex on a strap-on dildo, directly to E.J. Dionne and Hannah Natanson and ask whether they believe them to be age-appropriate for children. To see whether they and their liberal peers would directly defend this content.
But the defense is never direct, and the debate never allowed to be about age-appropriateness. Rather, it is refracted through the prisms of identity politics and partisanship. If a book depicts a racial or sexual minority, then any objection to its content becomes framed as a story of “conservative backlash,” rooted in of racial- or anti-LGBTQ animus. It’s quite sad that liberal pundits and journalists seem more eager to spin narratives of “misinformation,” or accuse their opponents of being “book banners” in order to “own the cons,” than to directly cover or confront parental objections to sexually explicit content. It is, therefore, unfortunately unsurprising that, as the Post reported, when challenged, most public schools decided to keep Lawn Boy fully available.
At the core of the controversy over “book banning” is a growing moral rift between parental common sense and liberal elite opinion. No one wants hardcore porn in school libraries. But one mom’s “hardcore porn” is an activist/pundit/bureaucrat’s social justice imperative.
Max Eden is a Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
