As the debate over inappropriate content rolls forward into the 2023-2024 school year, porn advocates continue to push back against efforts by parents and taxpayers to address access to content that may be inappropriate for kids.
Sexually explicit material that adults cannot legally read or show at public meetings (or to other people’s children without ending up on the sex offenders registry) continues to be accessible in print and online with the blessing of taxpayer-funded institutions.
Defenders of the access cry book banning and censorship in response as if the same content is not privately available to everyone everywhere else. The same could be said for the mountains of content not available at these libraries or through taxpayer-funded online portals. How many titles might that be? Million or just hundreds of thousands?
Are those banned books?
The pat answer is, of course, no, you knuckle-dragging right-wing extremist. People can still buy those books. We simply don’t have room to carry them in the school library, which is correct. You chose those books instead of a mountain of others. You made deliberate decisions on the content for which you’d make space, some of which would get a father arrested if he read it to his neighbor’s son or daughter – perhaps even his own. Put another way, if you wanted to groom a child for sexual abuse, those are the books you’d choose. They are books for groomers. Groomer Lit 101. Sexually explicit “literature” with heterosexual adult-child sex, sexual abuse, rape, gay sex, and drug use. Content that normalizes the sort of behavior necessary for an adult to take sexual advantage of a kid.
If you are not a groomer or claim you are not, you are either lying, aiding and abetting groomers (child molesters), or bat-shit stupid.
You are (in your own comparative parlance) the bartender who kept serving the drunk who killed a visiting family from Kenosha on the interstate—the firearms dealer who sold a rifle to a mass shooter.
You are complicit in grooming, or you are a groomer.
Thus endeth the lesson.