This is my testimony to the Nashua Public Library Trustees’ September meeting.
After the June Trustees’ meeting, I went to the children’s room to see what was on display, and I found the book “Grandad’s Pride” featured prominently for Pride month.
Related: The Nashua Library is Not Welcoming to Religious Families
I checked it out, and when I got home, I was horrified to find that this picture book, which is targeted to kids aged 3 to 6, has an overtly sexual image of a partially naked man in leather bondage gear. The image portrays a man wearing a leather codpiece molded tightly around his crotch, along with garters running down his thighs, thigh-high boots, and a dog collar. Bondage gear is worn by people who practice BDSM sexual fetishes. BDSM means bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.
I can’t imagine what could be more inappropriate to be in a book for small children or what the author or publisher was thinking by putting this image in the book and why the children’s librarian selected this book for the collection and then put it on display for small, impressionable children to look at. It’s really, really inappropriate and sick.
This is especially concerning since former state rep Stacie Laughton was recently charged with soliciting and distributing pornographic images of local toddlers, and the authorities are investigating whether he had sexual contact with those toddlers. Children need to be protected from sexual deviants and not exposed to them in innocent-looking picture books in the children’s room.
