Children’s picture book flagged at Alabama library because author’s last name is ‘Gay’
Madison County Public Library administrators were asked to go over a list of potentially "sexually explicit" books to be moved from the children's and young adult section to the adult section. The majority of these books were about the LGBTQ community. At least one was added to the list because the author's last name is Gay.
https://www.al.com/news/2023/10/childrens-picture-book-was-on-library-list-to-be-moved-to-adult-section-because-authors-last-name-is-gay.htmlOpen linkView original on kbin.social656
Comments115
And as always, the library has a copy of Mein Kampf that no rightwinger has a problem with.
And the Bible. Let's not forget that.
Hey, the Bible is totally child friendly. Like that passage where Lot's daughters get him drunk and have sex with him in order to have his babies.
Or the one that describes how a guy's brother died without having an heir. So the guy got to have sex with his sister-in-law in order to give her a son. Except he pulled out at the last second and "let his seed spill on the ground" and was killed for breaking his word.
Or maybe the passage where Dinah was raped and her rapist wanted to marry her. Dinah's brothers agreed, but only if all the men in that village got circumcised. Then, when all the men were "indisposed," the brothers ran in, killed all the men, and took the women and children captive.
See? So totally child friendly!
"Let the heathens spill theirs on the dusty ground. God shall strike them down for each sperm that can't be found."
Mein Kampf has very interesting parts about reproductivity of animals. Statements such as
"the stork goes to the female stork, field mouse to field mouse, house mouse to house mouse, wolf to wolf, etc..."
are truly remarkable in his incomprehensibly big brain revelations about biology. Then he moves on to explain how the same would apply to humans, completely brushing over the fact that storks and mouse are different kinds and he is too stupid to differentiate between race and kind.
Shut up nerd, save the science for the vivisections!
-- Hitler (probably)
The people.complaining put quotes from it in their newsletters
Fyi since I'm assuming you didn't read the article, the book was just moved out of the Children's section. Obviously a mistake in instance, but it's not being banned. Mein Kampf is not in the children's section. I think it's fine for sexually explicit books (i.e. the book "Gender queer") to be moved out of the children's section
"See, it's not really censorship because..." is an argument anyone should be ashamed to make. Conservatives never have a problem with Mein Kampf in any context.
Mein Kampf is not in the children's section, which is what this article is about. The comparison is useless in this circumstance. Read the article before commenting.
So then are you suggesting that it's totally ok to remove a book from the children's section because the author's last name is "Gay"? Because that's what this entire post is about.
I'm saying the process of removing books from the children's section is an appropriate policy, even if it was misapplied in this case. It's not banning books, like many people in here seem to believe.
Hiding children's books from children at the behest of bigots kinda defeats the purpose of having children's books. It's effectively a ban, which is why you're defending it.
I'm ok with removing sexually explicit books from children's sections yes. Especially ones that show gratuitous sexual activity, such as the book Gender Queer https://data.ibtimes.sg/en/full/52824/gender-queer.jpg?w=813
Or "This Book is Gay" which gives a step by step on how to use gay hookup apps. These are the books that people are demanding remain in front of children.
That's three better than me!
I knew a kid from Alabama back in high school.
He was exactly how you'd expect.
Is this the family everyone keeps talking about when they say The Gays are destroying everything? Are they like the Sachlers?
As a homosexual, I'm very interested in reading their Gay Agenda.
It's mostly a family Christmas newsletter-type deal with updates on what all the Gays are up to. Mary Gay tends to get a lot of coverage.
Today : Gay
Tomorrow : Also Gay
Oh wow, looks like I've got "be Gay" down every day for the whole year!
You know what isn't here? Forcing other people at the point of a sword to follow my religious beliefs about sexuality, gender, and expression. Not a single minute of that in the whole schedule.
It's hidden. Or I guess the more accurate term would be buried.
Reminds me of that time when some Christian website had put an RSS news feed on their home page, but of course the owner had insisted on putting a word filter on it.
So the website had a headline about "Tyson Homosexual" winning gold.
People immediately started wondering what kind of headlines the website would have on the anniversary of the historic flight of Enola Homosexual and the Hiroshima bombing.
Ah, nice! This is a glorious example of the genre.
Honestly, my favorite use of this is Guild Wars 2 turning everything censored into 'kitten'.
Skittenhorpe, Lincolnshire.
Also gloriously resulting in sporting news stories being auto-censored to be about “rugby prostitutes” in the US.
To be fair, "ball-tickler" is a weird name for a field position so I see why they edited it.
Is the "tight end" in American football any better?
You haven't heard someone toeing the line of decency until you have listened to ex-Tight End Greg Olsen. I swear to god he talks in double entendre on purpose
Reminds me of the good old days when AOL was king of the dial-up “internet”. They unilaterally rolled out a filter that suddenly completely broke a forum devoted to survivors of breast cancer. Only after a ton of backlash and negative press about “survivors of hooter cancer” did they relent…
This one seems apocryphal to my ear, but it's possible.
Edit: I stand corrected!
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1995-12-02-1995336086-story.html
All it took was a google search for “aol hooter cancer”…
Thanks! My Google Fu must be getting weak, I foolishly left AOL out of my search. 🤦🏻♂️
This is the guy the feed was talking about. A good athlete who probably got a lot of shit in school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyson_Gay
To be fair, he could have always used his father's last name instead...
Why should he? Maybe he was proud of his name. Just because people gave him shit doesn't mean he didn't want it to be his name.
That's fair. But that just means you'll have to except that you'll endure a lot of shit in school. And likely some after that as well.
Soon there will be a law to change her name automatically into "Marie-Louise Straight", so that administrators will be happy.
I'm impressed. The author is so committed to brainwashing our innocent children into having sex that she went back in time and gave herself the name Gay.
Tienanmen square levels of make believe
These loons are to books what Frankenstein's monster was to fire. I want to know who told them what's inside those buildings the smart people hang out in.
Logic checks out. I read the Berenstain Bears as a kid and I grew up to be a bear.
Turned you into a furry, you prove their point
wait until you see the impact of "Twinkle Twinkle Shooting Star"
So whats his last name? I want to know how gay it is? Is it like Dick Butkus?
No, their name is litterally Gay; Marie Louise Gay.
*whoosh*
My friend Gaylord would get cancelled so fucking fast, he'd go back in time.
I grew up on a road called Gay. I think my whole childhood would be cancelled.
Real and Gay
Wait until these people remember that the bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, an act of heroism and a very much necessary slaughter of 100,000 civilians (don't worry, they were the bad guys), was christened Enola Gay.
Contrary to popular belief, The Gays are actually straight.
I may be off my rocker here but I will bet the author has a discrimination lawsuit, if he finds a cleaver enough lawyer to argue the semantics of it.... also gay used to and still does mean happy and was used as late as the 80s in the USA... it only recently changed since the 90s to mean an orientation.... so I bet this author could have an interesting day in court....
What about the picture?
The one with the author's name, "Marie-Louise Gay?"
I don't see how that detracts from the point being made about a lawsuit. "Your honor, my client was discriminated against and has potentially experienced damage to her career because defendants don't enter libraries or read books except to see if they can find a reason to ban them, and they latched onto this book without realizing the word "Gay" can be a name, or can mean happy, and this ignorance exacerbated their homophobic bigotry, leading to this undesirable outcome."
Or some more sterile and legal way of pointing out what fantastic illiterate idiots these homophobes are.
Yes... and? Still not understanding why you assume they didn't look at the picture. The entire point is that the author potentially has a discrimination lawsuit because of their name, and I'm not seeing how the picture changes that in any way.
I believe they are referring to the original commenter misgendering the author as a man.
There are more polite ways to inform someone that "Marie-Louise" is a man than this entire chain of vitriol.
You're perfectly welcome to not draw it out.
Remember that time when we all thought folks would be a little nicer and a little less quick to rudeness and interpreting everything in the worst possible way on Lemmy and Kbin? (Like 3 months ago?)
Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
You sprayed an awful lot of it that could have been spared with a polite correction of a single pronoun.
Hey if you are comfortable being a dick that's fine, but I'm pretty comfortable calling it out.
Ironic coming from the guy who is apparently pathologically incapable of just going "Hey FYI it's a man," without having to attach some sort of ad hominem attack to it.
Talk about ad hominem.
Please, isolate this fuck'd up country! USA is boring us to hell with their stupidity and are literally giving ammunition to LGBTQAZ madness. In the meanwhile, real ugly books with LGTBTQAZ propaganda are distributed to 6yo.
Blame the borderline pornographic books that activists have been pushing on children for this response. And before you say "this never happens" go look up the book "Gender Queer" that shows people sucking dick, doing anal, etc
I know, right? When will those activists finally stop pushing the bible on kids??
Lmao, have you read Gender Queer? The protagonist comes out as asexual and mainly describes sexual topics either in the context of being uncomfortable with them or in the context of body issues. Nudity isn't automatically sexual. If I were a teen and was told this book was being removed for being pornographic, I'd feel pretty ripped off!
There is literally a page that shows someone deepthroating dick. Guess i'm crazy for thinking that is sexually explicit
Show me the page. You can't because it doesn't exist.
https://data.ibtimes.sg/en/full/52824/gender-queer.jpg?w=813
top right. its uncensored in the book just couldn't find a pic from a quick google. interested to hear you response when being shown something that doesn't exist apparently
Once again you've left out critical information. Let me put this in a bulleted list.
But if all you care about is surface level bullshit and not the actual content of the story, then sure. We should totally Think of the Children^TM , who totally have no idea that sex exists by the time they reach a grade level that would be carrying this graphic novel (high school, ffs!), which is absolutely a part of the curriculum and not something that they check out of the library of their own free will./s
Oh sorry, he's deepthroating a strapon that looks like a dick, instead of deepthroating a dick itself. Funny you really think that distinction matters. These are fucking children, stop trying to force feed books with gratuitous sexual content to kids. All you're doing is trying to minimize it, which I expected.
If I could prove to you that this book was present at Elementary schools, what would you say?
Gender Queer was never intended for children. It is aimed at adults and young adults.
The NEA recommended it on a list of books for educators and some people misinterpreted this (perhaps purposely, since it acts as really nice fuel for the fear fire) as being recommended for children.
It is not, nor was it ever, a children's book.
Yes, context matters. If in To Kill a Mockingbird the defendant actually did it then the book would be about defending a rapist.
Buddy, it's two lousy stinking panels. If that's gratuitous to you then I don't know what to tell you. Most people can see a dick shaped object for two seconds and be fine.
Ok, but it isn't. You realize that it isn't, right? I'm not going to entertain this hypothetical just so that you can feel like your argument holds any water. It doesn't.
Yeah, Gender Queer is definitely a little more graphic than I think the average kid below 12-13 or so really shouldn't be seeing. The illustrations on oral sex are definitely a little more than I'm comfortable with for readers who aren't knowing what they're opening up, mostly because if i had pulled this bad boy out to read on the bus going home, I'd definitely have been bullied, hard.
I think that book is important for publication, definitely place it in an area designed for teens and those very close to it. But I wouldn't call it borderline pornographic any more than I would have called Catcher in the Rye borderline racist. If I had read this growing up, it might have helped me make sense of things, but I can see why it's such a hot button topic for some and an easy target for others.
FYI, Gender Queer was written for adults and was later deemed as appropriate for high schoolers (13/14 and older) by professional reviewers. It's not typically put in libraries for younger audiences.
Gender Queer was never intended for children. It is aimed at adults and young adults.
The NEA recommended it on a list of books for educators and some people misinterpreted this (perhaps purposely, since it acts as really nice fuel for the fear fire) as being recommended for children.
It is not, nor was it ever, a children's book.
Classic moral panic. Find a few volumes to scream about loudly enough and use that as justification for removing any book that doesn't square with your bigotry.
If anyone bothered to read the article, the book is not being banned but is simply flagged for removal from the children's section into the adult section. Obviously a mistake in this instance but there has been a recent rise in sexually explicit books being marketed towards children in the name of activism.
There hasn't been a rise in sexually explicit books being marketed to children. There's been a rise in claims that anything that even touches upon LGBTQ is sexually explicit.
There's a book about two male penguins that raise an egg/chick. It's based on a true story. But since it's two MALE penguins, it's deemed "not appropriate for children" and is moved out of the children's section. Nevermind that the book is designed for kids or that there's no "penguin sex" in the book. The mere fact that two males are sharing a parental role is enough to label it "sexually explicit" because the people who oppose this book imagine that the two male penguins might have sex at some point. Meanwhile, if the exact same book were published but with a male and female penguin, it would be okay. Even if you could imagine the male and female penguin having sex. (And, again, there's no actual sex or even the implication of sex. This is totally in the imaginations of the adults trying to ban the book.)
You've clearly chosen your side but I hope you can come to acknowledge that maybe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Some people are using this as an excuse to criticize lgbt but it's also true that sex positive activists are a bit too eager to impose their beliefs on children in public schools. What you described is probably an example of the former, but that does not mean the latter doesn't happen.
"Criticize LGBTQ"? They've claimed that anything that even mentions LGBTQ is sexually explicit and must be banned. If a character in a book so much as says "I'm gay," that's enough for the book to be banned. Meanwhile, a book where a boy likes a girl is deemed just fine because that's not LGBTQ.
The book banning movement is an attempt to erase LGBTQ from literary works by saying "LGBTQ= Sexually Explicit."
You are generalizing. There is a genuine reason not to want non binary theythem activists teaching your young child.
Yes, that reason is called bigotry.
no, it's not. when (if) you have children one day you will recognize why its not a good thing to let activist teachers confuse your kids.
As a parent, I can confidently state that not all of us are bigots , not all of us want our kids to be bigots, and not all of us preach hatred for anyone different
It's bigotry and absolutely nothing else at all. Just because you're easily confused, that doesn't mean you need to project your deficiencies onto your children.
First of all, this isn't generalizing. The article above is about an author's book being banned because his NAME is "Gay." Teachers have gotten in trouble with parents because they had rainbows in the classroom. Books are being targeted merely for the tiniest bits of LGBTQ content.
Secondly, now you're saying that anyone who is non-binary shouldn't be teaching kids? For what reason? Does the fact that they use they/them pronouns make them unsuitable to be teachers for some reason?
Activists shouldn't bring their activism into gradeschool classrooms was my point.
So Christian activists shouldn't push their anti-LGBTQ beliefs into grade school classrooms? Or does this only apply to LGBTQ people being unable to speak their minds?
Also, how do you define "activist?" If a grade school teacher happens to be lesbian, should she be able to mention her wife in the same manner that an equivalent straight teacher would be able to mention her husband? (For example, "my wife/husband and I went on vacation.") Does mentioning that she is married to a woman make her an activist? Does a non-binary teacher asking to be referred to as "they/them" automatically become an activist for doing so?
Except the ones who want to ban books for you.
This is nonsense
It's not nonsense. I don't think the activists think they're doing anything wrong or have bad intent, they just don't respect the innocence of children as much as others, which causes conflict.
This is the nonsense part.
it's not nonsense.
Sex positive educators are literally experts in age-appropriate sexual discussion.
Pretending they are not because age-appropriate discussion freaks you out is your mistake not theirs.
Experts do actually know more than you do
"to criicize lgbt"... Strange choice of words