Library book bans on sex scapegoating for mal-parenting
Perusing library books is voluntary and reflect what a child is raised to cherish
Last May, Iowa enacted a categorical library book ban on any book that described or exhibited a “sex act,” a term far broader than the constitutional definition of unprotected obscenity as expounded in Miller v. California (1973): “A state offense must…be limited to works which, taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest in sex, which portray sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and which, taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” United States District Judge Stephen Lochner held the Iowa statute unconstitutional without even mental warm-up exercises.
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds expostulated, “The real debate should be about why society is so intent on over-sexualizing our young children.” But no library book opens by spontaneous combustion. It takes a human being to choose to open a book and to read it. These are voluntary acts guided by the interests of the borrower. A child trained to thrill and to reflect on Aesop’s Fables or a Child’s Version of Shakespeare will eschew squandering time reading about a sex act to gratify a prurient interest. Parents who fail to train their children to make their hormonal gratifications subservient to their reflective faculties give birth to sordid preoccupations with sex.
Governor Reynolds and the Iowa legislators and the voters who support them are part of the society which they roundly condemn as over-sexualized. Books are not the enemy. The enemy is parents who neglect to raise their children properly. If they did, books appealing to a prurient interest in sex would not be written, and Iowa’s book ban would be gratuitous.
The concept of scapegoating first appeared in Leviticus, in which a goat is designated to be cast into the desert to carry away or absolve the sins of the community. Iowa’s library book ban is a modern variation. The more things change, the more they stay the same.