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My wife takes our kids to our local public library. The YA section is overflowing with [unasked for aggressive child targeting LGBTQ evangelism] graphic novels (I get that that's a unkind way to describe this shit, but they are overtly targeting my early middle school aged daughter - I didn't start this). There are giant, proudly displayed pride flags up all the time. Jack Turban "hooray for trans!" book endcaps. Lots of community "witchy knitting circle!" outreach. I am not exaggerating here. We live in a purple area, politically, although our particular corner of it is more like 66% blue. I legitimately find it all very frustrating - if I took my kids to a "pray the gay away" church, it would horrify my wife, but our local library is quite literally that, and then some, for a different ideology (or secular religion, really), and one that appalls me. But, you know, it's a public library. Reading is good. Libraries are good. This is currently a really vexed issue for me, actually.
Anyway, I'm not saying burn it down, exactly, but if Hercules came along to reroute a river through it to clean it out, I wouldn't shed any tears. And I grew up loving my time in libraries, too. Very depressing.
The reason the libraries are woke is not because any government encourages wokeness, but because the kind of person who'd maintain a liberal arts oriented community space is woke. I don't think we should defund religious soup kitchens because the people doing them are religious, and I don't think we should get rid of libraries because the people who show up are on the other team.
(Libraries in particular are less important now because of the internet, but the same thing applies to museums, which still matter a bit)
Oh, I am well aware of why libraries are hotbeds of woke - it's for precisely the same reason that certain fields in universities are (and with substantial cultural and demographic overlap). Although I understand the general comparison to religious soup kitchens here, though, I believe there are actually also severe constraints on how and in what ways religious charities can be overtly religious or proselytize when dealing with public money, aren't there? I have that general sense, and Claude suggests there are indeed extremely strict behavior limits imposed on such charities. And I know the question of, say, if Catholic adoption services could reject gay potential parents has been a culture war flash point previously, for example.
Recognizing the social dynamics of why libraries have been taken over by a very specific, very radicalized niche subculture seems like the start of the conversation when it comes to public funding and public goods, not the end of it, at least to me anyway. It feels very similar to the issue with universities, where the people who dominate them use some extremely narrow, extremely particular definitions of "inclusive" and "global" that, in practice, exclude way, way too many people in a destabilizing and social mission undermining way.
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But the fact they're religious doesn't make their [secular context] mission of "offering soup" worse, and we're generally not using government funding to run them (though it does still happen occasionally; most of the handout comes in the form of being tax-exempt though).
The same cannot be said for the librarians- and the problem is that most of what they like has no literary value. When we were more neutral, those beliefs had to pay rent (so to speak); gay literature is perfectly acceptable (and the pretense that it isn't because muh socons has finally worn out its welcome) but it first and foremost has to succeed on its merits. We pay for those salaries and programs directly with government money, too.
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As a child I loved libraries. My family went to the library every week. Its so sad to see their current state in blue areas of two different states.
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Yeah, children's books are fucking terrifying these days. Our local library, that our daughter's school occasionally takes the older kids too, had a bit of a kerfuffle with them pushing inappropriate books on kids, Gender Queer chief among them. There were protest, the usual mealy mouthed euphemisms about "book burning" to dodge the issue of graphic novels with graphic depictions of gay sex being recommended to children. Instead of removing the books or putting them in an "adult only" section, they created some fake "New Adult" section, which really changes nothing? Because their terminal goal seems to be showing pornographic material to children.
Turns out the library was being run by an NGO despite being funded 75% by the county. The conservative county has now forced a conservative board onto it by threatening to withhold funds. So I guess sometimes you can vote your way out of problems. At least until the state or the feds decide to steal the institution away from you, or some interloper in a black robe decides "Actually, making pornography available to children is mandatory".
I could swear having LGBTQ themes is now mandatory in children's publishing. I made the mistake of wondering into a random bookstore with my daughter in my state capital, and virtually every book was queer. A curious girl falls in love and kisses a mermaid. A curious girl falls in love and kisses another girl. A curious girl pony falls in love with another girl pony and they kiss. Some lesbian unicorns, etc, etc. Basically there was a book for every type of little girl with the subtext of "Have you considered being gay?" With rainbows and sparkles, and god damnit the mermaid one really caught her attention because she loves mermaids. It was virtually every book prominently displayed cover out instead of spine out. That and some picture books proselytizing about Taylor Swift. Weirdest fucking shit I ever saw. Had to distract my daughter with something shiny behind her and then make an excuse about needing to be somewhere.
My wife, who does more of the shopping and the picking out of books notices this shit a lot more than I do, and virtually every day she comes home with tales of what she saw in a kid's section today.
Just, what the fuck? It's exhausting all the directions this shit keeps flying at us from. And then some parent you've been friendly with the last few years of your daughters school invites you to see a "family friendly drag show" and you wonder if all the people in your life have been replaced by pod people. There was a before time right? Like.... 5 years ago? 10 years ago? I'm not imagining it, am I?
Edit: Upon further research, the library in my anecdote chose to have their funding cut rather than accept a more conservative board of directors from the county, and ceasing showing pornography to children. I guess some thing you actually can't vote your way out of, and these.... people get to destroy one of the oldest libraries in my state. Alas.
Luckily, that kind of propaganda is only a small subset of the children's books available in Germany.
Most is still propaganda of the sort of "be a good little meek cheek-turner", "work smart, not hard, or don't work at all" and "a just-so solution will come to you", or ethically incomprehensible gibberish. And why, just why, must nineteen out of twenty children's books feature anthropomorphic animals? It's not a new trend, I didn't mind it as a kid, and I don't want to make a big deal out of it now, but it does frustrate me.
Other than those, we subsist on children's books from 30+ years ago. Those are far from perfect too, of course, but at least you needn't worry about the very modern maladies. Something something C.S. Lewis.
There is something fundamentally entertaining about an animal acting like a person to a vast swathe of humanity. Look at YouTube videos where a cat or dog is "talking" or using a doorknob. Or flushing a toilet. I don't personally get it, either, but YouTube view counts tell a compelling story.
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Err...
Yeah, I'm not arguing. I just feel like after decades of that being water to swim in, I'd like to know why.
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As a father of a young children I recommend Usborne books. They are high quality and lack all that stuff you just mentioned.
I have never in real life discussed Gender Queer. I think people would think I am a crazed conspiracy theorist if I gave a plain description of it. Rather than accept an actual published book available in schools and libraries across America and recommended for 8 year olds has cartoon gay porn in it.
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I should be the change I want to see. Who would buy my half-written (in heroic couplets!) children's book about heroicism, exploration and science? I can put a fire under it.
Try pitching it to BRAVE Books? They are an explicitly conservative and Christian children's book company.
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It seems likely that the "before time" was when they were actually successful in their propagandizing, before the snake started eating its own tail. Back then, they knew to slip subversive material in subtly - one gay book in a stack of normal ones, not a whole stack of gay books. The parent's less likely to notice the one gay book in the normal stack, and even if the parent does notice, it's likelier to be dismissed as a harmless aberration. The whole stack of gay books isn't actually more useful for their aims - it's a self-defeating result of their fifty-Stalins purity-signaling spiral.
For a middle-school student, I think one gay book in a blue moon would be kind of ideal. You want 99% of books to portray kids and adults in the world and how they live virtuously despite adversity, and 1% of books to provide a framework which the child can latch onto if they find themselves at puberty with no opposite-sex attractions. Where I have problems with the genderqueer books is when they tip over into pornography or into brainwashing. There's a fine line between having a gay character who is happy with their life and telling kids that it being nonbinary is a shortcut to being cool, special, or rebellious, or even worse, telling them that coming out as trans will solve their feelings of being lost in the world.
Of course, I also assume middle-school students are sufficiently exposed to portrayals of gay characters in other media, be it sitcoms or movies...
The average middle-schooler is aware of media portrayals of lesbianism. Actually, the upper half of elementary too provided they have an older male sibling. They won't admit it to you, of course, but they do know.
The actual issue isn't "muh gayness".
Actually, it isn't even the naked people[1].
It's the fact that, more than anything else, it's oppression pornography. It hopes to show oppression, either real or imagined, as the only virtue you need. Hence, if you can find some oppression (the demand vastly exceeds supply in modern societies), or identify with some oppression, then you have the cheat code to life.
That is the harmful message, why people whose political identity is wrapped up in being as much of a victim as possible love reading and writing these books, and they should be removed because books that are written like this are inherently garbage.
[1] Adult traditionalist men usually call this "pornography", but that refers to media that's supposed to be sexually stimulating, and these books are very far from that. Everyone but them understands this instinctively, though, so that complaint falls on deaf ears.
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They're also more likely to be actually a decent book (since they had to at least try and be convincing). Now, it's just taken for granted that the gayness makes the book good (since the group progressives form their identity around hating takes for granted that the gayness makes the book bad, and they think that reversed stupidity is intelligence), so you just get a bunch of Chick tracts.
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You need a new filter bubble.
Children grow up to be members of communities and not to be whatever their parents want. That means they absorb whatever is fashionable among their peers. If that means cutting their breasts off and pretending they want to kiss other girls, they’ll do that. If that means joining the army they’ll do that. If that means committing crimes and bragging about it on SoundCloud they’ll do that.
Children also like to rebel against the status quo. Zoomer's increased relative conservatism compared to millennials is partially explained by the dominant culture being progressive. You're not completely wrong, but you're not completely right either.
Adolescents like to become adults. Young men turned to the right because they thought the right was at least trying to help them do that. ‘Rebelling against the status quo’ is usually either 1) fun thing the status quo doesn’t like or 2) burning down rules they identify as keeping them from growing up.
The first one is straightforward, but I'd love to see you expand on the second. I think everyone has seen it happen, but I don't think I've ever seen it framed quite that way.
You know teenagers generally don’t actually like beer? They drink it because that’s what grown men do, and the valence is only there because of relevant laws. If it was about enjoyment they’d drink margaritas(which actually taste good when you aren’t used to alcohol).
Lots of things are like this. There’s an interesting psychological study I once saw- teenaged boys who worked in workplaces alongside normal grown men(think specialty stores, country clubs, etc as opposed to fast food) behaved better in aggregate and had a few other outcomes society would mostly consider ‘good’. This is because their role models for how grown men behaved were normal working class men as opposed to frat boys(and you can’t stop high school and college aged types from being exposed to each other, they’re too close in age). I can’t find it right now, and no doubt it has the usual issues of psychological studies, but it accords with what we’ve all seen.
Our society’s understanding of a woman’s role is too messed up to show the same thing for them. But I would expect it to be true for them too.
Beer isn’t the best tasting drink in the world but I don’t remember it tasting bad as a teenager.
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This. I use libraries occasionally and for the most part ours (fairly red part of the Midwest) are not super overt with the pro LGBT stuff, but it’s still, even in a red state there, and while I don’t have kids myself, I can understand the complete frustration that they can’t even take their kid to a library without having to police the area first to keep their young child from being exposed to sexual content. And it’s only going to get worse if there’s no strong pushback. I’m not sure that such a thing couldn’t be done by coming up with a sort of Hayes Code for books appropriate for kids under 16, but it’s very clear that something needs to change. And Trump now has their attention.
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“I didn’t start this” could be applied to most any CW topic. We still ask that you take more care with your words.
It might not be a particularly new / original / enlightening thing to say, but how is this a warning?
Did you see the original version of the text marked in brackets?
Oh, I didn't. I also thought that "I didn't start this" somehow was the offending part, lol.
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In a deep blue area, mine are similar. Except, they're also places that double as homeless shelters. Last time I went to one for a change of pace, in front of me there was literally a man looking up images of preteen boys in briefs on a computer, and he was zooming in on some... Very suspect areas. And no one dares go to a bathroom, because you've got an appreciable chance of stumbling across someone who ODed on fent.
I like libraries and in theory want them funded, but I want them to exist to serve the local community. They would have more defenders if they served their purpose of being places to borrow books instead of being places to enact an ideological agenda.
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Can you take some pics next time you're there?
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That's the worst part of this. I volunteered at our library as a kid. I found my dead mom's old newspaper column in the archives and spent days reading them all.
Then they stole it, murdered it, and wore its skin as a suit. And they used our money to do it.
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