[mystraline]

In the USA, the books that are banned are for public schools. They talk about topics like (gasp) LGBTQ and sex things!

Now where the USA censors routinely is financial censorship. If you can afford the thing thats fincially banned, the sure, its not banned. But if you cant afford it, youre screwed.

And, if you work for a company, they can fire you for any/no reason, INCLUDING your speech off work.

In the USA, its "freedom of speech" if youre independently wealthy. If not, hope you dont offend power.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>In the USA, the books that are banned are for public schools. They talk about topics like (gasp) LGBTQ and sex things!

The book that is commonly at the number one spot on "banned book" lists has what would always be called hardcore pornography in the middle of the book. It depicts fellatio literally (not just implying it). It has no educational value, and is meant, within its context, to be erotic/lewd. I can link directly to it on archive.org, I can link to that exact page even. I do that sometimes in these arguments, and I'm downvoted until my comment is hidden but not before a bunch of jackasses say "and what does it matter"...

Sorry, don't want my 10 yr old looking at it in the school library. No, take that back... I'm not sorry. And you're all awful people for wanting that in the school library. Or dumb for not realizing that it's in the book. What I've come to realize as I've gotten older, is that some people think they have a right to show smut to my young children behind my back and want to call me a Nazi if I object.

[bloak]

Are we talking about this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_for_Alaska#Author's_re...

(I've not read it, of course, and don't know whether I'd consider it inappropriate for school libraries. However, it sounds like it was not intended as pornography and therefore isn't pornography according to some narrow definitions of that term. In any case, school libraries have such tiny budgets and there are so many uncontroversial good books in the world I can see why they might want to give this one a miss.)

[mystraline]

NoMoreNicksLeft conveniently left out the (singular!) banned book they were referring to. I believe that was by intent, to make the strawman unassailable.

And its easy to attack books in k-12 school libraries. The hard conservative christians attack DEI, sexuality, suicide, witchcraft, and other things regularly.

However, we are also seeing direct attacks on funding with public libraries.

https://michiganadvance.com/2025/06/23/local-michigan-librar...

They almost had their funding yanked to keep librarians from putting LGBTQ books on the shelves. These christian nationalists would rather destroy public libraries than allow (gasp!) books on subjects they dont like.

And as far as I can tell, the solution as of May 21 2026, was that the 4 republicans on the board voted to segregate all the aforementioned topics to the adult section. They also voted to remove the ALA's Library Bill of Rights. And who is this "They" who rewote it? "Alliance Defending Freedom", a christian nationalist group known for LGBTQ hatred.

https://thelivingstonpost.com/guest-column-cromaines-mass-re...

And all of this shit is in the name of children and "harmful to minors". (Geeee, where have we seen this using children for terrible shit before? Perhaps age verification?)

Im not always for democrats, as many of them are statist stooges as well. But book banning and threatening to shut down libraries is well within fascist and nazi regimes.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

https://archive.org/details/gender-queer-a-memoir-by-maia-ko...

[mystraline]

Your one page shocker doesnt address anything I said. It just shows how sexually backwards you want older children and young adults to be.

From Wikipedia the book is intended for 12-18, or a better description, someone who is going through or has gone through puberty. This is the same age where children start to learn themselves and others as a sexual beings we are. And in Judaism, a 12 year old IS an adult, religiously speaking. Bar|Bat mitzvah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Queer:_A_Memoir

And even in the US across most (all?) states, a 16 year old can legally have sex. Pictures however are "child porn" or csam, for fuck-if-i-know reason. But sex? 100% legal.

And again, *pretending* this doesnt exist, or hiding or destroying this knowledge is NEVER a good solution. Adolescents are going to get knowledge. Id rather them get the correct knowledge, rather than slop, misinformation, or worse. And its even harder for LGBTQ folks. So much hate (by people like you) have been aimed at us. We've got a tough path. We would rather accurate descriptions be shown, rather than shit like Chick Tracts.

But ive dealt with people like yourself who use shame and disgust when talking about sex. Ive also seen where that leads, and how utterly backwards and ignorant those adult children are. And that ignorance of sex is actually more dangerous than 'harming' their sensibilities.

Thats how you get rape and sexual assault, by not talking of consent. Thats how you get pregnancy, by not talking how sperm and eggs work. Thats how you get STDs, by not discussing sexual diseases and how to protect yourself from them.

At one job I worked at (food service), had a 19 year old woman think if she had sex standing up, the semen would run out of her vagina and she wouldnt get pregnant. 2 months later, she was pregnant.

Another job in food service I worked at hired a 18 year old lady who was heavily indoctrinated by extremist christian home schooling. She didnt even know the definition or how sex worked. Her parents kept it from her. She ended up asking her coworkers on breaks what it was about. We all recognized the severe harm done to her, and tried to help where we could. Questions she asked that we couldnt answer, we directed her to the public library. (These days, the cristian nationalist trash types dont even want that to be an avenue.)

The underlying theme with your comments and invoking shame points that you support the utterly failed approach of abstinence only education. Everywhere its tried is an abject failure. https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/abstinence-only-e...

And Id say that you are harming your children more by arbitrary abstinence, than by actual education. Shocker image or no.

[frollogaston]

Some schools in Democrat-managed cities have already removed two of the examples used in this lightbulb, Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn, because they contain racial slurs. To Kill a Mockingbird too. That's not very common, but if right-wingers started shoving actually racist books into schools, you'll see how many people (rightfully) don't want their kids reading that. And maybe they should, if only to make the point that "book banning" isn't reserved for one party.

The news articles focus on the LGBT books. Notice how they never actually list the titles of books being moved, because readers would see that these aren't classics being witch-hunted decades after publication for some slight reason. Most are new things recently inserted into school libraries with an agenda, and/or books that the majority would find inappropriate for children. Here's the only one mentioned in your second link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Queer:_A_Memoir and here's a longer list https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/2024-book-bans/

[frollogaston]

Most of these "banned books" articles are 8 paragraphs without actually listing the books, because most readers would form a different opinion if they saw what the author is lamenting being removed from the kids' section. Here's #1 for 2024 supposedly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Boys_Aren%27t_Blue

[mystraline]

Nice strawman you constructed. However, it was burning the moment you put it together.

Its easy to say that pornography and smut are the only things banned in school and public libraries, as your claim. But thats easily demonstrably false.

One only need to look at the American Library Association's banned list

https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10

What do we see? Descriptions of sexual acts? Well, some. But we also see horrific accounts of sexual slavery, high schooler life troubles including suicide, a comic called 'Gender Queer', depictions of magic (read: non-abrahamic occult practices).

In general, anything that doesnt fit the puritanical hard right wing christian gets threatened with bans, with great scruitiny on LGBTQ, sexuality, mysticism, suicide, and real troubles of young adults in high school.

But its completely disingenuous to says 'oh its just smut'. No. Its censorship for people who cant vote, and have no power. And the censorship is done by adults who want to pretend that not having a LGBTQ book will make young adults 'not gay' or some bullshit.

> What I've come to realize as I've gotten older, is that some people think they have a right to show smut to my young children behind my back and want to call me a Nazi if I object.

'Young children' are like 5 or 6. And no, its not a "right to show smut". Its having these books on the shelf in a age-appropriate way. These christian nationalist types are targeting anything related to anti-christian sentiments, DEI, LGBTQ themes of any sort, and whatever else falls in the sights of these worse-than-nazi folks.

Even a picture book that says a friend has 2 dads (and elementary way to relate) is banned. And those are real situations children will deal with, book or no. Im not saying to an 8 year old to read "The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty", either. But if they look up basic LGBTQ books cause they feel different, yeah, they should be able to.

Also, I think it would behoove you to learn your history, especially with the original nazies. One of the first libraries they dismantled and burnt was the https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen... or a university for sex medical studies. Some of the first trans research was done there. And anyone who wants to destroy knowledge is an enemy of me.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

https://archive.org/details/gender-queer-a-memoir-by-maia-ko...

[Guthwine]

This is a 240 page book and the page you are linking to is more than half way in. No teen is reading this far in and frankly probably wouldn't even pick up a MEMOIR called GENDER QUEER unless the story resonates with them already.

This is besides the point, but did you read the surrounding pages? The main character doesn't advocate for sexual activity of any kind, they actually seem to lose interest and proceed to display positive emotional communication skills by telling their partner of their disinterest?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>This is a 240 page book and the page you are linking to is more than half way in.

Somehow you think you've got a zinger when you point out "they hid it in the middle where people would be less likely to look!" Before, everyone was saying I was lying, but I linked to the exact page and now we've moved on to "and that's a good thing".

No one banned this book. You can buy it. You can sell it in your bookstore. What you mean when you lie and say that it's banned is "we're not allowed to sneak it into the school library and make parents pay for it through their tax dollars even when they wouldn't let their kids read it". That's what you mean by "banned".

[defrost]

> What you mean when you lie and say that it's banned is "we're not allowed to sneak it into the school library and make parents pay for it through their tax dollars even when they wouldn't let their kids read it".

What that implies is that your ideal of a school library is one that only has books that every single parent out of a thousand plus parents approves of.

One with no Christian books that the Satanists object to, one with no science books that the flat earthers disagree with etc.

What a dull dull bland straitjacketed life that must impose.

PS: Ever built a stump-jump plough in your back shed? What is your favourite type of plough? I ask as you went quiet after we last discussed ploughs.

[mystraline]

> No teen is reading this far in and frankly probably wouldn't even pick up a MEMOIR called GENDER QUEER unless the story resonates with them already.

Exactly this. I remember how much hatred and strive was back in my high school days, with "fa@@ot" tossed around with anything not masculine. As a clarinet player, I got that a LOT. (Evidently the F word auto-kills a post. Hello, context matters.)

If a middle or high schooler is even so much as picking this book up, means theyre trying to cope with their own sexuality, that folks like NoMoreNicksLeft tremendously shames and demeans.

> This is besides the point, but did you read the surrounding pages?

We both know that answer. Of course they didnt. They gravitated to the single shocker image, and even ignored the shocker image of asexual feelings and how they're OK.

Ive been fighting against these types of christian nationalists for decades. I remember when Reagan called HIV a gay disease, cut funding, and said 'God would solve it'.

Killing us doesnt work, cause straights end up having children who are LGBTQ. And no amount of conversion therapy (sexual assault, seriously) or abstinence, or active denial of library materials will ever get rid of LGBTQ.

Hell, even Muslim nationalist nations can execute gay people, and there will still be gay people.

But this is the fight and the hatred we deal with on a weekly, and sometimes daily routine.