I’m a person who wholeheartedly believes in freedom of speech, but this only applies to adults and not children. Adults should be able to read whatever they damned well want and public libraries should cater to this and have a strict non-censorship policy when it comes to what books they stock. Sometimes the bad stuff that is written should be read in order that society does not repeat the horrors that the bad written stuff has helped to bring about. A public library should for example have and make available copies of drek like The Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf, not because I agree with either of the horrific and murderous ideologies that these books have been the foundation of, but so people can know what these ideologies are and understand why they are so appalling and awful. We cannot fight against terrible and disgusting ideologies without reading about them and understanding them.

However, it’s a different situation when it comes to children’s libraries whether the libraries are part of the public library system or are school libraries. Children are malleable and easily influenced and do not have the mental capacity to discriminate between the bad and the good or the real and the false. Age appropriateness should be the lodestone when it comes to books available to children in public or school libraries, but this guide seems to have been abandoned in some United States school districts.

Some schools, such as those administered by the school board in places like Dearborn, Michigan have been putting into the hands of children books that they really should not have. Books that encourage the sexualisation of children and which promote science-free and biology-free ideologies such as that of gender identity. One book encouraged young people, who are under the unrestricted age of consent for sexual activity in the US which, depending on the individual State in question, ranges from 16 to 21, to see the sex contact site Grindr as something that is OK to be interested in or to use. Now I’ve no problem if adults make an informed choice to use such a site but it should not be promoted to young people as a generalised good. Neither should children or young people be taught or encouraged to enter into any sort of gender transition as such treatments can have devastating long term medical, psychological or social downsides.

For many years the teaching profession in the United States, which like those in other Western nations tends to lean to the political Left, have been exposing children to sexual and ideological content that children’s parents may have valid cultural, religious or scientific objections to. For too long American teachers and school boards have had things all their own way and have been able to foist the most disgusting and inappropriate material onto their students with very little in the way of organised objections from parents who may well feel intimidated by the teachers, the school or the school boards.

But this is changing and changing fast. Parents, partially due to the Zoom lessons that went on during the Pandemic, started to get an inkling of what was going on in their children’s school and in their lessons and started, quite rightly in my view, to be both disturbed and disgusted at what was being taught to their children.

However some parents are starting to fight back against what is being seen a schools grooming children into all manner of inappropriate behaviour and into perversity. One group that is doing the fighting back are Muslim parents in Dearborn who turned out in droves to a school board meeting to protest about inappropriate books being shelved in the areas school libraries. Now as many will know I’m not the greatest fan of the ideology of Islam but I find that I cannot in all good conscience disagree with these Muslim parents who are speaking up about and against inappropriate books in school libraries. These Muslim parents are, as far as I can see, not extremists, they are decent American citizens who just want to get on with life and bring their children up in the manner of their choosing. They have an absolute right in my mind to not have their children corrupted by an education system that has decided that indoctrination about sexuality and trans issues is the way to go.

I watched and rewatched the video of the justifiably angry Muslim father at the meeting in Dearborn and found that I could not disagree with him. Adult contact sites should not be promoted to children, any children and it matters not whether the families of these children are Muslim, Jewish, Christian, secular or followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Here’s the video of the Muslim father who was disgusted at what the school board wanted to put before children. He’s right. The sort of stuff that he’s talking about is completely inappropriate to give to children and young people.