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Comment by lokhura | Hacker News Reader

States are not banning books and talking about gay and transgender people. Not sure where you got that info from. As I understand, what they are doing is removing non age appropiate books from elementary and middle school libraries, some of which include LGBTQ content. I would not call this "banning a book", in the same way that not being able to watch violent movies in elementary school is not "banning a movie".

I would suggest you look into the content of the books being challenged and come to your own conclusion as to whether they are age appropiate or not. After all, the term "age appropiate" is subjective.

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> As I understand, what they are doing is removing non age appropiate books from elementary and middle school libraries, some of which include LGBTQ content.

That's the same thing.

Defining a book as "age inappropriate" because it talkes about sexuality means that talking about sexuality is age inappropriate.

But taking about sexuality is critical for the healthy development of an LGBTQ+ child! How else can they understand, or even put into words, what they themselves are going through?

Teachers can show children Schindler's List, but can't talk to them about sex. That's the reality we are discussing here.

Talking about sexuality is critical for the healthy development of any child. Terribly wrong ideas can take root at a very young age. Every time an educator evades a child's questions about sex they are "grooming" an antisocial deviant; protecting people from truth is inherently destructive.

And it's clearly attempted to make any mention of gay or trans people existing or being in any way normal "not age appropriate". The sponsor of Florida's law gave pure mention of a child having two dads as an example of what should be prevented in schools.

Well maybe parents should do that rather than the state? What’s bad about LGBTQ content and what does that even mean?

I swear, you folks will reach as far as possible to make book bans seem reasonable.

Who is "you folks"? I can think for myself, thanks. I'm providing some context for your naive or perhaps intentional misunderstanding of what is actually happening.

And who do you think votes for these decisions? The parents. So presumably many parents think that some books in school liraries are not age appropiate.

I haven't even expressed my opinion on this topic yet you are assuming my stance because you lack nuance. That's why I suggest you read the actual books that are being challenged and come back with a more informed perspective.

> who do you think votes for these decisions? The parents.

There are a lot of non-parents with strong opinions about this.

One point of outrage I've seen is about this Florida law passed last year that said schools need to have an online catalog of the books found within the school library, have a public notice period for comment for any book being added to the library, a 30 day grace period for after the book is introduced for a parent to make a formal complaint, a form to make a complaint about an existing book, and banned pornography ... why do so many people take offense with this very democratic process?

> why do so many people take offense with this very democratic process?

The words written for a law aren't how the law is actually implemented. Law isn't code. The group in power, in this case people who want to limit how LGBTQ people live, will write a perfectly reasonable law, and then only apply that law to cases that they personally believe in. In other cases, such as if you were to complain about the bible being lewd, they would state some exception for it and ignore your request. This "perfectly democratic" law is, in fact, used in a non-democratic way!

The Hill We Climb was recently banned due to parental complaint in Florida.

That’s banning a book purely for its message. Any student could access the message of it by watching tape of a presidential inauguration.

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