December 19, 2021
"In the midst of a national furor over a sexually explicit graphic novel, the school has proclaimed it has the duty to expose children to pornographic imagery — to support free speech."
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/vermont_school_commits_to_kiddie_porn_as_enlightening_for_children.html
Vermont school commits to kiddie porn as enlightening for children
Vermont's Essex-Westford School District, which includes the town of Essex that last year fired a high school lifeguard for merely questioning Critical Race Theory, has done it again. In the midst of a national furor over a sexually explicit graphic novel, the school has proclaimed it has the duty to expose children to pornographic imagery — to support free speech.
It is axiomatic that free speech rights do not extend fully into schools — they never have. For example, the First Amendment protects quite a shocking variety of pornographic materials, including bondage and rape videos. Are those acceptable, protected school teaching materials? School administrations are supposed to be answerable to the appropriate needs of children.
But ESWD has declared itself the champion of the minuscule percentage of children afflicted with gender dysphoria, which not only is rare, but most often disappears with adulthood. All children must be sacrificed at Essex-Westford.
The book in question, Gender Queer, created a national controversy not because the subject of the book is a "non-binary" student (a multitude of such titles abound, as all informed parents are now unavoidably aware), but because the book features "pages of explicit illustrations depicting oral sex [sic]." The school's defiant letter to parents avoids mentioning this fact, instead proclaiming itself the defender of constitutional values:
Essex High School recently learned that a gender-affirming book in our library is being discussed on various websites. There is a long history of certain books being banned in the United States, so this is not a new conversation.
This sentence marks the beginning of a perverse justification for distributing pornography to children. The rationale employed would serve to groom children sexually for adult sodomy as a child's "right." The rights-defending hero-school fails to observe that there is not a long history of providing sexually explicit graphic novels to schoolchildren by public schools — this is very much a novel conversation.
Defying a request to remove the book, the school instead weaponized the GBQLT etc. movement as an excuse:
At Essex High School ... we know how critically important it is within our curriculum ... to have a representation of a plethora of lived experiences. Our students have a right to well-balanced library collection, including Gender Queer ... which is one title sitting among numerous titles featuring cisgender, heterosexual relationships which, on a side note, are not being targeted.
