A recent letter to the editor says asking if the Rockingham School Board knew the contents of banned books is an attack against Biblical citizens. I understand that for the writer and his ilk one of those thoughts follows the other as surely as night follows day, but I can’t help thinking he’s left out rush hour, dusk, dinner time, sundown, and other elements of an orderly transition.
Another writes about “what some of these explicit books are doing to our youth. Suicides up, Bullying up, Assaults up, Vandalism up, test scores down.” Again, there’s no citation of the intervening steps that make this happen. But if there’s one thing we know about the county School Board majority and their supporters, it’s that they value certainty more than process.
In trying to find the omitted steps in the corruption of the county’s youth, I know that I’m missing something. But let’s look at what we do know.
The books banned are about LGBT youth, which to the Christian Nationalist means sex. As a side note, can we call them CNs? Dominionist sounds so academic, but as a native Southerner I’ve found that much of what I grew up thinking was description turned out to be insult; that rules out calling them Holy Rollers, I guess.
LGBT to CN means sex. It doesn’t mean discomfort in one’s own body, or wanting to love whomever you want. It doesn’t mean uneasiness about traditional gender roles and divisions, or being unhappy that a onesie only comes in blue or pink. It means sex. And statistically, the books banned are about LGBT sex. Statistically, the number of paragraphs and words the CNs ostensibly object to in the books is smaller as a part of the whole than, just for instance, the Song of Solomon as a part of the Old Testament. But there is sex in these books. All the liberal agendas in the world can’t change that. And the last thing we want is farm-raised rural children learning about sex in a book instead of a barnyard.
These books don’t have whole chapters on sex. They’re not how-to manuals. They do describe sexual yearnings and ideas, teens worried about whether their crush is mutual, embarrassment about physical reactions to attractive classmates. In a less enlightened age, these things could lead to masturbation, and that right there is going to get me banned from a Rockingham County school library. But now, according to research I don’t know about, reading about the items listed leads to “Suicides up, Bullying up, Assaults up, Vandalism up, test scores down.”
But how?
It’s like back when the Everly Brothers were singing “Wake Up, Little Susie.” A couple went to a drive-in movie and came home pregnant. We didn’t need to know the intervening steps. I’ve often wondered if it was those heavy metal speakers. They weren’t worth a damn for conveying sound, so apparently they were good for something .
And likewise the intervening steps are missing in how a book corrupts youth. Booklooks, the instruction manual for book banners – I hesitate to call it their Bible – tells us that the following passage from page 123 of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” is objectionable.
“So, I told him a little about Mary Elizabeth, leaving out the part about the tattoo and belly button ring. . . .He lit a cigarette and started telling me about sex.”
At this point, if the first 122 pages haven’t broken him, the reading teen is going to go out and bully someone, or assault them, or commit suicide, or vandalize something, and then his test scores will go down. The perceptive CN knows by now that I’ve pulled out one segment from an entire website of examples to dismiss all of their literary objections. That’s unfair. It’s like banning a whole book because of two sentences on page 123.
But again, what’s missing from the process? Does the teen immediately assault someone, or does he have to vote for a Democrat for student council president first? Is he going to immediately vandalize something, or will he finish the book first? And where in that process do his test scores go down? Did he take the tests before or after the vandalism?
In asking for the process whereby youth are corrupted, I am guilty of taking the words of one or two CNs and generalizing them to the whole population. I am guilty of pulling one objection out of context to reject the whole of their argument. I am guilty of referring to liberal agendas in a ridiculously irrelevant way.
Does any of that sound familiar?