Sex Ed in a Library? How Dare You!

I remember few specifics from high school. It was way back in the 1990s after all. But I remember sex ed. It was 10th grade — why yes that does seem awfully late — and the health teacher was a special kind of terrible. He was the kind of person with many Bibles prominently displayed around the room, you know just in case we caught the spirit and needed saving, and from time to time played what I now realize were these terrible rightwing propaganda “documentaries” about the physical weakness of women and how wrong PC culture is for forcing women into “male” jobs like firefighters. The most distinctive part of sex ed was, however, that he didn’t do it. It turns out that he couldn’t say the word “vagina” without stuttering and going red. He skipped the days for the female reproductive system leaving it to a 22 year old substitute. He did manage to deliver one clear sex ed lecture on the dangers of gay male sex. It was complete with transparencies — kind of a stone age powerpoint — and the supposed physical dangers of anal sex. Sadly, sex ed hasn’t really improved in America. Teen Vogue summarizes some of the terrible things that kids are still taught. Only 13 states even require that sex ed be medically accurate. It is frightening. So when schools fear teaching any basic info we turn to another major educational institution: the library. Try to hold in your shock that libraries are targeted for daring to carry medically accurate information about sex and human development. A small town in Oregon saw an attack on its library in 2019 demanding, in effect, that the library be turned over to the religious community.

Mt. Angel Public Library is a cute small library in a town most famous for its monastery. The library likely was surprised to draw the anger of local residents but in early 2019 a group organized an assault on the library’s holdings. It began with three books challenged on 5 February: Who Are You?: The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity by Brook Pessin-Whedbee, It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living by Dan Savage, and Sex Plus: Learning, Loving, and Enjoying Your Body by Laci Green. One takeaway from round 1 of this controversy is only the last book is truly a sex ed book but the others were challenged because they have LGBTQ content and that is unacceptably sexual in nature. Who Are You “tells children that adults are wrong about gender — too much info for young ones.” The book disagrees with (some) parents with the implication being that it violates religious freedom. This is made explicit in the objection to Dan Savage’s book trying to support vulnerable kids. The challenger complained that it was full of “anti-religion statements, frequent use of profanity.” Sex Plus is a guide on “how to anal sex, oral sex, sex toy use, BDSM — completely unnecessary for our library” because “it is sold in adult shops around the country.” The first round ended with the library director sending a thoughtful letter explaining the strong reviews for the books in question and retaining all three.

The objecting group then launched round two on 13 March. This time one member went “walking down YA aisle” to identify books they considered objectionable and picked three more: Sex, Puberty, and all that Stuff by Jacqui Bailey, For Goodness Sex by Al Vernacchio, and S.E.X. by Heather Corinna. These were all targeted for being sex ed. For example, Bailey’s book is a “sexually graphic and explicit book. It is very suggestive and encourages sexual experimentation.” Such books are “Definitely not the way parents what their children to learn about sex” and “Do I really want my 12 year old to know how 2 girls have sex? or how 2 guys dance together.” No parent could possibly allow their child to know such dangerous info and the library, thus, has a duty to remove the material to facilitate the assumed choice of parents.

A few days later, on 22 March, the group sent a letter to the library director stating that “We believe that the sensitive and sensible approach to sex education should begin with parents in the home” and not through the provision of amoral books that “undermine parental authority and every parent’s wish to form their children in light of the values handed down to them.” They demanded “dialog and working together” from the library but what they meant was that the library should be controlled by their religious values: “For many years we’ve had a variety of librarians who took into consideration the ‘uniqueness’ of Mt. Angel, particularly as a community which has a rich Christian and Catholic heritage.” The implication being that the current director does not represent the proper religious community and has strayed from the library’s duty to support their beliefs and expunge anything that contradicts it.

The last round came in a call to action posted on a Catholic community bulletin board on 4 May. Now the library is not just providing books on sex ed but it is “promot[ing] witch craft and satanic subjects.” Including books on sex ed and human development amounts to encouraging “a satanic cult.” This cult has taken over the lovely little library, built without any of that government socialism!, with the nefarious goal of providing accurate materials to people who want them. As the library director made clear, in a series of thoughtful responses that had to get exhausting, “every family is different in their approach and beliefs” and the library “offers a variety of resources to assist those who desire reliable and factual information, including curious teens.” After all, they noted, the alternative was leaving kids to the internet. More importantly, while parents have a right to control their kids, “[i]t is not, however, a parent’s right to determine what other people’s children read or check out. Nor is it the responsibility of the library staff.”

The director’s response is a classic statement of liberal intellectual freedom: it is the library’s job to provide interesting, relevant, and reliable information so that patrons can read as they like. The challengers here, however, articulate a different conception of public institutions. The goal of society to them is creating virtuous, moral citizens. At some unspecified point in the past, the library understood this and allied itself to the local religious community. Now, sadly, it has turned against them. They do not care about reliable information because the readers will need guidance in how to properly understand that information and act upon it. They can’t be trusted to read it safely and public institutions have a duty to guide them according to this group’s understanding of proper behavior. The library properly refused to do so and after this last poster it appears that things died down.