Why Is NPR Promoting Teaching Children How To Give Oral Sex?
That image above is a panel from the kids' book Gender Queer. This is one of the tame panels; see others below. This is what many educators and other liberal elites want kids to be reading. In 2021, I wrote about how National Public Radio's show 1A deceived listeners about what people object to about Gender Queer. At least some decision makers at NPR believe the network cannot level with its listeners about what's really in the book, because to be honest is to endanger the Narrative.
They're still doing it. Going after NPR is the lowest of low-hanging fruit for Congressional conservatives, but I gotta say, David Marcus is not wrong here:
As House Republicans overcome their differences and take power in the chamber there is an issue that they should take up immediately: defunding National Public Radio. We all know that the taxpayer-funded, so-called news outlet leans farther left than a NASCAR racetrack, but this week they ran a slanderous and frankly disgusting essay by the author of the controversial graphic novel for kids, "Gender Queer," that should absolutely end their funding.
The essay, written by Maia Kobabe, is a woe-is-me tale about her book being taken off the shelves of many school libraries, mixed with self congratulation for her supposed courage.
What's not mentioned? Either in the essay itself or its brief introduction? That would be why the book has been deemed unsuitable for kids. The answer is the multiple extremely graphic drawings of sex acts, including oral sex, that it contains which are never even mentioned.
Here's a link to the Kobabe essay. This core of it tells you how Kobabe frames the controversy:
In 2020, Gender Queer was given two awards by the American Library Association (ALA): a Stonewall Honor, and an Alex Award, which recognizes books published for adults that hold crossover appeal for readers "aged 12 to 18." We headed into a second printing, then a third, then a fourth. By the time covid shut down my comic convention touring, the book had been out for long enough that it was starting to get assigned in college classes. I spent much of 2020 and 2021 speaking via zoom to literature classes, gender studies classes, comic classes, and once a class on graphic medicine, a study of narratives of health and illness in comic form. I settled into the business of writing my second book, happy that my first one had been so well received.
And then, fall of 2021. A video of a parent railing against Gender Queer in a school board meeting in Fairfax, Virginia went viral and sparked an immediate series of copy-cat challenges elsewhere. Sometimes the challenges were overturned, and the book was returned to the library shelves. Other times the book was banned and removed. Several conservative politicians made book banning a major talking point of their campaigns. There were so many challenges in such quick succession before the end of the year that I literally could not keep track of them all. I was getting so many interview requests that I could easily have turned into a full-time public speaker with no time to write.
You see how this goes: Honored Queer Book That Makes Everybody Feel Good Is Pounced On By Conservative Haters. The clear implication is that conservatives hate queer people, end of story.
Kobabe is entitled to her opinion, but NPR running it like this is propaganda, for exactly the reason Marcus said. Here, in these images from the book, is why parents were, and are, outraged that this book is on school library shelves. I apologize for posting this stuff, even in slightly censored form, but if you are going to understand why NPR (and other major media) are lying to you about what's in these books, you need to see this:
Why do media outlets like NPR mislead listeners (viewers, readers) about what's in these challenged books? Because they are part of a cultural elite that believe they have the right to deceive parents for the sake of Progress. The contempt they have for normal people and their concerns is breathtaking. For example:
Here's a more readable version of that letter from a middle school principal to a parent who had written to complain about the book:
The parent had been complaining that the book -- which, among other things, teaches middle-school kids how to use apps on their phone to meet gay men for anonymous sex -- was inappropriate for children. I'm not making this up. From the book:
It is hard to fathom that this is the kind of information that middle schools give to kids now in the United States. But it is. And if you object to it, you're a hate-filled censor. I know because I read about it on NPR's website.
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David Marcus quote:
Parents are furious and they should be. It is not the job of the state to teach our young children the proper way to suck a penis, frankly I can’t believe that this sentence has to be written. It also certainly not the job of taxpayers to fund propaganda in furtherance of this behavior.
At some point, the public is going to have to start throwing stuff. Meaning voters are going to have to use the only tool they have -- pressuring elected politicians to change the way they spend the public's own money -- to fight back against the cultural elites who despise them, and who are corrupting our kids with this filth. The backlash is long overdue.
The late great Florence King once wrote that she knew she couldn't engage in child abuse because it would require her to be alone in a room with one. Most LGB people are not interested in buggering children. But the promoters of crap like this want to mess up kids' heads so that when they do reach the age of consent they're ready to go. That's what grooming means.
Aristotle himself in the Ethics says that the virtues have to be taken as axioms, that is to say unprovable and unreasoned, if you like, and internalized by anybody who has been well brought up. Big Buggery has been engaged in a long game, probably since the Wilde trials, in subverting the list of those virtues, but it really upped its game (and Sullivan is right about this) in the aftermath of the AIDS horror when ordinary people felt pity for their neighbors. Twenty-five years of Will and Grace and Modern Family have had their effect. And if you don't believe in Nature (Nature as normative, not Nature as gay penguins), well, there we are.
It's only Tuesday, so: groomers, groomers, groomers, groomers, groomers. That should hold them to the end of the week.
Don't push this too far: you lose people when you do and end up looking off the deep end.
What I think is important is something Sullivan wrote a few weeks back, no one is LGBTQ2SIA..... (an acronym which like the people it describes, is polymorphously perverse). There are gay bars, there are lesbian bars, and both existed for many decades not because of "rights" and not because of "inclusive" literature which was celebrated in the mainstream media. They were places where working class people could bond, and create identities based on the people they saw around them, not from something they read in a book. They did not depend on professional class lawyers to argue about rights, they did not depend on professional class academics to write theory and narrative, they did not depend on professional class radio personalities to emote about their oppression. This is about creating a supposedly transgressive "queer" identity which unlike the gay bars and lesbian bars of the 1960s, creates a reliable revenue stream for late capitalism.
Have you ever heard of Ted McCarrick and how he groomed a little boy from the baptismal font? I don't understand the squeamishness around this word, groomers.
Then there's this:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11609947/DC-Comics-fans-outraged-new-Batman-plot-sees-Joker-PREGNANT-birth.html
Why would DC go about alienating its own fanbase? Money is a big part of this, but it's by no means the whole, or most important part of the story. This is gratuitous evil, straight out of Hell, based on a mystical hatred of innocence. If showing a comic book he-villain bearing a child is not exploiting "children sexually" (and I admit there are worse forms of such abuse) then what is it, exactly? Family fun?
As for Sullivan, he reminds me of that great series of cartoon Max drew in the '20s of the last century, "Old Self Meets New Self". He's now set himself up as Moses, Ward Cleaver, and Hadrian VII rolled up into one cuddly little ball of fun. He won't see the connection between SSM and the horrors currently foisted upon us because it would vitiate the whole project he devoted 15 years of his life to.
DC just finished a run where they made Superman gay, and I am sure there are even more incoherent things going on. I don't know why they are writing such stories, and I doubt it's worth my time trying to figure it out. Book sales are down way below what they were when I read comics in the 80s, so I don't think this will affect the collective imagination very much.
As Rod put it "You see how this goes: Honored Queer Book That Makes Everybody Feel Good Is Pounced On By Conservative Haters."
I don't see this as a hatred of innocence, I think NPR honestly believes that Kobabe represents innocence...because being "queer" gives this book a completely different valence within their world than if they saw this drawing of a blowjob as a male artist depicting "cis-heteronormative" sexuality. It's just a parallax of language, and although I agree with you that it is dangerous, it reminds me of the way I talked when I was in my twenties. I don't think anyone can think clearly about what they are doing until they start avoiding coinings for vocabulary that would have been recognizable in the nineteenth century.
I don't remember being particularly shocked by anything Sullivan said this week. I think his affection for the time of Reagan and Thatcher means that he might be able to come up with a rationale for "don't say gay" laws more palatable to the people who have embraced SSM, and being gay means he doesn't have as much hostility to traditional masculinity as many thinkers in our culture. I think Rod is right that there is a connection between SSM and the rise of gender theory but he is also right that it is important to consider how traditional ideas about marriage were abandoned in our grandparents time, and I am not sure Sullivan is the one to untangle all those strands.
What despicable slimy smarm. Put some Storm Front recruiting literature in the school library and see how quickly that tune changes.
I gotta say, you and David Marcus and Republicans in Congress couldn't be more wrong in your instinct to "defund NPR." It's an astounding reaction from someone who wants to use to power of the State to defend conservative values. Did "defund the police" work out as messaging? Dreaming about defunding public programming is equally divorced from the realities we inhabit. Boys, it's just not gonna happen. The most likely alternative to the status quo -- if even possible -- is the Orban way.
Orban doesn't defund key media organs he deems necessary to his own survival, why on earth would he do that? He installs conservative minds to lead those institutions and they starts delivering the expected lineup from every angle. Children's programs emphasize simple concepts like traditional family values and the basics of national history, religious programs highlight the role of faith in the national consciousness, as well as a history of religious diversity and tolerance. It's basically a constant nation-building project.
NPR tries very hard to tell the American story, its own Left-liberal version of it. There is no reason that same story cannot be told from a conservative perspective, in fact, it should be told, and should be presented on the public dime, if we have any sense of decency and integrity as a country. Citizens should be demanding it. Our famous freedoms and flowering religiosity combined with cantankerous independent-mindedness have always merited admiration, and are not an exclusive triumph of the Left. A nation must be forged somehow, and America is young, but it already means something, even if it's just the most exemplary land of mutts the world has ever seen. But we're more than that. There is something here that's worth conserving, elevating, and mythologizing.
Instead of self-flagellating and defunding, conservative lawmakers have to focus on creating an alternate NPR, otherwise, they have to find a way to take their rightful seats at NPR, presenting conservative programming alongside the liberal ones, otherwise, they have to completely clean house at NPR and PBS, and re-found the whole project. Seems to me I have listed the options in their order of difficulty.
Proponents of porn in schools claim that parents who object to exposing their children to this rot are “banning” books. That is not the case. School libraries, like other libraries, have limited budgets and must choose which books to buy. They have selection policies for this reason and unfortunately often rely on recommendations from you guessed it, the ALA. Given its agenda, it hands out awards in its name for these materials and promote them to libraries on that basis. Most people assume that librarians are trained to identify literary merit but this is not the case as we can see. I would bet that much of their training today is based on the various critical theories and designed to undermine critical thinking rather than illuminate.
It is important to note that when a school or any other library selects a book to buy, it necessarily does not select another book. Is the book not selected “banned?” What are the books not purchased? I can guess.