Quote Originally Posted by jp1 View Post
When I was a kid I was encouraged to investigate the library as thoroughly as I wanted. No books were off limits. And I can't imagine my parents trying to prevent me from reading anything I found and checked out with my very cherished library card. If I had shown up at home with the Anarchist Cookbook or some such book it might have made for interesting/uncomfortable dinner conversation but I don't think my parents would've ever tried to say "no, you can't/shouldn't read that..." They would have likely read it themselves in order to arm themselves with arguments about why certain suggestions/ideas made in the book were not a good idea for me to implement/act on.

Thinking about florida's 'don't say gay' bill and efforts to prevent teens from having easy access to LGBTQ books all I can say is that I didn't turn out to be a gay man because I read books about being a gay person. I read books about gay people because I had figured out that I was a gay person and was looking for validation that people like I knew myself to be existed. Denying kids that opportunity is about as cruel as cruel can be.
My parents were of the “she can read anything..go to the library, kid!” mindset.

I remember 30 some years ago when there were great debates within my own large urban library about eliminating the restriction on what kids under 12 could check out. Many staff members honestly thought they were protecting children by limiting artificially what they could read.


We moved to a system where the child’s card could be toggled on or off for for check out privileges from adult collections. The toggle was controlled by their parents. Then finally in recent years we moved to a “no restrictions at all” model and told parents it was their job to monitor their children’s checked out materials.

Looking back, these activities were quaint. Considering the thousands of god-awful sites on the Internet, all of these library materials are quite tame.