Kiddie Porn and the library.

People reading my comments on the illegitimate claimant to the Oval Office and the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, and indeed the general drift of Republican politics in this state, all of which are causing the ghosts of Mussolini and Franco to wonder "aren't they a little extreme?", may simply assume I'm a liberal, and that I oppose everything conservatives are doing.

They're wrong, I'm a social conservative, but anyhow. . . 

For those holding that view, this post will surprise.

October 14, 2025

Panel advances legislation restricting sexual content in Wyoming library books: The Judiciary Committee voted 11-2 in support of the measure, and the issue unified Wyoming Freedom Caucus lawmakers with Republicans not always aligned with them.

Committee Adopts Bill Greenlighting Lawsuits Over 'Sexually Explicit' Library Books

Here's the bill:

I have my doubts about the constitutionality of this effort, but I think this effort is worth it.

In spite of what people might say, some of these books are absolutely horrific.  Without detailing how I know it, two of the books that keep coming up in this discussion, Gender Queer and This Books Is Gay do not belong in the children's section of any library and frankly should only be in a limited adult section at that.  I don't overall object to them being in a library, but frankly the common assumption that they are aimed at "young adults" is correct.

Gender Queer is a "graphic" book, i.e., cartoon.  It depicts a scene in which a friend instructs another teenage friend how to stick a finger up a vagina, and that's not all.  This Book Is Gay is basically a homosexual sex manual for young people, complete with badly done illustrations.

Seriously?

This gets right to the roots of the culture wars.  Basically, the authors of these books believe that you are a homosexual from the second you are born, if you become one later, or even really if a person ever ponders such activity.  This is to "help" them get past what the authors regard unfortunate mental roadblocks.

The psychological support for such a view is basically nonexistent.  Homosexuality itself, while it occurs in all cultures, is particularly prevalent in the cultural West, so much so that in China its regarded as a Western thing.  At one time it was so associated with English public (that is to say private) boy's schools that it was called "the English disease".  We really don't grasp it all that well.

And frankly what we don't need to do is to push teenagers who might be pondering it, outright into it, which as a society is exactly what we are in fact doing.  Books like this help to do that.  They're Gender Queer is practically designed to do that.

Libraries have always restricted sexual content to the young. . . until recently.  I remember years ago reading an article in the Denver Post about how the Denver Public Library kept Playboy and a Buddhist sex manual in an area where you had to ask for them, with those publications being the two most requested in that section. The point is, they didn't keep bound volumes of Playboy down in the children's sections for teenage boys to peruse, even though a person could argue that it was just as instructive as those struggling with their sexuality as these texts.  And, moreover, any teen asking for either one of them would have been told to pound sand.

All this comes, as these articles make plain, against the background of a lawsuit over the topic that was just settled.  Not "won", but settled.  One ironic element is that the librarian spoke out hoping that her settlement, which is a settlement (i.e., she didn't win, or lose, the suit) would discourage the legislature from passing this bill.

Really?  It ought to encourage them to pass it.