Forsyth County Georgia Board of Education - Jere Krischel - 01/17/2023

Last month, we got to hear some pretty racy passages from books in our school libraries. We may even get to hear more today.

Some of those passages were read dramatically, others in a flat, clinical tone. Unsurprisingly, there were some appreciative, older liberal men in the audience, who thought these readings were very sexy, and wished that their sex education classes, when they were in school, included content like that. They could imagine themselves as younger, more lustful young boys, and how such graphic sexual passages would pique their interest so much more than your standard diagram of the fallopian tubes, or the vas deferens.

Is that the standard we want, though? Should we be indulging the fantasies of horny old liberal men, and exposing our children in schools to sexual kink and explicit sexual content? In Japanese we have a word, "sukebe", which means "pervert" or "dirty old man" - is it really appropriate to use the "dirty old man" standard for what books we allow in our school libraries?

I don't have anything against dirty old men - lord knows, I'm sure there are some who think I'm a dirty old man - but us dirty old men have had the time to grow, and experience the world, and find ourselves, on our own terms. The gift of innocence isn't something we can grant to our children, but it is something that we can steal from them.

Parents who want to steal the innocence from their own children, at early ages, are more than welcome to buy them as many pornographic books as they want. If they want to read them bedtime stories about children being raped, or engaging in kink, rather than the standards like Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat, it is within their authority to do so. And they can worry about explaining their actions to Child Protective Services if any abuse complaints are made.

Insisting that pornographic books be available to all children, of all ages, in school libraries, is improperly imposing upon the parental prerogatives of those who wish to give their children room and space to grow out of their innocence, on their own.

To put it bluntly, nobody is advocating banning books - concerned parents are just asking to add another layer of filtering before they get to our children. There are millions of books that publishers "ban" by not publishing. There are millions of books that distributors "ban" by not distributing. There are millions of books that retailers "ban" by not selling. And millions of books that librarians "ban" by not stocking in libraries.

Asking sexually explicit materials to be filtered out of our community school libraries is not a form of oppression, or an infringement on any of our constitutional rights. It is simply the acknowledgement that young children are not adults, and that the fantasies of dirty old men should not be used to groom our children into precocious sexualization.

And so on that note, thank you very much for your time, and again, I'd love to have lunch with anyone who disagrees with me.