Be Gay, Build Libraries, Smash the Family
From NPR
The number of reported challenges to books doubled in 2022 — and the number of challenges to unique titles was up nearly 40 percent over 2021 — according to data released by the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom Monday.
Lessa Kananiʻopua Pelayo-Lozada, president of the American Library Association, says it used to be that titles were challenged when a parent or other community member saw a book in the library they didn't like. But times have changed: "Now we're seeing organized attempts by groups to censor multiple titles throughout the country without actually having read many of these books."
In a soundbite hosted but not transcribed on the same page, Kananiʻopua Pelayo-Lozada goes on to say:
We know the lgbtq youth who feel seen and heard have reduced instances of self harm. And so as a library, as an institution, as a community center, it is our responsibility to make sure that our community feels reflected in our space and also has the opportunity to understand other points of view.
Reporter Tilda Wilson [not saying families shouldn’t be able to decide on their own what is right for their kids]
[just saying that they shouldn’t be able to override that same discretion of other families and individuals]
i think that’s cowardly, i think that concedes too much, i think that it reifies as assumed, natural, given the special, foundational, sovereign limits of the family and even grounds their own argument against government censorship in the consumer-esque deciding power allotted to families, that is to say, the total domination of parents over their children, their children’s reading, sexuality, subjectivity, pleasure, education, access to community, friends, transportation, independent subsistence, third spaces, in short all the necessary and auxiliary channels which a person might make use of in waging a rebellion against a despotic regime.
I was just listening to the radio specifically NPR which is the farthest left that my far West interior desert town gets and there was a broadcast discussing the uptick in attempts to ban books and in particular books with an lgbtq focus, and there was a clip of an interview with someone associated with the national library association who said something really profoundly stupid regarding the appropriate demarcations and limits and forms of freedom and Power in the American political imagination mainly that the opposition to banning books on the part of the association of librarians did not say that families quote should be able to decide whether should not be unable to decide what books are right for their children. and this is interesting because it has to do with like The sovereign nature of the American family and there's this interesting inside outside game going on where children are certainly included under the umbrella of the family so you get statements like family should be able to decide where parents should be able to decide what's right for their family
but at the same time there's no acknowledgment and I'd be almost absurd to acknowledge that children are not going to be if so facto or maybe desure making those decisions that is to say if the family is deciding what's right or wrong it's not the children who are deciding it's the parents and the the children will being part of the family as a domain or not part of the family as a democratic unit or the very least there is no right to be consulted as a child there's no right that children have relative to their parents and the librarian specifically said that families or people shouldn't be deciding for other families what those kids can see
and it's heartbreaking because this comes right after a quote where the librarian mentioned that lgbtq youth who have access to community resources like libraries with lgbtq books are less likely to self harm but I suppose that if according to this librarian child comes from family that forbids them to check out such books in the library that that's just too bad the library doesn't want to step over the boundaries of the family or the parents or more precisely the patriarchal officer whether that be the father or the father stand in should get to have those books
my boyfriend told me that his mother and many conservatives in his life growing up we're terrified that the government or liberals or other such projections we're going to swap or shuffle the kids all around and each year or each day a kid would go home with different parents and that this would represent the natural and most terrifying extension of the logic of liberalism or whatever these conservative parents are afraid of which is that their investment in their children will not be theirs and that they might have to raise someone else's children which immediately taps into the logic of cuckolding that they might not be able to pass their money on to their children and thus their financial soul will not be immortal and the way that they hope. in my own father had all these disgusting fantasies of setting up a little dynasty and would instill over and over again just absolute aristocratic liberal garbage ideas about this family lineage that we had to be grateful for an internal oBey and maintain and carry on
seems that so many are terrified of the family look at the working families party it's this patriarchalism that fits very comfortably within capitalism but we want to
of course to dialectic we're capitalism simultaneously tears down the social fabric that families can though do not always participate in will maintaining this legal sovereignty of the family of the parents over the children
there's this turning to the parents as always and naturally the best authority on what the child should be essentially giving the parents total control over their child's personality until the age of 18 unless and hear the burden of proof not only falls on the child but is assumes to be a transgression against nature if it happens and and an inferior form
whenever a child is emancipated early or adopted or put into foster care because ideally actually the subject should be created by and under the authority of the parent until that person reaches 18
it makes me think about states rights or the conservative democratic impulse to locate control of schools for example not just to the state but to the community as if these are neutral forms when in reality they simply concentrate power wherever they're strongest in the family in the small rural town etc
and in particular it's this move to say no no of course we would never violate the family that makes up the special webbing of sacred mysticism around the family it's not the conservatives work but rather they're supposed opposition which draws these uncrossable lines which not only then get prescribed into law and concede all the rights of any lgbtq children under the Dominion of some bigoted mother father but makes it almost impossible to even think that Liberty or even personhood could exist for children outside of the family that everything outside of the family is a barren wasteland and that the family in all cases except work can be definitively proven otherwise should be turned to as the source of normative decision making for their little slaves
does children can be made to work without compensation can be sent to churches and camps to have their sexuality changed and so forth and so on
the library the Union friendship and society broadly are not seen as sufficient spaces, only family and the state and work can be permitted to set the subjects background rights