#heidi stevens

I suppose it was meant to be a gotcha moment — Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., reading sexually explicit passages aloud to a clearly hot-and-bothered Senate Judiciary Committee. Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias had the floor, testifying during the “Book Bans: Examining How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature” hearing, and promoting a new Illinois law that prohibits state funding for any library that bans books for "partisan or doctrinal" reasons. The American Library Association documented 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources in 2022 — almost double the number of book ban attempts in 2021 and the highest number recorded since the group started compiling censorship data more than 20 years ago. [...] Anyway. Maybe those of us following along at home were supposed to clutch our pearls at the notion of young adults reading about *that* kind of sex, as opposed to the heterosexual kind that’s baked into every part of our culture and leveraged to sell everything from hamburgers to bottled water to cologne.  Maybe we were supposed to view Kennedy and his ilk as our white knights, saving our children from the wages of sin and saving us from having to broach uncomfortable topics at the dinner table. Maybe those of us who oppose book bans with every fiber of our being were supposed to switch teams, now that we heard what really goes on inside library books. Maybe. All I kept thinking was: Stop changing the subject. Stop pretending our problem right now is young people finding too much belonging, too much empathy, too much understanding. Stop pretending that leaving LGBTQ+ young people on the margins, that ostracizing them for who they are and who they love, that banning their stories, that pretending they don’t exist will prepare them — or their straight peers — for full, whole, healthy, harmonious lives. Stop pretending book bans are all about sex. An elementary school in Florida banned Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” a few months ago. A school board in Tennessee banned the Holocaust novel “Maus” because it contains swear words. Stop pretending we can solve the most pressing, dire issues of our time — the climate crisis, the opioid overdose epidemic, gun violence, the recent doubling of childhood poverty, the mental health crisis among young people — without including all sorts of voices, stories, perspectives, ideas, experiences and wisdom in public discourse and policy making. Stop trying to shock us with sex toys. Kids are being slaughtered at school with assault rifles. We live in a perpetual state of shock. Saying “strap-on harness” in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing isn’t shocking; it’s theater. I love theater, but that’s not what we elect representatives for. We elect them to solve problems, not distract us from them. Book bans are a distraction. They’re a distraction that chips away at the ideals we were founded to uphold — free thought, free expression, free speech. And they’re a distraction from becoming a more perfect, more just, more loving, more accepting version of ourselves.

“Despite all indications to the contrary, women’s bodies are more than just vessels to host babies and people’s opinions.

I’m trying to imagine why a person would look around in this particular moment and decide that drag queens reading storybooks to children are a menace that must be thwarted. I know the mind reels at the number of ways and places our kids can be harmed: Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children; COVID-19 variants continue to evolve; the American West is running out of water and kids are choking on wildfire smoke; close to half of all Americans live in areas with hazardous air quality levels; the proportion of high school students reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness increased by 40% over the last decade. Persistent sadness or hopelessness. I know some of the scariest and hard-to-pin-down threats live terrifyingly close, but they’re infuriatingly out of parental reach — and on the phones and other devices that are rarely more than a few inches from our kids’ fingertips. I know our hearts are stretched and weary and sad. But drag queens? Reading storybooks? And playing bingo? And creating balloon animals, along with joy and laughter and levity and a spark plus kindling for the imagination and curiosity and openheartedness and flexible thinking that will serve young people in every one of their endeavors? Not a menace. If anything, a balm. [...] Children don’t need everything to fit neatly into socially constructed rows. They need love. And wonder. And hope. And new experiences. And stories. And radical acts of kindness. So do adults. Including the adults doing the performing. Life is not an old-timey carnival, where the dominant culture gets to subjugate the folks they’ve deemed misfits or less than, and then charge admission for the crowds to point and gawk. It’s reprehensible that people who set out to bring some joy and inclusivity and a sense of belonging to kids would be on the receiving end of threats. It’s ridiculous that policymakers would dream up ways to penalize parents who want their kids to take part in that joy and inclusivity and sense of belonging, parents who want their kids to know the full, three-dimensional humanity and range and experiences of the people with whom they share this Earth.