Librarians and teachers coast to coast, once again, have been sounding the alarm over a new wave of book bannings rolling across the land. A recent call to arms involved a middle school teacher in central Illinois who was forced to resign her position in March because she showed a controversial book to members of her class.
Sarah Bonner, a teacher at Heyworth Junior High School in Heyworth, Illinois, a small rural community a few miles south of Bloomington, IL, has been a teacher for almost 20 years. The controversy arose when “she held a book tasting.” (Really? “Book tasting?”) This involved Bonner going to a local library, picking out several dozen books on topics she thought might interest her students, and bringing them into class.
One of the books she selected was “This Book is Gay,” written by Juno Dawson. Dawson is now a transgender woman, which means he’s a guy. He wrote the book a year before he “transitioned.” The book is an instructional manual, complete with illustrations, on how to engage in all manner of gay and lesbian sexual activities—anal sex, oral sex, use of sex toys, “water sports,” etc. The instructions are detailed, step by step.
When some parents found out about this, they became incensed and called the police. They complained that the teacher had shown their children obscene material, which for most adults it would be a crime for them to do so. Incredibly, it is not a crime for teachers or librarians. Illinois is one of 42 states where teachers and librarians are exempt from prosecution if they share obscene material with children. Several attempts have been made to remove the exemption, but the teachers’ unions and the American Library Association have fought those efforts tooth and nail.
Why is that? Do you suppose it’s because they know the material is obscene and they want to desensitize children to it? For what purpose?
Of course, Bonner was not prosecuted. She could not have been. But it appears the use of the book was not in line with the teaching standards of the school. Just because the law prevents teachers from being prosecuted for sharing obscene material with children, doesn’t mean school boards should allow such material to be used. The Heyworth School Board did not think so either. They voted 7-0 to force Bonner’s involuntary resignation.
It is not hard to understand why so many people are in favor of introducing how-to manuals on both gay and straight sex to children when you realize that there are large numbers of adults who believe that children of all ages have a God given right to experience sexual pleasure whenever they choose, as long as it is consensual. These adults also believe that sex is not binary, but a continuum. Straight, gay, trans, two spirit, bisexual, attracted to children—all normal. Of course, this is a lie, the roots of which I’ve traced in previous articles.
Belief in the lie explains this case, every other case in this category, the false claims of book banning, the efforts to expand graphic sex education to younger and younger children, and the opposition to removing obscenity exemptions for teachers and librarians. These adults are committed to indoctrinating children into the same beliefs 
they hold dear, regardless of what the parents want.
Who cares what the parents want?
For Bonner there is written proof of her motives. Last year she published with her co-author Robyn Seglem, a professor of education at Illinois State University, her first book — “Igniting Social Action in the ELA Classroom: Inquiry as Disruption”. Teachers College Press. On page 94 they write this:
Our students are currently in the stage of formulating their ideals. As teachers, we can let them blindly replicate the ideals of their families and communities, or we can offer them opportunities that allow them to push back against ideas (their families’ as well as our own), explore alternative perspectives, and try on new ideas. We can allow them to approach learning with dignity. In doing so, we can help them develop a foundation that they are willing to fight to protect, a set of ideals that will prompt them to accomplish the incredible.
This might be an approach to education that could be appropriate for young adults in college. But middle school? The brain is not fully formed until about age 25 and the last part of the brain that develops is the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that involves executive function, the area that controls problem solving, decision-making, managing multiple streams of thought, delaying gratification. The prefrontal cortex is indispensable to critical thinking. Children in sixth, seventh, eighth grade are not equipped to defend adequately the values their parents have instilled in them.
That’s the point of replacing education with activism. These modern educators, like Sarah Bonner and Robyn Seglem, don’t really want children to think for themselves. They want them to become activists who can be mobilized by pushing their emotional buttons during this period of their life when they have limited emotional controls. One of the easiest ways to trigger their emotions, and to divide them from the values of their parents, is around sex.
Sexualizing children automatically sets most of them at odds with their parents. The approach that is being used today—a theme that runs throughout all of the sex ed materials, the romance novels in school libraries, books like “This Book is Gay”—is the anti-establishment idea that purity is a false value. This has been explicitly stated by multiple sex educators at conferences I have attended.
Purity is a value that is essential for the traditional family to exist. The family is essential for our form of government to exist.
During a few months in 1919, at the end of WWI and the creation of the Hungarian Republic, communist Bela Kun controlled Hungary. During this time, communist Gyorgy Lukacs took control of education in the new nation. He introduced perverse sex education and according the Yugoslav historian, Victor Zitta,
“special lectures were organised in school and literature printed and distributed to ‘instruct’ children about free love, about the nature of sexual intercourse, about the archaic nature of the bourgeois family codes, about the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion which deprives man of all pleasure. Children urged thus to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the church, and to ignore precepts of morality.”
Not even Lukacs was teaching the children about how to engage in gay sex, just that restrictions on sexual activity were outdated. His purpose was to undermine the family and the church. Does this sound familiar?
Parents everywhere need to become as engaged as the parents in Heyworth. We need to clone the Heyworth School Board for every District in the country. Finally, churches need to take a stand to protect childhood innocence. Those churches that have not already sold out to our perverse culture are far too silent on the issues.
