Letters to the Editor

To the editor,

I attended the Columbia County Rural Library District meeting on November 28. I was interested to hear an update on the issue of the display of and access to books with explicit sexual content and/or graphic images. I heard parents, grandparents, and other adults express a desire for policies and practices which would help preserve the innocence of children and protect them from the explicit sexual material contained in a number of books available at the library. I also heard a person who read from prepared notes on her phone and seemed to be warning that restricting access to such materials increases hatred for and incites violence against people who self-identify as LGBTQ+. She went on to offer the recent shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs as an example of such hatred/violence.

I struggle to understand how advocating to protect child from inappropriate material encourages hatred and violence against those who self-identify as LGBTQ+ or any others. Is exposure of children to such explicit materials a necessary part of LGBTQ+ advocacy?

I am also unclear as to how the Club Q shooting supports the premise that restricting explicit sexual materials encourages violence against the LGBTQ+ community as the shooter identified as “non-binary,” and one of the victims was a young heterosexual male who was there with his girlfriend and other family members to celebrate a birthday.

Over the past almost-three years, many of the mandated measures in the name of health have been justified by the beliefs that it is “better safe than sorry” and out of an “abundance of caution,” especially when it came to protecting our children. It appears that such guiding beliefs have been abandoned when it comes to the issue of explicit media and these same children. Is this a situation where one group is favored while another must be sacrificed for the “greater good,” or should it be possible to advocate for protecting our children and the tolerance of all members of the community?

Thomas Utt, DDS

LTC (Ret), US Army

Dayton