by Jennifer Williams
June 23, 2023
My daughters (ages 13 and 11) have participated in the annual Johnson County Library “Summer Reading Program” since they were old enough to read. It’s one of those summer favorites that they look forward to, like vacation and the county fair. The program has always had good, wholesome books on a variety of topics that interest them. Not anymore.
Earlier this year, they were bombarded with a shelf of “free books” to take and review as part of the American Library Association’s YALSA program – Young Adults Library Services Association. They advertise on their website “YALSA is a division of the American Library Association, and YALSA’s goal is to make all libraries awesome for teens!”
Yet every single book they offered for review was loaded with leftist-agenda-talking-points on topics such as Critical Race Theory, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion, LGBTQ+, demons, witchcraft, and white shaming.
It’s really no surprise when you look deeper into the political organization and read their mission statement:
Mission
Through networking, advocacy, and professional development, the Young Adult Library Services Association empowers all those involved in the profession to provide equitable, diverse and inclusive teen services.
Vision
Our vision is that all teens, from a variety of backgrounds including, but not limited to ability, class, gender-identity, sexual orientation, race, religion and power-differentiated groups, will have access to quality library programs and services ‒ no matter where they occur ‒ that are tailored to the community and that create new opportunities for all teens’ to promote personal growth, academic success, and career development, while linking teens and staff to resources, connected learning opportunities, coaching, and mentoring.
They even have a section on their website “Celebrate Banned Books” with “banned books week” along with detailed legal resources and other outlets to fight censorship.
When reported to the Johnson County librarian, she claimed that it is their job to offer varying viewpoints on a wide range of topics; yet there was nothing about Christianity, the Constitution, American pride, or neighbors loving one another just as God has loved us. They were all doom and gloom, divisive, and political in nature for one side, targeting 12-18-year-olds during a time when they are highly susceptible to being influenced by thoughts and ideas that will affect them for the rest of their lives.
When the book choices for the summer reading program came around this year, my daughters were very disappointed that every topic was politically motivated, and they didn’t have a broad selection of fun, happy books like in the past. My oldest daughter chose one book, “When We Were Magic” because she said, “It was the only one that wasn’t political or racist against white people.”
When she opened the book to begin reading, she was mortified!
“Mom, this book is about murder, sex, and someone’s dick exploding,” she told me as we were driving down the road this week.
“What are you talking about?” I asked her, having trouble wrapping my mind around what she was saying.
“And it’s for 14-year-olds!” she continued.
When I got home, I only got through the sixth page to the dick exploding, but I had read enough.
The book begins like this:
“I DIDN’T MEAN TO KILL JOSH HARPER
Really, I didn’t. It’s just that I was nervous, and condoms are more complicated than I was expecting, and one thing led to another and – well.
Now there’s blood everywhere and he’s dead.”
It goes on to start forming the pornographic imaging that I believe is dangerously close to creating murder-sex fetishes in developing minds as it slowly describes her step-by-step move of dressing:
“I wipe my hands on the rumpled sheets until they are clean enough that I can pull my underwear on. I put on my bra, but I can’t get the hooks done. My hands won’t stop shaking. In the end, I leave it unhooked. I pull my dress on over it, and struggle to grip the zipper on the side. By the time I get the dress zipped up, blood has stopped pumping out of Josh Harper and naked feels like a hundred years ago.”
***
“Josh is on the bed.
There’s so much blood on the bed.
***
My phone buzzes in my purse and I nearly have a heart attack. My purse is at the foot of the bed. My phone is buzzing and I have to get it and it’s on the bed. On the bed where Josh is. On the bed with all the blood.
Shit.“
***
These people know exactly what they are doing! If you visit any of the left’s websites and news outlets, they confirm what we all know about developing children’s minds and the association of reading with learning and cognitive function.
We all know about erotica and words painting mental images with the intention of creating arousal in the reader. This book is literally describing sexually driven images with the step-by-step description of going from naked to dressed; while intermingling perverted images of blood, gore, and murder.
An American Psychological Association article titled “Why young brains are especially vulnerable to social media,” confirms the shift in mental development starting around age 10-12 – the beginning of the target audience for these horrific propaganda pieces.
In an October 2012 NPR article by Jon Hamilton, he states that researchers claim, “Teenage Brains Are Malleable And Vulnerable.”
As the website kidsreadnow.org discusses,
How reading helps children learn social emotional skills
Learning social-emotional skills.
Reading helps children gain a greater understanding of emotions, which can help them understand their own emotions and those of others.
Develop empathy.
Reading a story creates space for kids to imagine themselves inside the story. This allows them to develop empathy as they experience the lives of other characters and can identify with how they are feeling.
Practice perspective-taking.
Reading allows children to learn about a wide array of people, places, and events that they may not otherwise experience.
Improve cognitive development.
Reading provides children with a deeper understanding of the world and fills their brains with a wide range of knowledge. They then use this acquired knowledge to make sense of what they see, hear and read.
No thank you. As a parent, I refuse to have my children develop empathy for murder, demons, pornography, or any other weapon of the devil.
When visiting the Johnson County Library’s website for the Summer Reading Program, this book is actually one RECOMMENDED BY STAFF.
https://jocolibrary.bibliocommons.com/list/share/2280071849_jclsummerreading/2280730788_jcl_suggested_summer_reading_2023_teens
I would like to speak to the staff who thinks this is appropriate:
“Here is what I did.
I tried to have sex with Josh Harper.
I didn’t really want to have sex with Josh Harper. But I wanted to have sex with someone, and Josh Harper was around, and relatively sober, and I’d felt his boner against the top of my butt when he’d tried to grind on me at prom, so I figured it wouldn’t be too tricky to get him to have sex with me. And I was right. Sort of.
***
“Oh my god,” (notice the small g) Marcelina says, covering her black-lipsticked mouth with her hands. “Oh my god, Alexis, oh my god, what happened to his dick?”
Here is what happened to Josh’s dick.
It exploded.
I was trying to get the condom on him, and I guess I was doing it upside down or something. I don’t know, it looked a lot easier on the YouTube video I watched with the banana. But the room was dark and I couldn’t really see what I was doing, and it was my first time touching a guy below the waist, and it felt weird, and the condom wouldn’t go on. And then Josh asked if it was my first time.”
Fast forward another paragraph to:
“And then his dick exploded. And not in the way people joke about, not in the it-happens-to-a-lot-of-guys kind of way.
Every summer Marcelina cuts a hole into a watermelon and jams a handful of cherry bombs into it and then lights them and we run away and watch the carnage.
That’s the way Josh’s dick exploded.”
I would like to know what staff created this list, and I would like those people arrested for distributing murder-fetish porn to my child. This should be a criminal offense, punishable by jail time.
In Luke 17:1-2 the Bible states, “Jesus said to his disciples: “Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.”
I’ll take millstones for 1,000, Alex. These people need to be punished to the full extent of the law for warping and destroying the minds of our youth with their selfish, morbid agendas.
And back to the Johnson County Library’s main librarian’s response earlier this year about distributing all sides of the issues. Exactly what is beneficial about presenting murder and sex topics to 14-year-old children?
I don’t even want to fill my mind with this crap as an adult, let alone have my children be exposed to it by a bunch of groomers in the tax-payer-funded public library system. Someone read this book and recommended it for teens! More than one “someone.” This should concern the entire community on both sides of the political aisle.
And to the haters who claim that if you don’t like a book at the library then don’t read them, I will say the following. Unlike music, which comes with parental discretion warnings, my daughter had no idea what she was going to read until AFTER she read it. You can’t unread something. You can’t undo the mental image that was already created. This isn’t about book banning. It’s about inappropriate sexual material being distributed to minors.
