![](https://www.mindingthecampus.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/maineschools-1.png)
Maine Governor Janet Mills’s administration recommends that elementary schools carry pornographic books such as Gender Queer, a graphic novel (what we used to call comic books) depicting, among other vivid illustrations, a boy with his penis in another boy’s mouth. The text is as explicit as the pictures. Statements like, “I’m gonna give you the blow job of your life,” and “I want you inside me,” convey the tone and flavor of this volume.
Another book called This Book is Gay is a how-to manual targeted at young teenagers. It teaches students how to perform oral and anal sex with their same-sex classmates, and delves into exotic practices including the use of scat. If you are like me and are unfamiliar with “scat,” I urge you to leave it at that. It makes me ill just to think about it.
Pornography in the schools has become an issue in the Maine governor’s race, as it has elsewhere. Mills, a Democrat, is running against former Republican governor Paul LePage, a straight-talking, crusty Mainer who had a childhood right out of a Charles Dickens novel.
Of the handful of campaigns I support, the Maine governor’s race is the dearest to my heart. Although I am a resident of New York, I have long, deep ties to Maine. I have been coming to Maine for more than sixty years. My daughter lives there. If I have grandchildren, which I very much hope, I dread the idea that they will be exposed to pornography in school.
[Related: “Going Woke Isn’t Hard When You’ve Got a Library Card”]
Through a PAC, I have financed a campaign to call attention to pornography in the schools in Maine. The campaign is aimed at parents and grandparents. Giving explicit pornographic material to kids in schools will hasten the erosion of the family, which is our foundational institution. It is families that produce citizens with the self-restraint necessary for a self-governing Republic.
Pornography for children paves the way for sex between children and, ultimately, for pedophilia. If this sounds extreme, keep in mind that just a few years ago, we dismissed the idea that grown men would demand to use women’s changing rooms on the basis of a self-determined “sense” that they are “really” women. Yet now this is the norm around the country, and young girls who express discomfort with showering next to adult men are denounced as bigots.
The PAC I am funding is advertising on Facebook and other social media platforms, as well as on television. We try to feature actual images from Gender Queer. After all, seeing is believing. But television stations will not carry the images, even if the most explicit parts are blurred out. And I can’t blame the stations—even when blurred, the images are pornographic and not appropriate for public consumption. It is depressingly ironic that pictures too obscene to be shown to adults on television can be shown to 10-year-old kids in schools.
Governor Mills says that local school boards should decide for themselves whether their schools carry books like Gender Queer. She claims she is neutral. This is not true. Gender Queer is recommended on the Maine education web site. See for yourself. More damning still, the not-for-profit firm Maine pays to distribute these pornographic books, Out Maine, recently announced it will try to have them in all Maine school libraries by the end of 2024.
The real problem, however, is not that Mills lies about being neutral; it is that she thinks neutrality is the right standard. It most decidedly isn’t. Children’s minds are unformed and pliable, so we do not, for example, allow schools to carry books arguing that blacks or Jews are inferior. Such ideas undermine our country’s foundational premise that all people are created equal.
[Related: “Graphic Content Restrictions Are Not Book Bans”]
For a like reason, we must ban pornographic books in schools. The blessings of liberty come when liberty is well-instructed and well-directed. If we don’t take responsibility for directing American freedom to its proper ends, we will be responsible for turning our children and grandchildren into something less than fully human.
Pro-porn and other queer activists claim that the only reason most of us think pornography for children is bad is that we have been socialized to think it is bad. We just need to get over it. There will be other occasions to rebut this empty claim. For now, it is necessary that Maine parents know their children are being exposed to pornography in school. At present, most do not. And that is because the schools and the education establishment don’t want them to know.
The case of Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, however, is a promising sign that parents are demanding to know. McAuliffe told Virginians in the recent gubernatorial race that things like critical race theory (CRT) should be left to the experts. Once parents realized that McAuliffe thought they were supposed to keep their hands off their children’s education, they gave him the heave-ho.
CRT is vague and not always easy to grasp. But there is nothing vague about a boy with his penis in another boy’s mouth. Janet Mills would also get the shove were Maine parents to find out she was peddling this sort of thing. That’s my goal, to make sure that parents do find out. I know of no better use for my money.
Image: Adobe Stock
These books likely are in every school library in the country. In Virginia where I live, the school board, school administrators, and school librarians have pointed to the American Library Association to defend their book selection policies.
Many think that the ALA is a neutral organization that uses clear standards of literary merit to select the books that receive awards and that they recommend to readers. But a deeper dive will show that this is not true.
The ALA claims 54,000 members. This year less than 10% of the membership elected a “Marxist lesbian” as its president. The vote was 5410 for her and well over 4622 for her opposition. It is clear that a radical minority has co-opted the ALA much as other institutions have been co-opted. Is it any wonder then that an ALA president who advocates the “queering” of school libraries would support, with her radical allies, the adoption of library materials that advocate for materials that could not be shown in a movie theater to anyone under 18.
I obtained an MLS in 1972 and have many years of experience as a librarian.
Satan is in our schools. Time to vote out these school boards.
How much Maine has changed — back in 1986, a fairly draconian obscenity law almost passed:. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/11/us/voters-in-maine-defeat-anti-obscenity-plan.html
In Maine, the RSU 40 (Waldoboro, Warren, Washington, Friendship, Union) School Board recently voted to keep the book in the high school library by a vote of 11 – 4. This, despite the fact that we presented them with a petition of almost 1000 signatures demanding it to be removed! The books in the high school library, by the way, are easily accessible to the middle school, which is right next door, AND to all elementary school students in the district thru the inter-library loan program.
Spot on, thank you.
The Catholic Schools in Maine are outstanding and aren’t run by the Teachers’ Union’s lapdog, Governor (Shutdown) Mills.
Thank you. Things are indeed crazy here in Maine, and parents are late to the party. Unfortunately it is too late in the election cycle to influence anything at this point until the next cycle, I can only hope that fair minded liberals, if any are left, are able to finally wake up to this insanity. Parents need to be in the loop. Period.
Doug, I wasn’t impressed with the people going into Maine K-12 35 years ago…
Raising the salaries in the late ’80s was supposed to improve things…