An odd debate on children’s books is raging on in Oklahoma right now, and it’s all focusing on LGBT themes.
For the past decade, children’s books with queer themes have been segregated away from the kid’s section and into the “Family Talk” section at the Metropolitan Library System, which serves the Oklahoma City metro area. And although the section sounds fun, it actually houses these children books — Heather Has Two Mommies and King and King — with books about drug addiction, sexual abuse, and mental illness.
The decision to house them there was, surprisingly, a compromise from banning the books altogether or keeping them in a locked room.
“We didn’t want to have this material in a locked room,” manager Janet Brooks told The Oklahoman.
Now, a local LGBT rights advocacy group plans to ask the Metro Library Commission to revisit the policy and consider amending it to remove LGBT children’s books from the family talk section and place them in general circulation.
Relegating these LGBT books to the special section creates an unnecessary and outdated stigma, they contend.
“Everything else on that list was a medical condition, a substance abuse issue—but you’ve got one class of people that are singled out,” says Troy Stevenson of Freedom Oklahoma. “It identifies the entire LGBT community with sex, and I think that’s the biggest problem.”
In 2008, commission member Ralph Bullard introduced an amendment that required the “Family Talk” section be at least five feet from the ground.
“When I came on the commission there was a lot of interest in the community that certain books were not really books that they thought children should be reading,” Bullard said.“Just on a personal basis, I think that whole issues—and homosexuality and all the different versions its moved into, transgender and changing sexes and same-sex marriage and all those things that come from homosexuality and it being morally correct or immoral, is much more widespread now,” he added.
Stevenson agrees any book dealing with sex should be out of kids’ hands, “but to say the entire LGBT community is only defined by sex is clear discrimination. It denies us our humanity.”
He’s going to the next commission meeting on October 20 to ask them to take books like Daddy’s Roommate out of the “Family Talk” section.
