https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/08/24/heartstopper-library-ban-mississippi/
These are books written for 14 year olds and up, you know young adults. Again these same Christian warriors think girls that age should be forced to marry older men and be forced to carry a pregnancy to full term. But don’t tell kids about being gay or having a book that shows them their feelings are normal. That is the part that the Christian warriors hate, that it is normal and books like these show it as normal. As one parent claimed, “Gays use these books to recruit kids into the LGBTQ+ community”. By my dogs that love gravy it is 2023, and being gay is well understood not to work that way. You can not make a person gay. Full stop. No one can make a straight person gay and no one can make a gay person straight. What they want is to remove all LGBTQ+ representation from society, make gay kids ashamed that they feel different from the other kids around them, and to keep the society a nice forced Christian nation of the 1950s. We have to stop giving in to these overly loud minority. They are not the entire country, as maga people like to claim. You can’t please them. You can’t give in a bit because it is never enough. They will keep pushing for more and more their way. What they want is the erasure of an entire part of the population. Think on it. Even if the LGBTQIA was only 10% of the population, that is a minimum of 36 million people. I am sorry these people hate so, but LGBTQIA people exist and yes there are kids who are in that community. When the fuck do they think kids feel sexual, at 18? Why do kids start dating at 13, 14, 15? Because they feel an attraction. They have already started to use these laws to demand segregation, because good white kids are traumatized by having to sit in classrooms with black kids. A return to the 1950s. Hugs
one young boy said.
“Seeing that gave me at least a little bit of hope that maybe this town was OK and that people like me, kids, would feel like it’s not a bad thing and feel like they can have something relatable to connect with and make them feel hopeful and happy and secure, something as simple as a book,” he said.
- Aug 24
- Written by Emily Chudy
Nick and Charlie are all grown up and kissing – a lot – in Heartstopper season two. (Netflix)
The graphic novel series Heartstopper will no longer be available in the teen section of a Mississippi public library after a group of parents claimed the books were pornographic.
The Heartstopper books, which tell the story of two teen boys who fall in love, were removed from the teen section of the Columbia-Marion County public library and placed in the adult section after complaints.
The library moved the graphic novels from the teen section after a meeting on 9 August in which a group of parents claimed the books were pornographic, with one reportedly claiming homosexuals were using the series to “recruit” children into the LGBTQ+ community.
One mother also reportedly cited 14 other books that they found “objectionable”, asking for the board to remove them from the teen section in order to “protect our children”, The Mississippi Free Press reported.
Other titles described as objectionable included Dress Codes for Small Towns, by Courtney Stevens and Luna, by Julie Anne Peters, both of which have LGBTQ+ themes.
Heather McMurry, the mother said to have submitted the complaint about the Heartstopper series, said she had visited booklooks.org, a site run by “concerned parents” who screen children’s and young adults’ books for “objectionable” content. According to the site’s reports for Alice Oseman’s popular series, the graphic novels contain “sexual activities, alternate sexualities, alternate gender ideologies, profanity and violence.”
In reality, the books have a few scenes featuring kissing, but contain no explicit material.
Bookslooks was launched in 2022 by a member of the vocal conservative advocacy group Moms for Liberty, which has been branded as a far-right extremist organisation by civils rights activists at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
A local mother who wanted to remain anonymous said that she had not been given a chance to speak in favour of Heartstopper at the meetings, and told the newspaper that only opponents of the book had spoken.
Her son previously told the Mississippi Free Press that he had been pleased to see the series in the library.
“Seeing that gave me at least a little bit of hope that maybe this town was OK and that people like me, kids, would feel like it’s not a bad thing and feel like they can have something relatable to connect with and make them feel hopeful and happy and secure, something as simple as a book,” he said.
His mum said that while she was relieved the books were not banned outright, moving the titles to the adult section could mean that a child with a homophobic parent will not be able to read them.
The library’s director, Ryda Worthy, and the branch manager, Mona Swayze, who reportedly did not have a say in the decision to move the titles, confirmed that teenagers can only obtain books from the adult section with parental permission.
The restriction comes during a time of growing calls to censor or remove books containing LGBTQ+ themes from libraries, with one in the state of Washington facing closure over a single book about trans people.
The American Library Association tracked 1,269 demands to censor library books in the US in 2022, with Maia Kobabe’s graphic novel Gender Queer topping the list of most-complained-about books.
However, some states are fighting back, with a Texas judge ordering books banned for containing LGBTQ+ and racial content to be returned to library shelves.
Scottie's Playtime 
This has recently been reminding me of how they did biographies of MLK and Dick Gregory when my sister (2 years younger than I) was in 6th grade, and needed to read one for a book report. (At that time, 6th was the last elementary grade; 7th and 8th were jr. high. I guess I got really lucky; our class got to choose from any number of accomplished black people’s biographies. Anyway.) Though there was no sex nor any retelling of any off-color comedy of Dick Gregory, nor anything true or mythical about his personal life in that book, it ended up pulled, and everyone had to write their report from one single book about Harriet Tubman; at least there were 3 copies available! I checked out an MLK book from the jr. high library for her, but she said they all had to use the Tubman book so the teacher wouldn’t get in trouble. All something about how the men couldn’t keep their sex lives clean, and it was a second wave of that BS from the 50s. As adults, we now know what that was about, and this is the same.
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Hi Ali;
As I wrote my comment, I kept thinking back on yours and a thought that kept sneaking in to my mind: Have you ever noticed, be it slavery and the following e.r.a., religion, American Natives, Nixon, Vietnam, etc… that we really do seem to get ourselves in hot water only when we attempt to control other people’s freedoms? Odd that in the ‘land of the free’ we can’t learn this.
hugs;
randy
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Yeah. It does seem we’d have learned by now. It’s as if some feel that there is only so much freedom to go around, or something. If someone they don’t like is as free as everyone, someone else will somehow be less free. I can’t figure that out; everybody’s equal!
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Hi Ali;
I don’t know if you just penned that or if you got it elsewhere, but that is one of the wisest and best things I’ve ever read. Odd enough, I think some people actually do feel that way, that if others are free to be themselves then it somehow diminishes their own degree of freedom. Go figure.
hugs;
randy
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I’m not certain; I know that point has come up before here in Scottie’s place, but I don’t know who originated it. Heck, come to think of it, it’s probably a paraphrase of that thing I think LBJ said about getting people to fight over something that makes one feel better than the other, while stealing from both.
But it makes me sad. It makes us sad.
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Hi Scottie;
I, like many of your readers, was a public school student of the 70’s and 80’s. The Vietnam War was only recently over, Nixon, we were still reeling from MLKjr, we were still hopeful of tomorrow. When I was in 6th grade, we had our first black students – twins, named Ronald and Donald. When I was in 9th grade we had our first student with dwarfism, I guess you would say “little people”, but we were all little, so? I was intrigued because they were so different but very much the same as me.
Like many of your readers, I remember feeling different and alone in the crowd that was my public school. I remember feeling withdrawn, avoiding the bullies, avoiding the deep questions I had within myself. It wasn’t until I was 13 that I found the library, where I sit in the back aisles and read books I would slide oh so carefully from the other side of the shelving so no one would know what I was reading, what I was too ashamed to check out. I imagine the librarians knew what I was doing, but they left me alone. I certainly would not have attempted to receive “parental permission” for those books!!
When it comes to it, the educators and administrators and textbook writers are charged with educating our children, but in truth it is each child going through school who is attempting to understand their world, themselves, others, and why things keep changing. Maybe he doesn’t have to haunt the back aisles of the library like I did, we didn’t have internet you know – we had a card catalog! But, maybe he does need that resource. Maybe he does need that comfort that there are those who went through stuff and cared about others enough to write it down and be of help. And, maybe he gains the self confidence, the self esteem needful to understand that he is not horrible, a mistake, but is beautiful and unique so to enter into a confusing world and be successful.
Or, we can just keep him ignorant and feed him the party line until he breaks down and asks Siri.
hugs
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Hey Randy. Two thoughts. Too many parents, especially fundamentalist religious parents and right-wingers see their children as property that they demand be mini them. They demand their kids be copies of themselves. They don’t seem to want the child to develop and be themselves. They want a mini me copy of the parent. Girls must be just as the mother parent, and boys must be just like the father parent. No individuality nor independent thought. The child must not choose a different way of living, a different way of thinking, nor shall they wear their hair different nor their clothing. The child they want to walk lock step as the parent tells them.
The other thing I was thinking was you as a child were in the back of the library because the world around you, the people around you, wanted to make sure you felt shame for your feelings and would be targeted for being different. That was changing in the modern age. Young LGBTQIA kids did not feel ostracized and instead were being accepted, they did not feel they were wrong or broken, they had help to stop the bullies along with support programs. In red states the fundamentalist Christian republican bigots have destroyed that. In Florida we have returned to a time when there were no books, movies, or cartoons with LGBTQIA characters or issues. There are no library books for a child today to reach through the shelf for. There is no positive mention or even talking about the famous gay people in history. It has become taboo and something they want kids to be ashamed of, and these same Christian republican bigots want the LGBTQIA kids targeted, harassed, and beaten up. They want these kids fearful and to stay in hiding until they leave school. That includes higher education in Florida that also have to follow the same don’t say gay “anti-woke” laws that cover K-18. That is the true evil of these laws, and in Florida the Trump appointed courts keep dismissing challenges to these laws based on the ideology of the judge who agrees with turning the country back into the society of the 1950s. Hugs
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