Former President Obama released a letter supporting explicit LGBTQ+ content, lamenting supposed “book bans.”

From National Review. Barack Obama released a rare public letter denouncing the “profoundly misguided” attempts to ban books in libraries across the country.

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“Today, some of the books that shaped my life – and the lives of so many others – are being challenged by people who disagree with certain ideas or perspectives. It’s no coincidence that these ‘banned books’ are often written by or feature people of color, indigenous people, and members of the LGBTQ+ community,” the former president wrote.

Obama’s comments come amid a wave of parent concern over the addition of highly sexualized content to public-school libraries.

Much of the concern has focused on the book Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, an LGBT book that has been introduced to elementary and middle-school students around the country. The book, which received the 2020 American Library Association’s Alex Award, includes erotic scenes of men having sex, illustrations of minors performing oral sex, and a drawing of a man masturbating a young boy’s penis. …

Beneath the former president’s letter to the nation’s “dedicated and hardworking librarians,” was a link to an organization, Unite Against Book Bans, spearheaded by the American Library Association. On Friday, the group held a rally in Chicago headlined by antiracist author, Ibram X. Kendi, who has infamously argued that the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” …

Obama also passingly referenced attempts to bowdlerize classics: “[T]here have also been unfortunate instances in which books by conservative authors or books containing ‘triggering’ words or scenes have been targets of removal. Either way, the impulse seems to be to silence, rather than engage, rebut, learn from or seek to understand views that don’t fit our own.”

In recent years, several publishers have been caught re-writing historic books to make them more inclusive and sensitive to modern tastes. In February, it was revealed that physical descriptions of characters in new editions of Roald Dahl books were airbrushed to remove references such as “fat” or “ugly” by hired “sensitivity readers.”

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(Excerpt from National Review. Photo Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)