Helena Library Board Meeting – August 25th, 2008
Re: The Joy of Gay Sex
Questions to the Collection Review Committee Members:
What did you see as the value of this book; what did you get out of it after viewing and reading every page as required by the review committee?
What is your rationale for keeping this book on the library shelves?
What service is this book providing for the community?
Are you comfortable with members of your family, particularly children, having access to this book?
Considerations for All:
Legality – It is illegal to distribute pornography to children. If I were to hand a copy of The Joy of Gay Sex to a child on the sidewalk outside the library, I would be arrested. Why should the library be immune from behaving as expected of law-abiding Helenans?
Morality – The library says its policy is to not act in the place of parents. This suggests passive neutrality that honors the parent’s role as guardian in overseeing the reading material of their children. This book violates that spirit. It has a chapter for teenagers giving advice on how to meet people online for sex and how to hide illicit internet browser histories from their parents. The book suggests that children lie and hide things that their parents have every right to know in order to act “in loco parentis,” as the library has deemed suitable.
This is clearly immoral and despicable behavior, contrary to the library’s policy of honoring the parent’s supervisory role. By abstaining from removing this book from its shelves, the library is taking sides against the parent’s supervisory role while washing its hands of any responsibility. That is wicked.
Censorship – The stated mission of the library is to “provide access to a marketplace of ideas, accounts and approaches that are varied, divergent, and inclusive, including that which may be controversial or a minority point of view.” This will lead some to conclude that removing this book amounts to censorship, but that is plainly not the case. Removing the book from the library does not affect its availability through public avenues of commerce, where the book may be readily obtained by all those who desire to have it.
As for the usefulness of the “ideas, accounts and approaches” that are found in this book, the knowledge about how men can sodomize and homosexually gratify themselves is something any decent community can live without. In fact, a disproportionate number of homosexuals have died from AIDS because of sodomy, a good reason not to teach or encourage it. The homosexual lifestyle is not one that should be promoted for many reasons. And why should the library stop at only having a guidebook for men? Why not one for lesbians, too? What about one for people who like to have sex with children, or animals? Where does this madness end?
Respecting Privacy – Regarding sexual practices between consenting adults, our society respects the privacy of the home. But those things that are done in the privacy of the home are not meant for public viewing through our public institutions. If people want to engage in whatever sexual practices, that is a private matter and not one that should be publicly aired to everyone through the library. (This principle applies whether homosexual or heterosexual.)
Those who claim a right to privacy for their sexual practices cannot then force the public to accept an airing of these practices, which much of the public finds utterly repulsive. To expect to have it both ways is plainly antagonistic and wrong.
Bigotry – Many argue that homosexuality is a nature, not a choice. Therefore, they conclude, it is bigotry to say anything against having a homosexual book in the library. However, many more people are born with a nature that finds homosexuality disgusting and offensive. They do not want people to teach their children or others that homosexuality is clean and wholesome. If homosexuals want to maintain their private lives in peace, they must not try to force the larger public to accept what it finds naturally unacceptable. That is being hypocritical and bigoted.
Judgmentalism – Rather than judging those who object to homosexual pornography, homosexual advocates should support the removal of this book from the library on the basis of maintaining privacy. Most if not all monogamous heterosexual couples raising children in our community would not support naked pictures depicting their sexual acts and techniques in the library. There is no hypocrisy or judgmentalism in expecting the same from homosexuals and their boosters.
Do No Harm – It is a well established fact that exposure to pornographic pictures has an immediate and lasting negative effect on people. Why is pornography so addictive to many men, for example? Is anyone proposing that children’s psyches, or adult’s for that matter, are not influenced by graphic sexual images? While the library should be a repository of information and ideas, it should not be a place that provokes those with existing weaknesses towards vice, illness, and disease.
Some may say that this book is not intended as pornography, therefore it is not pornography. Drano is not a beverage, yet kept within reach of small children, it may become one. I recall that adolescent boys used to enjoy viewing National Geographic’s articles about Africa, not because they were interested in geography, but because they were curious about women’s nakedness. It was sexual titillation, which, if fed and maintained, led to underage promiscuity, fornication, teenage pregnancies, abortions, impairments of various kinds and sexual dysfunction. A book is not necessarily what the author says it is; how it is used or how it affects others is what matters.
Nevertheless, what is happening here today at the Helena Public Library is about a lot more than protecting children. Treating homosexual pornography as everyday fare means you are not far removed from the fate of Sodom. That is future world you are creating today and will experience tomorrow. It is already rapidly devolving into all evil.
What about Our Creator? – In the same Book where we have the Ten Commandments, known the world over as the basis of civil society and the backbone of Western civilization, it is also commanded by God: “You shall not lie with mankind as with womankind. It is abomination to God” (Leviticus 18:22 MKJV).
We don’t have books in the library that teach us how to steal.
We don’t have books in the library that teach us how to commit adultery.
We don’t have books in the library that teach us how to murder.
At least, I wouldn’t think so and would hope not. Why should we have books in the library that teach us how to sodomize?
Ought we not to fear God? What society has ever prospered in tossing aside the Commandments of God and then trampling on Them?
The greatest advances in freedom and liberty, of which we have been the fortunate inheritors, came from those who received the words of the Bible and Its moral code and sought to uphold that code. They fought against religious tyrants and their kings to allow for the freedom of conscience and expression that has given us the legacy that is exercised at our Helena Public Library. To abuse that legacy with books like The Joy of Gay Sex is to desecrate the blood of those who laid down their lives for our sakes. Above all, it is to desecrate the blood of the One Who laid down His life for all of us, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Conclusion – I have answered arguments for, and have given reasons against, keeping this book in our public library. This has only been necessary because our society is so fearful of offending anyone by stating what is perfectly obvious and true. Otherwise, this case is a slam dunk. No one in his or her right mind would ever think such a book fit for public consumption.
I state the perfectly obvious: The emperor not only has no clothes, but he is posing with other men, doing the vilest things. It is a no-brainer to find this unacceptable fare for a public place of learning and enrichment.
I recently met a Russian living in Canada visiting Helena on summer holiday. I told him about the complaint form I had registered about this book. He laughed at me. “In Russia,” he said, “we would just take the book from the library shelf and destroy it.” I envision next meeting someone from Saudi Arabia. He might also laugh. “In Saudi Arabia,” he would tell me, “we would just take the librarians that put that book on our library shelf and immediately hang them in the city square.”
I am not suggesting that. (I need to say this because those who rabidly oppose the things I am saying will surely make the charge. Yet they are the vicious ones, out for blood.) I am speaking of the eventual direction things take when people live lawlessly. How do you think Saudi Arabia got the way it is today? A lawless people will get the law, in spades. Once the moral code is dispensed with, and laws are twisted to protect or promote evil-doing, it is but a short time before the agents of retribution will rise up and bring down the hammer of God’s wrath. Debauched Germany becomes Nazi Germany. Or debauched Europe becomes Eurabia. It is happening.
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