Citizens Challenge Obscene Materials in Fayetteville School Libraries
A retired teacher involved in Arkansas policy is urging the governor, state lawmakers, and school officials to protect children by removing pornographic books from the shelves of Fayetteville public school libraries.
More than 50 books in Fayetteville's school library system contain sexually explicit passages that alarmed parents and citizens have deemed not merely inappropriate but pornographic. One book called Push, for example, contains a graphic description of a character having sex with a baby....
I believe that would be this book called Push, by the poet Sapphire:
... Enter the world of Claireece Precious Jones: eating herself into oblivion on the sagging couch in her mother's suffocating apartment. Illiterate 16 year-old "Precious," as she prefers to be called, is pregnant with her second child by the same father as the first--her own....
Precious' first child has Downs Syndrome, and the young mother names the baby "Lil' Mongo" for mongoloid, a word which she neither knows how to pronounce or comprehend. She gives birth to Mongo on the floor of her kitchen, after being kicked and beaten by her mother for "stealing her man." The infant goes to live with Precious' grandmother, but is brought over for the half hour of the caseworker's monthly visit so Mrs. Jones can claim her as a welfare dependent.
Sapphire conjures up every stereotype imaginable and lays each spread-eagle across the pages of PUSH, daring the reader, just daring the reader to flinch. Incest, AIDS, pedophilia, welfare fraud, illiteracy, homelessness, domestic violence-- she refuses to let up....
Anyone for whom this is "pornographic" already has problems way beyond the kind that can be solved by keeping the book off a library shelf.
The retired teacher spearheading this campaign is Debbie Pelley; her organization's Web site promises a "Link to Shocking, Pornographic Pictures & Books in Fayetteville, Arkansas Library," and tells us here, "We regret having to post them but evil today is so ugly that opponents can't even bring it out in the open publicly by the media." But if you're expecting something like Push: The Graphic Novel, prepare to be disappointed. Here's one of the "Shocking, Pornographic Pictures," from a book for young people called It's So Amazing:
Oh, the humanity!
(The rest, from this and other books, are more explicit, but they're all in the same vein -- they're here and here.)
Debbie Pelley can't seem to get Governor Mike Huckabee, a Republican and a minister who's considering a run for president in 2008, to pay attention to any of this. She thinks his priorities are skewed:
Pelley says Huckabee seems to have time to fly to California to appear on HBO, campaign in New Hampshire, sponsor a "socialized" medical program called Kids First, and back a program giving illegal aliens prenatal care. However, she says the governor apparently has no time to speak out on destructive pornographic school library books and the health problems they will generate.
Yeah, I guess providing prenatal care to illegal aliens is also obscene, as is providing these services to low-income native-born children whose parents can't afford them.
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