The book that riled the Liberty Lake City Council
By the time you read this the Liberty Lake City Council Members, Phil Folyer (who is a lame duck that will be replaced in January), Chris Cargill, Jed Spencer, Wendy Van Orman, and Mike Kennedy (who just now replaced the appointed Tom Sahlberg) may have exercised their transient supermajority to take over control of the Liberty Lake Library Board.
For an excellent, detailed (and lengthy) analysis of the controversy I highly recommend that you click on Aaron Hedge’s and Erin Sellers’ RANGEMedia.co article published yesterday entitled “What is obscene? Who gets to decide?”. While you’re there signup to receive email notification of publication of RANGEMedia’s article and, if you can possibly afford it, sign up for a paid subscription. These reporters deserve our support.
As detailed in the RANGE article this whole controversy started over a challenge to the book “Gender Queer” lodged by Erin Zasada in December of 2021. Ms. Zasada did not read the whole graphic (meaning illustrated, not explicit) novel before she decided that she wanted to make the book unavailable to everyone else who visited the library.
Remembering from my young adulthood the quip that the surest way to increase the circulation of a book was to get it “banned in Boston”, I bought a copy, read it in a couple of hours (I’m a slow reader), and shared it with others. The subject matter, the author trying to understand their innate sexual orientation, is a bit jarring—but, for anyone undergoing the same internal struggle as the author, it is clear to me that this book could be a life-saver. A gay friend of an age similar to mine who read “Gender Queer” quickly declared that there should be a copy of it available in every high school library. As the RANGEMedia article points out, the book clearly is not obscene based the three-pronged “Miller test” for obscenity. One of the three qualifying questions is “Whether a reasonable person finds that the matter, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” “Gender Queer” lacks none of those attributes and I take pride in thinking of myself as a “reasonable person”.
Underlying the Liberty Lake book banning controversy is a profound difference in worldview. For some, sexuality and sexual identity are strictly binary and, moreover, any deviation from that binary requirement is a choice that a person makes rather than part of one’s inborn makeup. In this worldview one fears that one’s supposedly perfectly normal teenager can be enticed into aberrant, “sinful” sexual behavior, i.e. “groomed”, simply by understanding that such things are possible. In this worldview, sexual identity is malleable and “conversion therapy” works. (It doesn’t, in spite of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s endorsement.) This first worldview almost always comes bound up with Fundamentalist religious convictions.
The second viewpoint, a viewpoint shared by most biologists and physicians, notes that sex is profoundly NOT binary—an observable biological fact manifest in babies born with complicated variations of internal and external sex organs and variations in physiological responses to sex hormones. I recommend the documentary “Every Body” as a very human look at this complicated reality. (It’s available to watch on YouTube for a fee.) These people’s lived experience strongly suggest that one’s gender identity is formed biologically as well. In this view, having access to a book that confirms for such a person that they are not a hopeless freak damned to a life contemplating suicide or—worse—damned by God as a sinner—access to such a book is life saving. In this second worldview all of these people are just that, people just as worthy of a rewarding life as the rest of us.
I’m happy to live in a society that includes people with the former worldview, but it really raises my hackles when these people want to dictate what folks of the latter worldview have available to read. It is even worse when they wish to make and enforce laws that govern love and sexual expression between consenting adults.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. The Science of Biological Sex provides a more in depth discussion of biological sexual and gender variations that the binary-only folks have to ignore to maintain their fear-filled views.