Refresh PornNewz for the latest stories!

PornNewz Goes out to Stores, Distributors and Interweb Nuts all over the freakin' place!!
Our advertising team visits stores around the country everyday!!

These people really need a better hobby.

Group calls sexually explicit teen books in county library “a scandal”

A citizens anti-pornography group wants certain books in the St. Louis County Library’s teen section segregated from younger eyes and placed in the adult section.

However, the library director says a system is in place to review materials on the shelves.

Citizens Against Pornography (CAP) is an interfaith community organization that wants to alert the public to the dangers of pornography.Carl Hendrickson, chairman of the group, submitted petitions signed by almost 150 residents at the library’s board of directors meeting last week.

The petitions call on the board to establish an Adult Advisory Committee to review literature going into the teen section.

CAP says some titles in the teen section contain graphic depictions of homosexual and heterosexual sex acts not suitable for young readers.

According to the petition, each of the seven members of the St. Louis County Council would be asked to submit three names to the library board, from which one name in each district would be selected to be on the Adult Advisory Committee.

Hendrickson, a former Republican state representative from South County and the committeman for Tesson Ferry Township, said this method of selecting committee members should ensure a balanced representation on the committee.

Complaints from groups like CAP are not uncommon across the country, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom,

“Public libraries are organizations that serve the entire community,” she said. “So this particular group of parents, based on their sincerely held values and beliefs, don’t believe that their children should read these books.

“But there may be families that are dealing with these issues, or have kids grappling with these issues who are of an age where they should have accurate and good information available to them,” Caldwell-Stone said. “These families need to be served by the library as much as the other families are, so to have one group of parents setting the parenting standards for the entire community, deciding for everyone what’s appropriate, is problematic in the context of a public library.”

Jim Melka of West County, a member of CAP, told the county library board the teen sections “are not family friendly.”

“The St. Louis County Library director, Mr. Charles Pace, has populated the teen section with very explicit, sexually explicit offerings,” Melka told the board. “There are over one hundred titles whose content attacks vulnerabilities of children.”

Melka called the inclusion of the books “a public scandal” and said the purpose for certain books to include detailed descriptions of love-making acts and sex “is to make it easy for readers to fantasize the described actions, and in doing so, bring out sexual feelings.”

Charles Pace, who became executive director of the county library in October 2006, said he was not solely responsible for the content of the teen section of the various libraries and that there was already a reviewing system for the books in place.

“It needs to be noted that many of these books have not been on the shelves for about two years, most have been in the collection for far longer than that, so it’s not Charles Pace who has populated the collection with these items,” Pace said.

Pace said the library already has a reconsideration of materials policy, and anyone who objects to certain passages in specific books can file a request for review.

“We also try to incorporate a wide variety of different points of view in our collection,” Pace said. “But there is a procedure in place for people who wish to make a challenge of a particular item.”

Laura Kostial of Ellisville said CAP was not asking the board to censor the books.

“We are not asking that the books be removed from the library, we’re just asking that they be put in age-appropriate categories,” Kostial said. “That is our only request here, that they be segregated and that children have to have advanced authorization from the parents to check out this material.”

Kostial held up a copy of a particular series of books that begins with a central character for second-grade-level readers and advances through middle school.

“This is a great example,” she said holding up a book. “It has a little girl, a blond haired, blue-eyed little girl (on the cover. This is a series that actually starts for second-graders with ‘Alice Gets a Kitty Cat.’ By the time you get to this one, for middle school, Alice is having sex with everyone, and it’s not just casual, it’s in great, great detail and we (parents) would have no idea.”

Kostial also thinks a rating system similar to video games and television and motion pictures would be appropriate.

Hendrickson said the library’s review method was reactive.

“What we would like to do with our adult advisory committee is be proactive, have some people make a reading of the materials before the parents object,” Hendrickson said. “I suspect they’re (the library) not going to do anything since the procedure in place is their response.”

Hendrickson said the books in question should probably be located in the adult sections, but “if they (board members) feel they are of some value to teenagers they should somehow let parents know that there may be objectionable material they may not want their children to see.

“We’re not trying to censor a child from reading it, but we think parents and grandparents, they don’t have any idea what’s in some of these books,” Hendrickson said.


Comments

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Our Title

Our Sponsor

Sponsor Links

Clickable version of PornNewz newzletter!!

To advertise with us: