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On Tuesday, Louisiana senator John Kennedy took to the floor of the Senate to read aloud from two books currently embroiled in bitter controversy, given the content of the material juxtaposed with their promotion in school and public libraries across the country.  Viewer and listener discretion is advised, because the language is offensive and the storyline is utterly filthy, but the viral clip can be seen below:
Sen. Kennedy reads passages from pornographic books Genderqueer and All Boys are Blue.
The Illinois Sec. of State Alexi Giannoulias responds by saying “those words are disturbing coming from your mouth.”
His state’s new law stops parents from being able to remove it from… pic.twitter.com/eDehdhctQL
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 12, 2023
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According to a report out yesterday:
The author of ‘Gender Queer’ responded to Sen. John Kennedy’s (R-La.) viral Senate reading of the memoir this week, which was meant to justify book bans.
The author, Maia Kobabe, told the Washington Post in an interview published Thursday that the conservative senator seemed to conflate the illustrated format with a book meant for children.
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Kennedy isn’t “conflating” anything; rather, Kobabe is, confusing “adult” with “child.”  In Kobabe’s own words, from the WaPo interview:
It keeps being called a children’s book. Senator Kennedy implied it was a children’s book. But I think that’s coming from a misreading of the comic-book form. ‘Gender Queer’ is a comic, and in full color, but that doesn’t mean it’s for children. I originally wrote it for my parents, and then for older teens who were already asking these questions about themselves. I don’t recommend this book for kids!
First of all…she originally wrote it for her parents?  Why is it that for leftists, graphic sex and nudity are common discussions and experiences between parent and child?  From entertainment report a week and a half ago:
Ethan Hawke insists he had no qualms about directing daughter Maya’s graphic sex scenes in the upcoming film, ‘Wildcat.’
‘We were so comfortable with it. I couldn’t care less,’ the … actor assured Variety.
Blech!
(You might recall that Hawke harbors rabid anti–Donald Trump sentiments.)
Secondly, it’s in comic form and “full color,” but it’s definitely not for kids…okay, yeah, sure.  Do the e-cigarette companies get to use that excuse when they get caught allegedly marketing to youngsters?  According to the director of the National Capital Poison Center, a medical toxicology physician:
Children are naturally drawn to colorful packaging and cartoon characters and are more likely to use products that contain these types of imagery[.]
Lastly — and this is not to condone this explicit material for any consumer of any age — it’s especially concerning that Kobabe used the phrase “older teens” instead of something “young adults” — because there of course have to be some children thrown in the mix instead of what should be absolutely zero.  Sounds as if someone needs to remind Maia Kobabe that teenagers are mostly children, literary material about “strap-on harnesses” and “dildos” amounts to obscene pornography, and efforts to disseminate or market smut to those under 18 is often a crime, not to mention pedophilic.
Oh, but according to Kobabe, since the excerpt Kennedy read didn’t accompany pornographic images, it was merely an exploitative out-of-context manipulation tactic by a bigoted conservative.  In her own words:
[I]t’s interesting he chose to read the words without showing the images. Because the images on that page are not salacious at all — it’s an illustration of me sitting at my job, which was in a library, reading text messages from someone I was dating.
Yet…the WaPo interviewer says this:
Back to Senator Kennedy and the one page he read out loud. If he’d kept reading, we would have learned that the following page shows you and your partner beginning to have sex, and then you deciding you don’t actually want to have sex.
To this, Kobabe replied:
Right. The whole scene is really about consent. … This is the page that most conservatives cite when they say my book is too explicit.
The scene?  A graphic sex act.
Image: Charles Hutchins from London, United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.
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