Do you really want to be the person playing devils advocate with showing porn to children?

He asks a good question. Back before the internet it was pretty normal for some kid now and then to manage to swipe one of his dad’s issues of Playboy or Penthouse and share it with the other kids in their neighborhood.

So we have plenty of experience that says seeing the occasional sexually explicit photo or drawing doesn’t harm kids.

Can you give an example of sexually suggestive writing that you would classify as "porn"? "Explicit" is quite different to "suggestive".

Hmm, seems "porn" really does mean something different in the US...https://news.artnet.com/art-world/florida-western-civ-fired-...

We could also argue whether teaching about the "benefits" of dog eating would have negative effects. The goal of such "educators" is to uproot the morals early and normalize the abnormal things.

What’s wrong with eating dogs?

Sex is abnormal now? FWIW I don't see any need to push descriptions of sexual activity into kid's faces, most of them are unlikely to find it terribly interesting anyway and there's something to be said for the fact that we can enjoy a short period of our life without being unduly influenced by sexual desire. But the idea that we need to ban books from school libraries just because they hint of a more complex adult world where sexual impulses are part of life (even in ways that inevitably affect the children who live with and around them) seems very hard to justify.

Obsession with sex is abnormal, just like obsession with food. I'd buy the "complex adult world" argument if the schools equally taught about the dangers of meth addiction, with graphic depiction of those addicts to explain where those "impulses" lead. Right now it looks like the books are trying to whitewash those impulses, make them look good even.

Isn't there a lot of literature about how kids exposed to sexually explicit material go on to do risky sexual behavior as teens and do them earlier? Also about abusers literally grooming kids for sex by showing them porn? Pretty sure all this was standard discourse at least since the early 2000s.

I didn't ask about sexually explicit material though - "explicit" and "suggestive" are quite different. My expectation is that most kids (below the age of 12 or so) wouldn't even recognise a lot of sexually suggestive language for what it was anyway.

They're banning sexually explicit books aren't they, so I'm talking about that.

The only book I saw mentioned that may be considered sexually explicit was one about a boy suffering rape and incest. I'd accept it's probably not appropriate for a school library to have a book like that freely available to students of all ages. But I don't get the impression that's a representative sample.