Lack of Self-Awareness is So Annoying!

So some librarians have their underwear all bunched up over the use of "scrotum" in a children's book. Not just any children's book, mind you...a Newbery Award-winning children's book. Of course, The Times has an article about it. These librarians are censoring the book from their shelves. I don't care what they argue, a librarian banning access to a book is censorship, plain and simple.

The thing is...the reason why they are banning the book have nothing to do with children, whom librarians are claiming to protect.

“I think it’s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,” said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J. “If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn’t want to have to explain that.”

It's about the adults who deal with children not wanting to have conversations about the body with children. It's about their own squeamishness, not the child's.

"Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. “I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,” she said in an interview."

Yet, these people rant and rave about the fact that they are the ones thinking about children when the author is not. Even though the point of the story apparently is the child growing up by learning about the body!

Ridiculous!