An Open Letter to the Parents Protesting Inclusive Literature in Schools

Teaching about gay and trans life is not “grooming”; it is exploring the world as it is. You cannot turn a straight child gay, any more than you can turn a gay child straight—not with your thoughts and prayers, not with your oppressive legislation, certainly not with a picture book.

 The government overreach you promote will never “cure” someone who is not sick, just different. Out of every hundred children born, five to ten are gay, and one is trans. It has always been thus. If the God you believe in exists, then He made them what they are. Instead of trying to make gay and trans kids–and adults–miserable, and yourselves bitter, perhaps you should apply the lovingkindness your Bible prescribes. Try it sometime; it might get you into heaven. And it might make life here on Earth a little more heavenly.

Bob Dylan wrote the following in a different context half a century ago, but it still applies today as the world creeps towards a confrontation between fascism and freedom, with even American conservatives having openly abandoned the pretense of a belief in individual liberties:

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

So please lend a hand. The American Dream, after all, was never a house in a white-bread suburb. It was the freedom to become yourself, whatever that might be. 

[PEN (Poets, Editors, and Novelists) is leading the fight against censorship in the United States. To learn more, go to PEN’s Defend the Freedom to Read]