The news release about the arrest of Charleston County Magistrate James Gosnell left enough unanswered questions that I jumped innocently into the attached 11-page complaint. I wish there had been a warning label. I will never be able to unread the descriptions of sexual abuse material Mr. Gosnell is accused of collecting on his computer.
A male reporter who was covering the charges told me unprompted that it was “one of the worst things I’ve ever read.” Fast forward to former S.C. Rep. RJ May’s guilty plea to charges that don’t begin to compare to the allegations against the magistrate: U.S. Attorney Bryan Stirling had to apologize as he haltingly read a brief description of each video for TV reporters. “Bear with me,” the former director of the state Corrections Department said. “This is very hard to read.”
It’s one thing to read that the magistrate’s video collection allegedly included infants, toddlers and older children being raped. It is quite another to read graphic details of those rapes, of how the babies were restrained, of what specifically was done to them, of what they were forced to do. It is haunting.
In a much more horrible way, it’s like the difference between saying a couple had sex and providing a how-to manual for the various types of sex they had, describing in graphic detail the action and reaction of each body part.
Descriptions of consensual sex probably won’t leave a deep and lasting impression on grown-ups, who have had sex. But for children who have not — who in some cases have not even been told about the basics of sex — it likely will. And if the how-to manual describes forced sex, that will leave impressions young people can’t unread — and could forever taint their understanding of what sex is supposed to be.
This comparison came to mind when the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday challenging the state regulation that prohibits “descriptions or visual depictions of ‘sexual conduct’” in school library books.
I’ve never been a fan of Regulation 43-170.
The problem is not the idea of prohibiting sexually explicit material in our schools. We wouldn’t allow Hustler or Playboy or Playgirl, which means the question isn’t whether to draw a line: It’s where.
The problem is the lazy, sloppy way the regulation was written.
The explanations the Education Department’s attorneys and the State Board of Education have given provide a great deal of clarification about their intent, but that clarification isn’t reflected in the actual text of the regulation. It incorporates (without quoting) the definition in South Carolina’s criminal anti-obscenity law of “sexual conduct” — a definition that is much broader than most people imagine. And nothing in the regulation defines “descriptions” in the narrow way the board has chosen to.
Even if board members don’t want to provide school officials with more clarity and certainty over what’s allowed and what isn’t — and they should — they should consider the compromised position the regulation leaves them in. Recall that the Legislature had to rewrite its anti-abortion law after the S.C. Supreme Court correctly found that it was lazy and sloppy.
Another problem is that the regulation makes no distinction between what’s appropriate for a 17-year-old and a 12-year-old and an 8-year-old.
And unlike the obscenity law from which it draws its crucial definition, it doesn’t allow any consideration of the value of the work as a whole. Now, I don’t think we need to give a complete bye to all descriptions and images of sexual conduct just because they’re contained in a work that has, as the obscenity law describes it, “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” After all, that carve-out is written in the context of judging what you can get sent to prison for. A carve-out in the regulation would be used to decide what books taxpayers will purchase for our school libraries. The better standard would give the literary or artistic merit of an entire work some weight in an evaluation of individual passages.
Supporters need to acknowledge these significant flaws and correct them.
But critics have plenty of their own problems to address, starting with an acknowledgement that some things we read leave lasting impressions on us, even as adults — and that there are some things kids simply aren’t ready to read.
We can’t fairly evaluate whether the state’s line on sexual content has been drawn in the right place unless we do what the federal court will do: examine some of those books that have been removed from schools.
I’d like to give you some examples, but the targeted excerpts are more graphic than this newspaper is willing to print. The same is true for other mainstream media, which is why you probably haven’t seen them.
And that raises this question: If newspapers are unwilling to publish the language that gets books kicked out of schools, should taxpayers be providing those books to high school students? To middle school students? To elementary school students?
If you object to the book removals, open-mindedness requires you to go to the Education Department’s website and read the targeted passages. Read them not through the eyes of an adult. Read them through the eyes of a 14-year-old, who we hope hasn’t had sex.
Two parting thoughts: Allowing someone other than a librarian to exercise judgment over which of millions of books are appropriate to include in a school library does not constitute book banning; that’s like saying the librarian is banning all the books she chooses not to order for the school library. And the R-rated material in these removed books, while inappropriate, is not obscenity or pornography; if you disagree, then you should read the offending passages as well — and then ask me to send you the Justice Department’s descriptions of Judge Gosnell’s videos. I think the difference will be pretty clear.