Texas lawmakers seek to ban “obscene” material used with children for “educational” purposes
A bill would close a Kinsey-era loophole that brought perversion into public schools
Texas lawmakers have passed a bill that would effectively ban sharing material classified as “obscene” to children for “educational” purposes.
SB 412, which awaits Governor Greg Abbott’s signature, would close a loophole from the age of Alfred Kinsey and the “sexual revolution” allowing an “affirmative defense” for adults who share obscene material with children.
The Texas Tribune explains that currently, state law allows teachers, doctors, and parents from laws prohibiting the distribution of “obscene” material to children to argue they were doing so for the sake of teaching children.
Live Action explains that these protections “have allowed sexually perverse content to make its way into books and curriculum used for explicit sex-ed programs taught to children — without legal ramifications, since it was all allegedly promoted for reasons of ‘a bona fide educational, medical, psychological, psychiatric, judicial, law enforcement, or legislative purpose.’”
The pro-life site explains that these provisions, from the 1970s, originally cited Kinsey, a “sex researcher” who gathered data in part from pedophiles who had sexually abused children and whose work has helped to normalize perversion and immoral sexuality since the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s.
If the bill is passed, Texas would be joining five other states who have also removed the Kinsey-influenced laws, taking an important step towards protecting children from sexually graphic and explicit material in school.
Despite critics claiming the law would criminalize parents and teachers, the Tribune notes that lawmakers have been clear the law would use the Supreme Court-derived “Miller test” to determine obscene material, so those using common-sense material for earnestly educational purposes would have nothing to fear.
“What we're talking about here is a perversion in extreme content that's got to meet all three of these criteria laid out in this bill. It's got to be pretty extreme,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Jared Patterson (R-Frisco) said. “And unfortunately, we have seen some extreme examples in our public schools, and I do believe that it would affect some of those.”
Patterson is completely correct there, as we’ve often reported over the last several years. One extreme example of blatantly obscene material in public schools would be the graphic novel “Gender Queer,” which illustrates a pedophilic sex act and graphically depicts and describes explicit sex acts, or the novel “Lawn Boy” which describes a sexual relationship between a child and an adult man.
Bear in mind that proponents of such literature argue that such illustrations can be used for educational purposes, however, in a worldview in which educating people about homosexuality and transgenderism is vital.
It is vital to protect children from this radical ideology, not just by getting the books out of the schools, but also by affirming the truth of the biblical worldview and the hope of the Gospel!