Warning: This piece includes sexually explicit content.
I wasn’t surprised when I got a call from the local newspaper telling me it wouldn’t run my editorial featuring graphic sex excerpts from a controversial teen book. The parts I included were definitely disgusting and over-the-top — no question. The South Bend Tribune’s editorial page editor, Alesia I. Redding, told me over the phone, “We’re not going to print these things. … We don’t print those things in a family newspaper.”
Exactly. That’s why moms and dads don’t want “those things” in the family sections of our public library either.
Just days before, Redding and the two others on her editorial board, Executive Editor Ismail Turay Jr. and Enterprise Editor Cory Havens, defended Indiana’s St. Joe County Public Library for refusing to reshelve the sexually explicit teen book in question to the adult section. Their own editorial self-righteously defended political free speech and implied prejudice in the hearts of parents protesting the book, This Book is Gay, noting that the books “most often deemed ‘inappropriate‘ are those that tell the stories of Black and LGBTQ people or are by authors in those communities.” Yet, even the Trib staff acknowledged the inappropriateness of the material when it refused to run such vulgarity in its own pages.
The editorial board was able to make its allegations under safe cover because its audience had no context. The column they wrote advocating to keep This Book is Gay in the teen section didn’t actually include any of the controversial material
