News/Commentary

Obama raises eyebrows with TikTok campaign defending ‘banned’ library books: ‘Shaped my life’

July 18, 2023 | | Print Article

Former President Barack Obama is promoting a TikTok campaign that defends “banned books” conservatives are fighting against due to explicit sexual content not fit for children which many contend are pornographic in nature.

The video is expected to be the first in a series that pushes reading books taken off school shelves due to content in what he contends are “profoundly misguided” restriction efforts, Fox News is reporting.

The Kankakee Public Library in Illinois posted a video featuring a number of people reading books that have faced controversy, such as Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and Angie Thomas’ “The Hate U Give.” Obama appears in the video at the end reading a book and drinking from a Kankakee Public Library mug.

According to the Washington Post, Obama has filmed a number of videos in various libraries across the country to promote access to all books irrespective of sexualized content being exposed to school children.

@kankakeepubliclibrary Reading can transport you to new worlds #LetFreedomRead #FreedomToRead #SummerReading #KankakeePublicLibrary ♬ original sound – Kankakee Public Library

“To have someone like President Obama appreciating the work that we do, and also sharing our mission for intellectual freedom, it just couldn’t come at a better time,” Harris County Public Library System Program Director Linda Stevens remarked.

The video appears to be a direct slap against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) who has led the way in getting inappropriate material off school shelves and supporting parents outraged at books their children are being subjected to that contain pornographic material.

According to PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans lists, almost 1,500 books were banned from schools in the first half of the 2022-2023 school year. However, that seems to be reported without context given the circumstances.

Obama posted a letter to Twitter on Monday falsely claiming the bans target “people of color, Indigenous people, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.”

“Today, some of the books that shaped my life—and the lives of so many others—are being challenged by people who disagree with certain ideas or perspectives. It’s no coincidence that these ‘banned books’ are often written by or feature people of color, Indigenous people, and members of the LGBTQ+ community—though there have also been unfortunate instances in which books by conservative authors or books containing ‘triggering’ scenes have been targets for removal,” Obama speciously claimed in his letter to librarians.

“Either way, the impulse seems to be to silence, rather than engage, rebut, learn from or seek to understand views that don’t fit our own. I believe such an approach is profoundly misguided, and contrary to what has made this country great,” he continued.

In another tweet, Obama referred people to the Unite Against Book Bans campaign from the American Library Association to “support librarians and defend the right to read.”

DeSantis’ Parental Rights in Education Law is obviously being targeted by Obama in the campaign. It prohibits school employees or third parties from distributing materials on “gender identity” or “sexual orientation” throughout all grade levels in order to protect students.

The governor has had to constantly battle the media and the left who call the law a book ban instead of a move to protect children and return the power of choice to parents.

“They are doing that to try to create a narrative, they’re not doing that because Florida has a law,” DeSantis noted. “They’re doing it because they know there is enough people in corporate media who will just take that, and run with that… if it is explicit and pornographic, parents have the right to object.”

The Washington Post reported that 75% of children’s picture books that have been challenged involved “titles with LGBTQ characters and storylines.” What it didn’t report is that the vast majority of them allegedly contain themes such as sexual intercourse, oral sex, gay sex, transgenderism, and other sexual topics that are not appropriate for children and have parents enraged.

One of the books, “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, an LGBT book that has been introduced to elementary and middle-school students across the nation has been severely called out. The book includes erotic scenes of men having sex, illustrations of minors performing oral sex, and a drawing of a man masturbating a young boy’s penis. The left is framing the issue as discrimination when in fact, it is about pornography.

Obama’s campaign will only further divide Americans on the issue, which may, in fact, be the point:

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