For K-12 schools and city libraries, September 18-24 was celebrated as “Banned Books Week.” And why the festivities? The answer is complicated. It tells us a lot when we look to see who is behind the celebration.

Wikipedia explains:

Banned Books Week is an annual awareness campaign promoted by the American Library Association and Amnesty International, that celebrates the freedom to read, draws attention to banned and challenged books, and highlights persecuted individuals.

NOTE: This American library Association is the same that recently elected a Marxist lesbian as president.

All over the country, parents are challenging city and school libraries over books that could get you arrested if you read them aloud on a street corner. Library directors and associations are fighting back with cries of censorship and celebration of banned books.

So, how did we get to the place where a library could become a battleground? It basically comes down to the definition of free speech. One side defines it as, “anything goes at any age.” The other side is willing to concede age-grading for some material, but see other copy as too raw for any age.

They agree with St. Paul: “For it is a shame to even speak of those things which are done of them in secret,” (Eph. 5:12). When a parent dared to read one book in a school board meeting, they quickly shut down his microphone fearing that the video streaming of the public meeting would get someone arrested.

So, why are library officials so bold in standing against common decency? Or parents seemingly stymied in their attempt to clean up the libraries? Basically, it comes down to a struggle over the Free Speech Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Original framers of the constitution relied on a virtuous people who would understand that freedom of speech had its limits. Pornography and transgender propaganda exceeds those limits just as shouting fire in a crowded theater does. Now we are in a situation where that freedom is abused to promote perversion and destroy the innocence of our children.

Indeed, laws have been passed that open a wide door for libraries and classrooms to freely expose students to outrageous evil. Over the years, laws were enacted to protect materials in libraries that were acceptable educational and artistic expressions. Forty states now have these “obscenity exemptions.” Again, it depended on a virtuous people handling even this material discreetly.

Always quick to take advantage of an opportunity, homosexual activists have used this exemption to push perversion all the way down to the kindergarten level. Some of the fruits of their efforts are showing up in the spread in society of gender confusion among even elementary school children. This has been rightly identified as a “grooming” effort to prepare a new generation for approval and promotion of the homosexual lifestyle.

Parents who are trying to counter this evil by replacing elected school boards find an entrenched bureaucracy at the heart of their public school system. Their efforts are blindsided by foot dragging, doubletalk, and sometimes outright hostility. Some even find that the courts are slanted against them.

As Bible believers we recognize that loss of virtue is at the heart of so many of our problems today. If we are to preserve these freedoms, gifted to us so wisely by America’s founding fathers, we must do everything we can to show that God has a better way.

Gospel tracts can be a powerful way to saturate a neighborhood or community with God’s plan. No matter what the devil chooses to celebrate, it’s always the right time to spread the good news.