Last year, we caught culture war-obsessed Media Research Center writer Tierin-Rose Mandelburg falsely smearing a book about a transgender child as “pornography” because it had brief references (not images) to “dirty magazines” and “porn.” Her replacement at the MRC, Justine Brooke Murray, is playing the same smear game. She wrote in a Jan. 13 post:
You can tell how depraved our society has become simply by the fact it is now controversial to remove pornography from the hands of 5- and 6-year-olds.
A Minnesota public school district had to defend its decision to pull a gay “children’s” book that includes illustrations of naked people from its library shelves after angry perverts complained — perverts who also seem to include the district’s school librarians.
“My decision to direct the removal of the book ‘The Rainbow Parade’ from our elementary media center shelves is not based upon restricting student access to a viewpoint, message, idea, or opinion. It is based solely upon the depiction and celebration of public nudity in illustrations on two pages of the book,” insisted Kent Pekel, the superintendent of Rochester Public Schools, in a memo obtained by The Minneapolis Star Tribune.
The book begins with a story of a young girl attending her first gay Pride parade with her two moms. I’d show you pictures from the book, but I don’t need that smut saved in my work computer’s history.
Instead, I’ll refer to a summary by Fox News, which described several pages of nude illustrations, including two men dressed in bondage gear.
Pekel believes that “depiction of public nudity makes the book inappropriate for the open shelves of a media center in an elementary school where students as young as kindergarten can access the book without adult supervision or guidance.”
Seems reasonable! But not according to a “committee of community members, teachers and media specialists,” who reportedly voted “overwhelmingly” to keep the porn book in the hands of children.
It turns out the Fox News article to which Murray is referring — written by Kristine Parks, a former MRC writer who was known at at the time as Kristine Marsh — is wrong. The Fox News link supporting Parks’ claim of “several illustrations … depicting full or partial public nudity” goes to a another Fox News article describing a different book. In fact, there is only one image — not “several” — showing what could be problematic context: a naked woman walking who is shown from the rear, and two men in bondage gear. Both are small in relation to the total image, and nothing explicit or sexual is shown.
Nevertheless, Murray continued to falsely insist the book is a “porn book” despite the total lack of anything resembling pornography and falsely claimed it showed “naked men in bondage gear” when, in fact, one is wearing pants and the other is wearing shorts (unless shirtless men count as “pornography” now. She concluded:
Similarly, Rochester’s school board member Karen MacLaughlin said she thought the story was “cute,” which is why she was torn whether to leave the smut-laden book in the hands of kids. But she ultimately decided during a Tuesday board discussion that it wasn’t “meaningful enough” to include it with “the plethora of other books about gay rights and celebrating LGBTQ.”
Of course, admitting that, let alone criticizing the presence of sex-related children’s books in the first place, triggered progressives, who interjected with an outburst over her comments.
Murray failed to specifically identify where, exactly, in the book this “smut” is located.