Legislation poses a greater threat to young people than controversial books • Current Publishing

Editor,

A recent letter to the editor suggested that Carmel High School should abandon its current policy of allowing parents to restrict what their children can borrow and instead require parents to opt in to accessing certain books. The fatal flaw in such an approach is that different people will find different subjects offensive.

The letter’s author focuses on books with sexual content. Some in our community object to books that address issues such as racism and LGBTQ rights. It’s easy to understand that others with equal conviction and sincerity might object to books that support or oppose all sorts of social, religious, political, and historical opinions and positions. If CHS were to force parents to opt in to every book that might contain content a family might disagree with, it might as well require parental permission to enter the library at all. Or just close it down, as some have publicly called for.

For those who care more about protecting young people than political theater, I recommend focusing on raising the age of consent in our state from 16 to 18 and reducing the age gap in Indiana’s Romeo and Juliet law to three years instead of four. It is truly obscene and harmful to minors that adults of any age can take advantage of a 16-year-old and that an 18-year-old college freshman can legally engage in sexual activity with a 14-year-old eighth-grader.

The Republican supermajority in our General Assembly has refused, in session after session, to modernize our age of consent laws. Supporting candidates who criminalize the actual sexual victimization of teenagers will accomplish immeasurably more than being upset that those same teenagers might be reading books that describe such victimization.

Jim May, Carmel