In news that’s not so new, yet another group “dedicated to upholding and reaffirming marriage” is causing a scene, trying to ban a book.  This time, though, the Illinois Family Institute is asking parents to ban not just a book, but the entire Scholastic catalog.

Love Ya Bunches is a YA novel about a group of girls that become friends because they are all named after flowers.  The problem?  One of the girls has same-sex parents.  You know what happens next.

Yet even though this happens over and over again and very often in our current socio-political climate, I still manage to be surprised over what parents are offended over and what they are not.  Murder mysteries and violent war novels don’t seem to bother parents.  Who cares if you’re child is reading about a stabbing death, when they could be reading about a loving family?  But I’m not here to argue that subject.

What I am almost more surprised about is the way that School Library Journal reported the story: not offering any other side but IFI’s, even if they did present the situation in a neutral tone, and then Scholastic’s spokesman trying to be the least controversial he could.  But if it’s not the industry defending its own books and the right to sell them, who is?

If you don’t want your child reading about kids with same-sex parents, that’s not my call: don’t buy the book.  I personally would wait a bit to purchase my kid gruesome crime novels.  But that’s a parenting choice, and the freedom of speech allotted to publishers must be protected.  You don’t want your kid to read the book?  Fine.  But stop targeting innocent books that you’ve deemed “inappropriate” as a means to an end for your personal political goals.  Let us publish what we feel is necessary and important, and you be the filter.