Tuesday, August 30, 2011

A Moral Question

Tom and I are crazy thrift store/flea market shoppers. Nowadays, I always search through the children's books at these things, and often come home with a few gems. Yesterday evening, I was sharing one such book with Tom. The book is called Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers. It is a very sweet book with beautiful illustrations, showing all the things that babies do. Each page says something simple like "Everyday, everywhere, babies are fed." And then you see pictures of a baby nursing, babies drinking bottles, babies in high chairs, etc. The expressions and attitudes of the people are varied and relate-able. The pictures are just delightful, and would be very captivating to a child. So, after a quick scan of the book at the flea market, and noting that it was only 25 cents, I had thrown it into my pile.

So back to last night. I was holding the book out in front of Tom, turning the pages and pointing out the great pictures, and how cute they were. Then I came to this one:

"Are they....lesbians?", I asked. We both kinda laughed in an unsure way, and Tom concluded, "no...no...it's just two women. It doesn't mean they're lesbians."

So I turned the page.



Look at that more closely!!


Those men are DEFINITELY romantically involved. "ahhh! This is a GAY book!" I yelled.

I quickly scanned the rest of the images, and didn't find any others like it, thankfully. Now sure, someone might argue that the book is trying to be realistic and portray scenes that one might encounter in the real world. But that still doesn't mean I want to expose my kids to that at a young age. To allow the thought that living in a homosexual relationship is "normal" or "good."

The book is so excellent aside from that one image. And maybe our kids would never even pick up on it?? But I don't know if that's a safe thing to count on. Could I pass it off as the guys just being good friends? It's ridiculous that I even need to ask such questions!

So what do I do?

5 comments:

  1. Hmm. I think that probably they would not pick up on it (although sometimes kids pick up on the most random things, in their innocent way) ... but for me, I think, that wouldn't be enough for me to feel comfortable with the book! So, I don't know what to tell you. :-/

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  2. If it is any help, more than half of the positive Amazon reviews love it because of its diversity.

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  3. Photoshop? I would probably get rid of it. Even if Sly never notices and has no I'll effects, it will bug you whenever you read it.

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  4. Yeah, a while back, the library was giving away copies of that book, and my friend and I noticed those "special" illustrations and decided to pass our copies along. We just figured it was better not to even have it in our homes.

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  5. (Just a clarification: I probably should've put "diversity" in quotation marks or something to show how I meant that second comment to be taken. :) )

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