Sunday Reflections: My Child Deserves Representation in the Library

My oldest child was in middle school when she came to me and told me that she didn’t think she was straight. I watched her wrestle with this question for all of her middle and high school years. Something she has been open about here at TLT.

I think about her a lot as there is a wave of legislation sweeping state by state trying to ban LGBTQ literature from kids in our schools and public libraries. Parents stand at school board meetings and say they must protect kids from the books, the books that feature kids like mine. They’ll say things like they don’t want their tax monies to pay for books like those. A simple Google search will show you tons of proposed legislation, video from school board meetings, and a variety of tweets or Facebook posts claiming that my child is a sin and the books that feature people like her should be banned.

But I am a tax paying parent raising a LGBTQ kid and I want her to have representation in our school and public libraries. I want her little sister to be able to read books about little sisters that love and support big sisters who identify as LGBTQ. I want my family to be represented in the books and services that my tax monies pay for. Parents of LGBTQ kids have just as many rights as the parents of cisgender and hetero-normative kids.

But most of all, I want my child to be safe. That is all any parent wants. And these continued attacks on the LGBTQ community make the world less safe for kids like mine. I can’t change a person’s heart and make them accept my child as they are, but I can try and be louder than them and demand that they respect her basic civil rights, her basic humanity, and her right to safety. I, too, can shout about representation.

I am a mother who is also a Christian and the only thing I was ever afraid of when my kid told me they might not be straight was our fellow Christians, and the hate they have in their heart for kids like mine. And as state after state try to pass laws to criminalize the very existence of kids like mine, that fear only grows.

I am a parent and if you are fighting for parental rights, that means you must also fight for the rights of parents like me, who openly embrace and affirm their LGBTQ kids. And that includes representation in the books in our libraries.

Filed under: Sunday Reflections