Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro challenged a member of the Biden administration to publicly read from a sexually graphic book found in school libraries across the country as the administration appoints a coordinator to challenge so-called “book bans.”
Shapiro said that someone from Biden’s team should publicly read the book “Gender Queer,” by Maia Kobabe if they think that it is appropriate for young children. The book contains graphic descriptions of masturbation and oral sex alongside explicit illustrations.
“I challenge somebody from the Biden administration to get up and read out loud on camera while showing the pictures ‘Gender Queer,’ and explain why that should be available to 9-year-olds or 15-year-olds, for that matter, at public expense,” Shapiro, co-founder of The Daily Wire, said on his Friday podcast.
Shapiro’s challenge comes as the Biden administration announced that it would be creating a position in the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to fight against local and state laws intended to shield children from graphic books like “Gender Queer” in schools.
One scene in “Gender Queer,” found in school libraries across the country, involves a teenager having a sexual fantasy about an adult male.
“What [Biden] really wants is for your local second grader to be able to walk into a school library and see graphic cartoon depictions of anal sex. That’s really what Joe Biden wants. I notice that everybody on the Left who constantly talks about these book bannings is unwilling to actually read out loud the books that they think should not be prevented from being disseminated,” Shapiro said.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP
The Daily Wire host added that Biden was only pretending to care about free speech, pointing to how the Left has pursued book bans for other books that did not contain sexually explicit content.
He also pointed out that the measures being taken to shield children from explicit content didn’t really qualify as a book ban, pointing out that most parents and advocates were just restricting what content school children had access to.
In recent years, parents have shown up to school board meetings across the country to read from sexually explicit books available to their children, prompting local and state governments to approve measures giving parents more oversight of the materials available to their children.