Local Advocacy Group Exposes Obscene Books in New Mexico Public Schools – Urges Parents to Act

This week a statewide non-partisan advocacy group, New Mexico Freedoms Alliance, published a comprehensive booklet detailing obscene books that are available in schools across the state:

“All across the state, school libraries have many books which contain age-inappropriate, explicit content. These are books with detailed descriptions of child rape, sex acts between adults and children, children using hard drugs and sex toys, children engaging in cutting and suicidal behaviors, excessively violent imagery, etc. Most parents have no idea that these books are present in their children’s schools.”

The booklet details the inappropriate content from a sample of 95+ explicit books that can be found in Las Cruces Public School libraries by young children. While the booklet focuses on Las Cruces Public Schools, the same books are being made available to children statewide. School libraries rely on book lists published by the American Library Association (ALA) and School Library Journal (SLJ), which both promote these age-inappropriate, sexually explicit, and violent content for children. School librarians rarely read the books before making them available to children in their schools.

New Mexico Freedoms Alliance stated, “It is time for LCPS and other districts to stop relying on the ALA and SLJ as the “experts” and instead take full ownership to ensure that the books being placed in our school libraries are age-appropriate.”

New Mexico Freedoms Alliance says they created the booklet to try to raise public awareness of this issue. For years, parents and advocacy groups have been appealing to the Las Cruces Public School Board to protect the children in their district from damaging, age-inappropriate content in their libraries.

The group details their experience challenging one book called “Jack of Hearts and Other Parts” by L.C. Rosen. The book includes scenes describing sexual acts between adults and children, pedophilia, and drug and alcohol abuse. According to Las Cruces Public School policy, book challenges are decided by a committee, which inexplicably voted 6-1 to keep the book in school libraries in Las Cruces after they had been advised of its disturbing content.

Public documents requests revealed later that the book review committee had been intentionally “stacked” by two school board members, Patrick Nolan and Robert Wofford, and the school librarian, Karen Hansen-Sharp, to ensure that the inappropriate book would remain in the library over the wishes of the parents of the district.

Even after exposure of the corruption in the board’s review process, the Las Cruces School Board has taken no action outside of creation of a form that would allow parents to opt their children out of being able to check out particular books. This form would not prevent a child from reading these books inside the library, getting them from other children who had checked them out, or from new books which had been added to the library’s collection without the parents’ knowledge.

This entire situation is especially concerning given the graphic depictions in these books of child sexual abuse by adults, pedophilia, rape, and hard drug use by children – things which are illegal and should never be normalized in any society. Why are some school board members and librarians so eager to expose children to books that damage kids and normalize sexual relationships between adults and children?

Parents are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the inappropriate content of these books as detailed in the booklet and protect their children from abuse by joining New Mexico Freedoms Alliance in demanding school boards across the state remove these pornographic books from school library shelves.