Imagine for a moment that a big, admired multinational corporation, one selling a beloved product, was employing large numbers of male pedophiles and rapists, operating in rings all over the world, and that their crimes had been uncovered in Australia, Ireland, Canada, the Philippines, Belgium, France, Austria, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Britain, Germany and the United States, and, further, that senior executives had systematically covered up and suppressed evidence, transferring and enabling hundreds of predators, betraying thousands of victims.
This article says “By secular standards” but honestly, by any standards the Catholic Church is severely messed up (at best) and pure evil (at worst.)
For a variety of reasons, I never got to know my mom’s side of the family quite as well (mainly since many of that side of the family – including my grandparents – lived in BC so we simply didn’t see them that often.)
But we had a family reunion at Kenosee Lake a few years back and it was a great chance to reconnect with many relatives on my mom’s side including one family I did know a bit better – the Bobby and Joyce Peet family who lived across the bridge from my grandparents in Kelowna.
(On a side note, as I sit and whimper with my broken wrist, I’ll point out that Bobby and Joyce’s daughter, DJ, who is second from right in the back row, attended the reunion with her hand in a splint and bandages as she’d recently caught it in an auger and though her hand was ripped up pretty bad, she was extremely fortunate that the leather gloves she was wearing jammed the auger and prevented much worse damage!)
I’ve always believed that science fiction is the single best type of writing to teach us about our own lives and society.
So I’m absolutely fine when I think about sci-fi books with “inappropriate” content being put into the hands of kids even though the author of this article seems to think librarians put some books in the kid’s section out of obliviousness (which may be true) but without also acknowledging that most librarians also have a fairly open interpretation of “what’s appropriate for readers” and *don’t* try to be gatekeepers.
