Thoughts on HB7661 from a Children's Literature Academic
- Feb 27
- 6 min read
I am so mad I can barely breathe.
My chest hurts.
“Heart attack” is a medical term and “heart break” is an emotional term. But both overlap in a Venn diagram of guttural, physical pain. Such deep, scraping pain that it’s difficult to concentrate on anything else.
I want to talk about House Bill 7661, because I’ve read it fully. And looked up every single source. And because it relates to something I have studied for many, many years.
House Bill 7661 is quite short. It has only two sections. Notably, one of these two sections is to give the bill a nickname, or a “short title.” This bill’s short title is “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.” This title denotes several important features. The first word, “stop,” implies there is an action currently going on that must be ended. The word “stop” tells the reader there is a problem that must be addressed. And that problem, according to the second part of the short title, is “the sexualization of children.” We’ll get more into that in a moment.
The description of the bill states that it is an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. It is therefore important that we understand this act before we proceed with reading the read of the bill. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was a civil rights equity law. Its purpose was to improve the quality of education for those students most at an economic disadvantage. For our purposes, we are going to look closely at Title II, focused on literacy education. ESEA Title II stipulates providing grants “to support literary efforts from birth through grade 12 and supporting school library programs early literacy services, and the provision of high-quality books to children and adolescents.” (Source: Congress.gov “The Elementary and Secondary Education Act [ESEA], as Amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act [ESSA]: A Primer.”)
The phrase “high-quality books” or rather “high-quality materials” appears to be the issue that HB 7661 wants to amend. To return to its short description, the bill wants to “prohibit the use of funds… to promote literature or other materials to children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material.” If we can put two and two together here, HB 7661 is arguing that “sexually oriented material” cannot be of educational quality.
The bill goes on to define the term “sexually oriented material” as i. “including any depiction, description, or simulation of sexually explicit conduct” or ii. “involving gender dysphoria or transgenderism.” What we see with these two definitions is the suspicious omission of heterosexuality and cisgender. According to the bill’s language, gender dysphoria is sexually oriented, but gender euphoria is not. According to the bill’s language, transgenderism is sexually oriented, but cisgenderism is not. The bill’s language negates heterosexuality as a sexual orientation, and with this omission is a frightening message indeed.
To orient means to situate oneself, to turn in a specific direction. By omitting heterosexuality as a sexual orientation, the House Republicans behind this bill mean to signify that to “turn” in any direction away from heterosexuality is equated to inappropriate sexualization. This is precisely what the bill makers want to “stop.” They want to rid school libraries of any depictions of people who are not heterosexual and heteronormative.
But let’s back away from making sense of the bill’s language, because it is in itself, nonsensical. We give the language of this bill much credit in its interpretation, as its language is essentially one large contradiction. The bill wants to “stop the sexualization of children” by preventing children from accessing “sexual oriented material.” But while the bill makers want to forget the word “sexual” in the longer term “heterosexual,” we cannot. The English language cannot forget or overlook this major oversight. For being straight, for introducing a nuclear family with traditional values is by its nature, just as sexual as critiquing or turning away from this orientation and its values.
In his book Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature, Tison Pugh writes: “Children cannot retain their innocence of sexuality while learning about normative heterosexuality, yet this inherent paradox runs throughout many classics of children’s literature. ...This tension between innocence and sexuality renders much of children’s literature queer.” Pugh’s main thesis throughout the book is that queerness has been sown into the very foundation of children’s literature by this inherent contradiction. Having read the book cover to cover, I think Pugh is right. He makes a compelling case for what happens when an adult (metaphorically) grabs a child by the shoulders and screams “You must stay innocent of all sexual content! Now watch this man and woman kiss and get married!”
In reading the small remainder of HB 7661, we find that the contradiction persists. The bill clarifies that the term “sexually oriented material” includes any material that exposes children to “nude adults, individuals who are stripping, or lewd and lascivious dancing.” However, the bill says this rule will not limit or interfere with teaching—A) standard science coursework, including human anatomy B) the texts of major world religions C) classic works of literature or D) classic works of art.
The definitions of C) and D) turn out to be extremely restricted. Classic works of art are defined to mean a work depicted in A SINGLE SOURCE, the SmartHistory guide to AP Art History, volumes 1-5 (2019-2020.) Classic works of literature get three sources: Great Books of the Western Art World ( Encyclopedia Brittanica 1990), “Classics Every Middle Schooler Should Read” (Compass Classroom), and “Classics Every High Schooler Should Read” (Compass Classroom.) While both definitions are extremely limited, I want to expose a cruel distinction between them.
SmartHistory, The Center for Public Art History, is an incredibly well-researched art history resource. It’s a nonprofit founded by two doctoral art historians, and it works with art museums, historians, curators, artists, and archeologists around the world. If you go on its website and look up the term “queer art,” you will find a wonderful database of queer artists and works with queer themes to peruse and study.
The three sources posed to define a classic work of literature, on the other hand, are antiquated, biased, and dangerously under-researched. The Great Books of the Western Art World from Encyclopedia Brittanica was released in 1990 and thus does not include a single book produced over the last thirty-five years. It is a list of 60 volumes written almost all by white, cisgendered men. The lists “Classics Every Middle Schooler Should Read” and “Classics Every High Schooler Should Read” are even worse. There is not a single book on either that was published after the year 1980. In addition, both lists come from the Compass Classroom website, a niche homeschool and co-op curriculum resource for a “Christian worldview,” as it states on the homepage of the website. Despite the obviously blatant disregard in HB 7661 for the separation between church and state by narrowing the definition of “classic works of literature” to those works hand-picked on a “Christian worldview” website, we find an abhorrent set of articles written by individuals with clearly very little background in literature.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is featured in the Middle School list, with this reasoning: “This is a book everyone should read since it will probably be unavailable in the next decade considering its subject matter. Contains sexual content that might be a bit mature for some audience.” That's the entire description. One important note here is that the sexual content involves the description of black female slaves being forced into prostitution and raped. On J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, the description reads “Most people are familiar with the Disney version; however, the original could not be more different. Despite this, your students will greatly enjoy it.” The article describes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as merely “a hilarious coming of age story” that spotlights Tom Sawyer’s best friend Huck Finn. The book To Kill a Mockingbird has the description “This book has already been a part of cancel culture for a few years now, which is a sign it should be read by everyone.” The authors of these lists are clearly not educators interested in promoting “high-quality” literature, but instead, their primary interest rests in the website’s mission of promoting literature that underscores a traditional “Christian worldview.”
What are we meant to take away from all this? Mainly that the power in education rests in diving deeper, in understanding the intricacies and the details of what we’re being told. I saw the same headlines about HB 7661 as most people. I saw the distilled information about what’s going. But I think it’s important to know as much as we can about things, to understand all the specifics about why this bill does not amend Title II but infringes upon the purpose of Title II and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The bill does not want to educate, but instead to obscure, to censor, to silence, and most insidious of all, to miseducate.
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