Book-banning advocate claims 'a single kiss' in a children's book led to her porn addiction

The story was ridiculous enough on the surface: A 20-year-old woman showed up at a Texas school board meeting and insisted that a kiss depicted in a specific children’s book had set her on the path to a pornography addiction that left her depressed and suicidal within two years, at age 13. At the meeting at which she testified, the Conroe Independent School District voted to restrict access to another book, “Drama,” for students in the eighth grade and below despite it having no content more sexually explicit than a staged kiss. It’s a book for grade-school kids that has now been restricted to high school students. What “Drama” does have, though, is LGBTQ+ characters.

This is some ridiculous bigoted book-banning nonsense worthy of attention. But Substacker Frank Strong and Popular Information’s Judd Legum dug deeper and discovered that this was in effect a performance put on by a would-be right-wing competitor to Scholastic, the children’s book giant that published “Drama” and dominates the school book fair world.