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(AgapePress) -- Laurie Taylor is the mother of two school age children. She lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Like most parents, she cares about her kids' education. So, when she discovered the school library had a sexually explicit book, It's Perfectly Normal, aimed at elementary age students, she did what any concerned parent would do: she went to the administration and asked that it be removed, along with two other books with similar themes.

At first, school system leaders seemed to agree with Taylor, and placed the books in a "parent library" section with other books geared more to parents than to children. But when Taylor found dozens more books with sexually explicit content, and asked that they not be made available to students without parental approval, the school reneged. It overturned its earlier decision and voted to leave all of the books on the shelves with unrestricted access by the students.

Some of the books include graphic descriptions of incest, homosexuality, masturbation, bestiality, and child molestation. For instance, Push is the story of a young girl who is pregnant with her father's child. The local newspaper, the Northwest Arkansas Times, which opposed the effort to limit access to the book, admitted that it contained "materials that are patently offensive."

Another book is advertised as being "the most controversial young adult novel ever," and describes an adolescent boy's love affair with a teacher, and two teens who become addicted to heroin. Oh, and by the way, the book won an award as "an outstanding book for children."

Yet another book proudly displayed on the Fayetteville library shelves was once featured in Playboy magazine. Its vile and sexually explicit content is interspersed with dialogue such as this: "Just keep asking yourself: 'What would Jesus not do?'"

Once other parents learned what these books contained, many joined with Taylor in asking the school to take action. The public outcry was great. A parents' rights group was formed, "Parents Protecting the Minds of Children," with dozens of parents joining the cause. The local paper wrote that this issue generated more letters to the editor than any issue in recent history. The story of the battle of the books became the paper's story of the year for 2005.

But Fayetteville is a college town, and liberals turned out in droves to cry "censorship" and shout down Laurie Taylor's courageous efforts to protect the children.

In truth, of course, Taylor never asked that the books be banned altogether, even though that might have been appropriate under the circumstances. All Taylor and the other parents asked for was that the books be placed in a restricted access section, thereby allowing parents to exercise their God-given (and constitutionally protected) rights to oversee the moral upbringing of their children.

Arkansas, like almost every state in America, has laws protecting against the distribution of material harmful to minors. However, also like many states, the Arkansas statutes define "harmful to minors" as material that, taken as a whole, "lacks serious literary, scientific, medical, artistic, or political value for minors." Some of the books to which the Fayetteville parents object have received awards, making it more difficult to demonstrate that they lack serious literary or artistic value.

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