Letter to the Editor: Some Books in Old Lyme Library Children’s Section are ‘Pornographic,’ BOE Members who Supported Their Retention Should Resign

** COMMENTING ON THIS LETTER IS NOW CLOSED **

To the Editor:

I am highly disturbed by the actions of some of the candidates on the Democratic slate and others in Lyme and Old Lyme who put their name on a petition supporting pornographic content in our towns’ libraries. 

With minimal effort, anyone could find out that the books in question promote immoral, unethical and illegal activity. 

Shouldn’t we expect that our elected officials and candidates would do their due diligence and research the material before signing something they stand behind?

Here is my comment from the 10/04/23 Region 18 Board of Education meeting:

“At a “meet the candidate” event at Soundview on Sept. 17th, a member of the BOE, Martha Shoemaker, stated that she supported the freedom to read and that her own children would find whatever within minutes on the internet, with or without parental controls.

Yet, she really did not explain why she signed a petition supporting books that tell the children of Old Lyme and Lyme to go to porn sites and chatrooms online and explore kinks and fantasies with adult porn stars in a chapter from the “Let’s Talk About It” book.

We all love freedom, but we also have laws protecting children from visiting age restricted websites and especially chatrooms with porn stars.

A quick google [stet] search into this topic and anyone would have found the “The Child Internet Protection Act”, which was enacted by Congress in 2000 to address concerns about children’s access to obscene or harmful content over the internet.

Adults who put this specific book in front of children which promotes internet pornography are breaking the law. A quote from The New London Day paper on July 30, 2023 from Mary Jo Nosal said “Well, at least by signing the letter, the rest of us know who you are” and so do we. 

The names on the petition supporting obscene books in the children’s section includes [stet] Martha Shoemaker, Jason Kemp, an LYSB employee and many others who probably should have done their own research into this issue.

I sincerely hope you all were misled or misinformed, or do you truly support pornographic books and children trolling porn sites?

I would expect our current elected officials and potential candidates to do research on any topic before they would stand behind it. In this case, with this topic, I am highly concerned as a parent, citizen, and a volunteer in our town.I would kindly ask all of you to reevaluate your choice to support pornography and publicly denounce the petition or choose to remove yourself from the BOE because you demonstrated that you are unfit to vote on policies that protect our youth and educational curriculum if you failed to research the material that you are supporting.”

Sincerely,

Emerson Colwell, Jr.,
Old Lyme.