King & King

Does anyone else find it strange that public libraries, which stand for freedom and exist solely for the benefit of their communities, get attacked so often?

Well, it's happened yet again in a suburb between Philadelphia and Allentown, PA, where some mother was shocked and awed to find that the book she was reading her toddler included a scene in which two men kiss.

''I saw them at the altar and I said, 'This can't be what I'm thinking,''' Eileen Issa said, recalling illustrations of the prince holding hands with and kissing his new husband. ''I was sick.''

Judging by the photo, Ms. Issa isn't, um, a reader. She's at least not enough of a reader to have flipped through the book—a children's book weighing in at a massive 32 pages—in advance to see what it's generally about. So kudos to her for visiting a library and trying to read to her kid. But sick? Really? As in vomiting induced by affection between men?

Her husband, who apparently shows no affection to his son for fear of triggering emesis in his wife, chimes in.

''I just want kids to enjoy their innocence and their time of growing up,'' Jeff Issa said, explaining his persistence. ''Let them be kids … and not worry about homosexuality, race, religion. Just let them live freely as kids.''

I'm particularly fond of Mr. Issa's emotional "let them be children" rhetoric.

By this logic, Mr. Issa's veal, I mean, son should also be protected from all those stories that end happily ever after with the prince and princess hooking up, because they're sexual in nature, too. And it goes without saying that tales of princesses kissing frogs should be burned.

Forgive the ad hominem bits of my reaction to Mr. Issa and his mouth-breather wife. I take libraries and attacks on them very seriously. But on a broader scale I'm opposed to censorship of any kind. And this is censorship, because the Issas' actions could limit other parents' ability to expose their children to aspects of life the Issas find distasteful.

That's a deal I suspect the Issas don't really want to make—especially when someone with an even bigger mouth tries to dictate exactly what they can and cannot expose their son to.