A roiling controversy in Arkansas may serve to awaken many parents to the reality of what is found in many public school libraries--explicitly sexual material.

This controversy centers in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where Laurie Taylor, a mother of two young teenage girls, complained to the local board of education about three library books that contained explicit descriptions and depictions of sexual activity. Later, Taylor would form a group called Parents Protecting the Minds of Children, and her list of three troubling books would be expanded to dozens of others.

Predictably, national library associations and anti-censorship groups quickly jumped into the fray, charging Mrs. Taylor with launching a crusade to take the Arkansas public schools back to the dark ages.

In response to her concerns, the Fayetteville Board of Education first decided to move the three books in question into a special parents-only section of the school libraries. Nevertheless, the board later rescinded that decision and, by a one-vote margin, decided to return the books to the main collection where they would be accessible to students.

This particular controversy tells us a great deal about how much influence parents can wield over local school boards and the administration of the schools. In a nutshell, this case proves that, even in the heartland of America, parents are denied much influence at all.

I do not know Laurie Taylor, but a quick visit to her organization's web site should be enough to raise the temperature of any concerned parent. The three books of her immediate concern, It's So Amazing, It's Perfectly Normal, and The Teenage Guy's Survival Guide, contain hair-raising material. It's So Amazing, intended for children in kindergarten through the fourth grade, deals with a wide range of sexual issues. It's Perfectly Normal, designed for third through sixth graders, includes cartoon drawings of a couple having sex, of homosexual relationships, and of a boy masturbating. Those readers that require proof of this content can simply visit the group's web site.

The Teenage Guy's Survival Guide encourages the use of pornography as "natural and fine." Backward parents who think otherwise will find themselves isolated by the liberal elite and attacked by advocates for libraries and librarians who seem to have no concern for what parents believe to be appropriate for their children.

The Little Rock newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, editorialized against Laurie Taylor's crusade. Referring to the excerpts from offensive books Mrs. Taylor and her group assembled, the paper responded: "They can be shocking. And often on the basis of those inflammatory excerpts, she's rallied support from others with concerns that mirror hers. In the name of protecting her kids from books she finds distasteful, she's unavoidably created obstacles for others who don't feel the way she does." The paper went on to accuse Mrs. Taylor of seeking to ban books and argued that her effort amounts to a form of unconstitutional censorship.

When Mrs. Taylor suggested that parents might decide to "opt out" their children from school libraries, the paper described her proposal as "a curious way to approach education, preventing your kids from using the school library."

One might think that the newspaper would be more concerned with the use of a school library as an environment for indoctrinating children into the sexual revolution. The Little Rock paper suggested that the school district should simply "flag each student's record with parental restrictions on what books their own kids can check out." In other words, parents could decide that they could prevent their children from checking out a specific list of books. Of course, nothing would prevent the children from gaining access to the books while in the library.

Undoubtedly, some persons would assume that this is all about sex education in general. But the books Laurie Taylor and her team have listed are, in the main, not about biology and the "birds and the bees." To the contrary, the books she lists are among some of the most explicit and pornographic to be found anywhere in literature.