Dear Friend,
Along with our allies at Family Voice, we have an urgent request for your help.
House Bill (H.B.) 1257 would protect children from exposure to pornography by requiring any website publishing pornography to conduct industry standard age verification of its users, while maintaining user privacy.
Studies show that by the age of 17, 75% of children have been exposed to pornography. They also show that the average age children first view pornography is between 7 and 13 years old, and most of those exposures happen accidentally. Even more concerning, research proves that pornography is as harmful to your brain as a hard drug. Our children are being exposed to material that is harming them the way a hard drug would, and they’re stumbling upon it by accident. H.B. 1257 would put a stop to it while ensuring all user data remains protected.
Parents are the first guardians of their child’s innocence. Ensuring kids are protected from early exposure to pornography is a critical step to making sure parents are the ones providing their kids with age-appropriate sexual education when they know it is right.
H.B. 1257 was dead in committee, but on Monday, the legislature can “smoke it out” with a one third vote on the Senate floor. So, we need you to contact your state senator and ask him or her to support H.B. 1257 on Monday. Doing so is easy in our Action Center.
Along with our allies at Family Voice, who have worked tirelessly to get this bill passed, we urge you to partner with us to protect kids from early exposure to pornography.
Send a message to your state senator NOW and urge them to protect South Dakota kids!
For our kids,
Joseph Kohm
Director, Public Policy
Dear Friends,
Earlier this week, we alerted you to the story that iconic Scholastic Books had scrapped plans to protect elementary children from certain pornographic and sexually explicit titles appearing in their school book fairs. If you missed it, you can read more about the situation HERE.
Already, thousands of our readers have taken action by signing our open letter to Scholastic! If you have done so, thank you!
If you have not yet signed the open letter to Scholastic, please do so by clicking HERE now. (But please come back to finish reading this important message…because there is more!)
Right now, we do not know if Scholastic will do anything. That means that we need to continue to press upon them how dangerous it is to sell sexualized, pornographic content to children of any age.
Much like Target and Bud Light, some large corporations really don’t care what people think until they see their bottom line being affected. Ultimately, it’s all about the money.
But we have a plan, and you can help.
Family Policy Alliance is asking you to help in one more simple way – and this one will require just a little homework from you, but we think it will be worth it.
Because schools must invite Scholastic into their buildings to sell a single book, school board members have the power to tell Scholastic that they cannot sell books to any student. The message is that Scholastic must change their policy, or they will not be allowed back into schools.
To send that message, we must notify school board members who share our values and want to protect children. They must be informed about the harmful material Scholastic sells in schools and they must be willing to take action to stop it.
Here is where you can make a difference.
We need to know who the strong, reliable, conservative school board members are in your area so we can provide them with the background material and tools they need to protect children from harmful materials.
There are over 90,000 local school board members in 14,000 school districts across the nation, and knowing who to reach out to is a daunting task. Your help in narrowing our focus to those best positioned to take action on this issue will be immensely helpful.
Here is where your homework comes in.
For any school board member whom you feel should be involved, CLICK HERE and provide the following: Their name, an email address and the name of your school district, city and state. If you do not have all of this information, share as much as you can! If you are fortunate enough to have several good school board members, please send us contact information for all of them.
We appreciate your help in firing up elected officials at the grassroots level!
Your input here is key to activating what we hope is a national effort to stop schools and corporations from pushing pornography on schoolchildren of any age.
Again – click HERE to give us contact information for any reliable, conservative school board member(s) in your area and we will reach out right away to equip them with the tools they need to take action on this issue.
Thank you,
Robert Noland
Director, Audience Engagement
Dear Friends,
Recently parents across the country have been taking action to eradicate pornographic material in school libraries and curricula. Such content simply has no place in our schools. Pornography is deeply destructive in a child’s life; and in a time when the average age of first exposure to pornography is between 8 and 11 years old, schools need to be sure they are not facilitating such exposure.
But can you imagine your elementary-school-aged child or grandchild going to their school’s book fair and finding that same pornographic material available to purchase and take home?
What school would allow this and ask parents to pay for such content?
Scholastic Books, the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books, has been iconic in the school book fair realm, having sold books to young readers for over 80 years. Scholastic is, however, not the wholesome company you might think.
Scholastic recently decided to offer a collection of books to elementary school students that covered controversial topics including LGBTQ+ material. Scholastic had proposed steps to ensure that these controversial, pornographic titles were segregated as a special category of books. Schools could even decline to sell the titles in this category outright if they wished.
The policy was short-lived when last month, Scholastic buckled under pressure from the Left to scrap the policy. They fell to outlandish (woke) claims that by protecting children, they were being discriminatory and banning books.
In fact, Scholastic apologized for their efforts to protect elementary children when they promptly reversed course.
Scholastic should not offer such content to children in the first place, but now, given this recent policy reversal, it is presumed that students of any age will eventually be able to find and preview pornographic content at Scholastic books fair without restriction. (Note: Scholastic already provides controversial, pornographic titles for sale to older children without restriction.)
What can you do?
We are asking you to sign our open letter to Scholastic Books telling them that selling sexualized, pornographic material in schools is unacceptable and asking them to stop selling pornography to children of any age.
Book fairs are usually fantastic opportunities for children to fall in love with reading, however pornography and gender politics appear to be tainting this once wholesome realm and endangering children.
Please take action by signing onto our letter to Scholastic today.
Sincerely,
Robert Noland
Director, Audience Engagement
PS Please use the buttons below to share this message on social media and with your friends and family who need to weigh in as well.