I made the same statement on the Harry Potter stuff and got beat up. My argument was as yours, I don’t have to read something that has been publicly identified as not suitable with my beliefs to chose not to read it.
“I made the same statement on the Harry Potter stuff and got beat up. My argument was as yours, I don’t have to read something that has been publicly identified as not suitable with my beliefs to chose not to read it.”
The difference between the two sets of works was that, previously, an argument could be advanced that the Rowling books were not evil, at least not based on the known philosophies/religious beliefs of the authors.
It was reported previously that Ms. Rowling is a Christian, while it is also well-established that Mr. Pullman is a militant atheist.
Thus, there were those willing to give the most charitable interpretation to Ms. Rowling’s work, interpreting it according to her alleged Christian belief. Conversely, it’s difficult to give as charitable an interpretation to the work of a man who says his goal with his writing is to kill God in the minds of children.
One poster here who made an effort to give Ms. Rowling the benefit of the doubt is Antoninus. He wrote a series of essays on the first four or five of the Potter novels.
However, once Ms. Rowling informed us that one of the major “good” characters of the series was homosexual, it became impossible to any longer make a charitable interpretation of the work. Ms. Rowling is no more Christian in belief than the Archdruid of Canterbury, Mr. Williams.
For me, I didn’t let my children get into the Potter works, not because I was entirely convinced at the time that they were evil, but because there was considerable question about their worthiness. Not having the time to delve deeply into the question, my prudential judgment was that it was better to have my children leave them unread, with the possibility that perhaps they were missing out on something fun and entertaining, if not entirely wholesome and good. The alternative would have been to permit my children to read something that, it turns out, is indeed evil and pernicious.
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