Another Perception of Being Educated in ‘The Truth’

Let me say at the outset that just because many of us want to limit children’s exposure to inappropriate material at Samuels Public Library does not mean we want Bridget Randolph’s sister (or anyone else) to be dead. (Royal Examiner Letters to the Editor, July 19.)

While I’m truly sorry for her family’s tragic loss, it is not helpful for her to use victimized grief as a rhetorical flamethrower against people with whom she disagrees. It is not fair or helpful to blame the “toxic” influence of local Catholicism for her sister’s PTSD. Perhaps she has proof of that. I can only hope the allegations of bullying and abuse are untrue or exaggerated. Such individual acts of cruel behavior should never be tolerated or excused. And they are condemned by the Church.

In many ways, Randolph’s letter (also read at the July 18 Warren County Board of Supervisors meeting) I believe helps to underscore the importance of filtering information ingested by our children (or, as she calls it, “to ban free speech in the name of protecting kids”).

She rightly claims that children who are gender-confused or sexual orientation-confused are questioning, doubting, and seeking truth. And that’s the saddest part.

The family were parishioners at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church. Randolph herself says she graduated summa cum laude from Christendom College with a degree in history. She quotes her sister Rose from a speech at her school: “Every human being deserves to be educated in the truth.”

As a Catholic, and especially as a well-educated one, Bridget Randolph should know that Jesus Christ is Truth itself. She should know that the Old and New Testaments, and Catholic teaching derived from them, have always condemned homosexuality as inherently disordered. She should know that the Church has always offered a path for a troubled person to shed sin, guilt, and spiritual oppression — and to come to healing reconciliation with Christ.

In her speech quoted in the letter, Rose tells of slipping over to Samuels Library while her mother was at Mass to surreptitiously check out books that she hid from her parents and read on the sly. “I read everything,” she is quoted as having said.

Although undoubtedly not intended to be, this underscores the importance of limiting what kind of materials children’s highly mold-able minds should be able to access at the public library (or social media, etc.) and it supports the arguments of the people seeking to clean up the library.

Despite Bridget Randolph’s assertion, preventing children from accessing information about, and promoting bonding with, the LGBTQ+ community is not an act of censorship or book banning that will put them at grave risk of mental and physical harm. On the contrary, information that seeks to normalize — or even cultivate — unnatural, immoral, and socially injurious behavior is destructive in every sense. And those who think it acceptable to expose children to such information are enablers of that destructiveness.

Vernon Kirby
Warren County

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