IFI received a return-request letter via priority mail this week from Dunner Law, a law firm based in Washington D.C. that specializes in intellectual property law. The letter came from Adam Sikich, senior counsel with Dunner Law (and according to his bio, a “Star Wars aficionado”) on behalf of Dunner’s “Client,” the American Psychological Association (APA). In this letter, Sikich kinda, sorta implied Dunner might slap IFI with a $150,000 lawsuit if we don’t remove three illustrations we used in recent articles about a children’s picture book celebrating “pride” parades titled This Day in June by lesbian author Gayle E. Pitman.

Star Wars aficionado Sikich first told us how very important his “Client” is:

We represent the American Psychological Association, Inc. (“our Client”) in its intellectual property matters. We write to you regarding your organization’s use of protected illustrations from the copyrighted work This Day in June.

As you may be aware, our Client is the largest and most prestigious publisher in the field of psychology, mental health and development. Our Client’s children’s book division, Magination Press, publishes books that help children deal with the many challenges and problems they face as they grow up.

How have so many people for so many decades not realized how desperately little children need picture books about “pride” parades to help them face the challenges and problems they face—you know, the problems created for them by adults who sought to mainstream sexual deviance?

Then Aficionado Sikich informed IFI of the seriousness of our potential crime and the potential penalties for our potential lawbreaking:

Your organization’s use and posting of illustrations from This Day in June without our Client’s permission and without attribution to our Client or the book’s illustrator, Kristyna Litten, violates our Client’s exclusive rights in its work, including the right to control the publication, reproduction and distribution of the illustrations within the work. These actions subject your organization to copyright infringement liability under the U.S. Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § I 06, entitling our Client to injunctive relief as well as statutory damages in an amount up to $150,000 if your organization is found to have willfully infringed the protectable rights in the illustrations. [emphasis added]

Clearly, Aficionado Sikich and the “Client” are miffed that the “Client” and illustrator were not given their due attribution. Well, Sikich’s command is my command, which I with subservience and alacrity hereby fulfill: The talented illustrator of Gayle E. Pitman’s rhetorically banal and offensive picture book This Day in June, which is published by the American Psychological Association’s Magination Press, is Kristyna Litten.

Oddly, Aficionado Sikich never mentioned the Fair Use Law which is used to determine whether copyright infringement has taken place:

Under the doctrine of “fair use,” the law allows the use of portions of copyrighted work without permission from the owner…. [T]he fair use of copyrighted material without permission is allowed when used for the following purposes: criticism; comment; news reporting; teaching.

What a coinkydink! Those were IFI’s–a non-profit organization–exact purposes. I just bet that impish Sikich knew that.

(Why, oh, why couldn’t he be a Harry Potter aficionado, so I could say “that impish Quidditch-pitchin’ Sikich”?)

Even odder was this remark from Sikich:

That your organization has used this work to support an anti-tolerance, anti-gay rights agenda makes the unauthorized and unattributed use all the more troubling.

How does IFI’s disagreement with Leftist assumptions about the nature and morality of homosexuality and the “trans” ideology or our views on what constitutes age-appropriate material for young children make our potential copyright infringement “all the more troubling”? How is Sikich’s angst about IFI’s moral views legally relevant?

Aficionado Sikich conveniently casts our views as “anti-tolerance, anti-gay rights.” How does Sikich or the “Client” define “tolerance”? Is Sikich or the APA (or the American Library Association for that matter) “tolerant” of conservative views on the nature and morality of volitional homosexual activity or the “trans” ideology? If so, how does their tolerance manifest? What specifically are the “gay rights” to which Sikich or the “Client” refers?

And this brings me to the most remarkable part of Aficionado Sikich’s letter: In it I learned that Magination Press is the children’s publishing arm of the American Psychological Association.

Wowzer!

To remind IFI readers, Magination Press is the publishing company that published This Day in June as well as conducted an interview in which Pitman was asked what her book is “really about.” She said this:

I LOVE this question! This Day in June is really about being who you are, and not apologizing for it. When I wrote this story, I wanted Pride to be featured as realistically as possible. I wanted to see drag queens, guys in leather, rainbows, political signs, the Dykes on Bikes —everything you would see at Pride. I didn’t want any of it to be watered-down or sugarcoated. Lots of people have asked me, “Do you think that’s appropriate for children?” And my answer always is—YES. There’s something very powerful about allowing something to be portrayed authentically, because it teaches children in an indirect way to be as authentic as they can. It’s also important to recognize that children respond to Pride very differently than adults do. When adults see people wearing leather, they make certain associations to that. Children see people wearing leather and think they’re just wearing a costume, or playing dress-up. What I love most about This Day in June is that the illustrations are age-appropriate AND authentic at the same time.

With Pitman’s fervent belief in the power of “authenticity” and her absolute opposition to “watered-down or sugarcoated” illustrations, why are all the illustrations actually watered-down, sugarcoated, and whitewashed images of the inappropriate things children really see at “pride” parades? And why aren’t there any cartoon-y pictures of topless women, bare-bottomed men playing dress-up in chaps and mouth gags, or men engaged in simulated sex acts? What are her criteria or the “Client’s” criteria for determining age-appropriateness?

Isn’t it even a wee bit troubling to the APA that this picture book exposes children to watered-down images of people wearing leather without understanding the perverse “kink” culture with which it is associated? Doesn’t this constitute a form ideological grooming? In other words, through these illustrations, aren’t Pitman, Litten, and the APA normalizing homosexuality, the “trans”-ideology, and “kink” long before children are able to understand the authentic reality and critically examine the assumptions embedded in the watered-down, sugar-coated, inauthentic illustrations?

Imagine if a children’s author were to offer this rationalization for including sugar-coated illustrations of a KKK rally: “When adults see people in white robes and pointy hats, they make certain associations, but when children see people wearing them, they think they’re just wearing a costume or playing dress-up.”

The moral of this creepy tale is that the APA, the “most prestigious publisher [or is it most litigious publisher?] in the field of psychology, mental health and development,” cannot be trusted with children. The “Client”—foolish and cruel step-sibling of Big Brother—demonstrates a malformed understanding of child development, a grotesque view of age-appropriateness, and no sense of sexual morality.

Listen to Laurie read this article in this podcast:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/The-Creepy-Tale-of-a-D.C.-Law-Firm-the-APA-and-IFI.mp3

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Picture this: You’re at the library with your three-and-a-half-year-old daughter whose attention is grabbed by a colorfully illustrated children’s book. She takes it off the shelf and asks you what the book is about.

You are happy to oblige until you see that this colorfully illustrated children’s book is about promoting many aspects of the LGBTQQAP (etc.) agenda.

This is what happened recently to Kurt and Michaela Jaros. Fortunately, Michaela was quick to utilize her mothering skills and answer her daughter’s question without providing a sex ed lesson on the spot.

The book the Jaros’ daughter pulled from the shelves of the West Chicago Public Library is titled This Day in June.  Here is the description from the book’s Amazon.com page:

In a wildly whimsical, validating, and exuberant reflection of the LGBT community, This Day in June welcomes readers to experience a pride celebration and share in a day when we are all united. Also included is a Reading Guide chock-full of facts about LGBT history and culture, as well as a Note to Parents and Caregivers with information on how to talk to children about sexual orientation and gender identity in age-appropriate ways. This Day in June is an excellent tool for teaching respect, acceptance, and understanding of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

Not to Kurt Jaros, who has taken up the issue with the West Chicago Library Board.

Jaros explains that since libraries work together through inter-library loans, if one library has it, it will be available to regional libraries as well. Therefore, one need not live in the West Chicago Library district make a statement at the meeting.

Jaros further noted that libraries often do not receive enough public comment on controversial issues. He has set up a website to rally support for the effort to have the book either removed from the shelves or be placed where children do not have access to it, as many libraries do.

Some argue that having this and similar books removed from library shelves is “censorship” or “book burning.” As with everything else, Leftists can’t quite grasp the fact that taxpayer have a say in how their tax dollars are spent.

Jaros explained that from cover to cover, This Day in June is filled with pro-LGBTQQAP (etc.) propaganda presented through symbols and messages. He prepared a flyer to provide examples from the book. (This disturbing book is written by Gayle E. Pitman and illustrated by Kristyna Litten.)

Library board member David Reynolds also spoke with IFI about the offensive nature of the book and the inappropriateness of allowing children to have unsupervised access to it. Libraries remove books from shelves all the time for various reasons, he said, but the effort to have this book removed is creating the equivalent of a “constitutional crisis.”

Controversial books should not be placed where children can easily step on cultural land minds, Reynolds said. Books like This Day in June should, at a minimum, be moved to a separate parent/teacher collection as is the policy at many libraries.

Just two days ago, Illinois Family Institute’s Laurie Higgins wrote “In a Heartbeat”: Propaganda for Children. Here is her opening paragraph:

Anyone who doubts that “LGBTQQAP” activists and their “allies” are pursuing the hearts and minds of other people’s children should watch this sweet, well-crafted, animated short film about an adorable, red-headed, closeted middle school boy whose secret crush on another boy is exposed when his anthropomorphized heart leaps from his chest and pursues the boy with whom the main character is besotted.

This Day in June too seeks to capture the imaginations of young children:

Filled with saturated colors and vivid illustrations, this picture book uses rhyming couplets to convey the fun and exuberate feelings assocated [sic] with a pride parade for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people and families. For example, “Rainbow arches/Joyful marches/Motors roaring/Spirits soaring.” The cartoon artwork is richly detailed and capture the “Banners swaying/Children playing.”

Here is a paragraph from that Laurie Higgins’ article reworked to apply to This Day in June:

The book’s creators are making the implicit argument that the biological sex of humans is irrelevant to the morality of sexual activity. Leftists use the adolescent slogan “love is love” to distract the public from the central issue—which pertains not to love but to sex. The central issue concerns sexual morality and sexual boundaries. The Left seeks to skirt that issue by dangling vivid illustrations and rhyming couplets in front of vulnerable and manipulable children.

None of the “profoundly important questions about sexual morality matter,” Higgins writes, “in a culture where cartoons shape feelings—nothing more than feelings.”

IFI also spoke with a veteran of the public library systems who noted the Leftist slant from the local level on up to the Illinois Library Association (ILA) and the American Library Association (ALA). “Libraries do not need to carry these kinds of books,” she said, but often do because so often they are lobbying for one side of a political argument.

Even the ILA and the ALA seem to be less about promoting libraries than pushing political agendas, she said: “They need to be neutral like librarians are taught in library school and how they are trained in collection development.” Librarians are given a lot of control over the latter, she said, so the more liberal the librarians are, the more liberal the book collections will be.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send an email or fax to the West Chicago Library Board of Trustees, urging them to reject policies that spend tax resources on politically controversial and deviant books targeted at young children.  You may want to point out that this is not an issue of free speech but rather of book selection policy.

More ACTION:  If you are a local resident, please try to attend this meeting, and try to arrive by 6:30 to sign in to make comments, which are limited to three minutes. You may want to type up your comment and read it so as to ensure you don’t exceed the three-minute limit.

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