Editor,

A recent letter to the editor suggested that Carmel High School should abandon its current policy of allowing parents to restrict what their kids can check out and instead require parents to opt in to having access to certain books. The fatal flaw with such an approach is that different people find different subject matter objectionable.

The author of the letter focuses on books with sexual content. Some in our community have objected to books dealing with issues of racism and LGBTQ rights. It’s easy to see how others, with equal conviction and sincerity, might object to books that support or oppose all manner of social, religious, political and historical opinions and positions. Were CHS to force parents to opt in to any book that may contain content with which a family might disagree, it may as well require parental permission to enter the library at all. Or simply close it, as some have publicly advocated.

For those who care more about protecting young people than political theater, I suggest focusing on raising the age of consent in our state from 16 to 18 and shrinking the age gap in Indiana’s Romeo and Juliet law to 3 years instead of 4. It is truly obscene and harmful to minors that adults of any age can take advantage of someone as young as 16, and that an 18-year-old college freshman can legally engage in sex acts with a 14-year-old 8th grader.

The Republican supermajority in our General Assembly has refused to modernize our laws regarding age of consent in session after session after session. Backing candidates who will criminalize the actual sexual victimization of teenagers will do immeasurably more good than handwringing over those same teenagers potentially reading books that describe such victimization.

Jim May, Carmel