[hildea]

Originally Posted by rcentros

You can't have it both ways. Either children are minors whom parents are responsible for, or they're adults.

Huh, what a strange worldview. Children are minors. Parents have a duty to protect them, but children are people with their own rights. For that matter, everybody in a society should protect children, regardless of who their parents are.

By law, in the United States, children are minors until they are 18 (and parent's are responsible for their actions). Since that is the law, parents have the right to restrict what kind of material they're kids read.

I wasn't talking about the current state of legal rights in USA, I was talking about what are - in my opinion - moral rights.

So you claim. Do you really think kids are that ignorant about this subject because they're "deprived" of reading smut?

Some kids may be ignorant. Others may have seen porn, but maybe not more realistic descriptions of sexuality. I haven't read Maas, so I don't know how those books are in that regard, but here's a quote from another book ("The Hate U Give" by Angie Thomas, which has been challenged for its sexual content, as well as for other reasons), which is a good example of the kind of thing 14-year olds could benefit from reading:

Spoiler:

Fooling around isn’t new for us, and when Chris slipped his hand in my shorts, I didn’t think anything of it. Then he got me going, and I really wasn’t thinking. At all. For real, my thought process went out the door. And right as I was at that moment, he stopped, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a condom. He raised his eyebrows at me, silently asking for an invitation to go all the way.

All I could think about was those girls I see walking around Garden Heights, babies propped on their hips. Condom or no condom, shit happens.

I went off on Chris. He knew I wasn’t ready for that, we already talked about it, and yet he had a condom? He said he wanted to be responsible, but if I said I’m not ready, I’m not ready.

I left his house pissed and horny, the absolute worst way to leave.

I've got a feeling you've never had kids, so you're probably unaware about what parents go through when raising them.

I have children who are now grown up. But I remember vividly balancing on the knife's edge between "My, how brave you are!" and "No! Stop! That's dangerous!" Giving children enough room to grow and enough support when they need it is hard. But I was never in doubt about getting them library cards (to the public library, not just the small one at the school) well before they were old enough to take the bus to the library themselves, and I've never tried to monitor what they chose to read.