Meet the Virginia Buddhist Who Is Leading a Charge to Ban Books

One of the leading challengers of books in school libraries is not a fundamentalist Christian but a Buddhist — and she claims that reading sexual content may make young people more vulnerable to abuse or likely to engage in unsafe sex.

That challenger is Jennifer Petersen, 48, of Spotsylvania County, Va. She is one of the small number of people who are filing a majority of challenges to books in the U.S., notes a profile in The Washington Post.

Petersen is one of them. She reads every book she challenges, ordering most of them from Amazon. She finds many of the titles on lists of frequently challenged and banned books published by groups that champion the freedom to read, such as the American Library Association and PEN America.

Petersen doesn’t specifically target LGBTQ-themed books, but she has challenged some, including Red, White & Royal Blue, a gay teen romance that was recently made into a popular TV movie; a poetry collection by Allen Ginsberg; and All Boys Aren’t Blue, a memoir by Black queer writer George M. Johnson. Her primary basis for opposing any book is the presence of sexual content, gay or straight. About a third of the 71 books she has challenged focus on the LGBTQ+ community or people of color.

Related: Conservatives Fight to Ban This Black, Queer Memoir State-By-State

Petersen, who has one child going to school in the Spotsylvania County school district and another who recently graduated, took up this cause just in the past couple of years. She began attending school board meetings in 2020, mostly because she opposed pandemic-related measures the district was taking, the Post reports. At one meeting, though, she heard parents object to two books — 33 Snowfish, which features one teen who has suffered sexual abuse and another involved in sex work, and Call Me by Your Name, depicting a romance between two young men. That led one board member to say such books should be thrown into a fire and another to say they should be eradicated.

“Petersen, too, was alarmed,” the Post reports. “If children under 18 read about sex, she worries, they will be more likely to engage in unsafe sex or fall victim to sexual predators.” She also found out that book challenges in the district were rare.

So she started ordering and reading books, but when she read aloud from some of them at board meetings, she was surprised that other parents defended them. Then she began filing challenges. For instance, she praised Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved for depicting the horrors of slavery, but she said the sexually explicit packages it contains added nothing to the book.

The district put a process in place under which any book challenged at a given school would be reviewed by the principal with a committee of teachers and parents. But when these reviews resulted in recommendations to keep the books Petersen challenged, she appealed. So a district-wide committee was formed, but it recommended keeping them as well.

Superintendent Mark Taylor can override the committees, however, and so far he has withdrawn 14 of the titles Petersen found objectionable. More than 30 are awaiting action by him or the district committee, and librarians pulled 18 titles before the review process was established.

Kimberly Allen, the district’s high school librarian and library liaison, told the Post not all 18 were removed for sexual content, although a few did contain such content that was deemed inappropriate for young people. Others were pulled because the books were in bad shape or because there was little demand for them, she said.

Dealing with Petersen’s challenges has been time-consuming, she said, with staff members spending up to 40 hours a week of uncompensated time reviewing the books.

In “most of the books, we do not agree with her assessment, because ... you cannot base the merit of a book on just its parts,” Allen told the paper. “She is weighing the whole book on single passages.” Petersen may be “a good person, doing this for the right reasons,” Allen added. “But she’s doing it the wrong way.”

Petersen, allied with some conservative Christian parents and others, has vowed to continue her crusade. She will go on "as long as it takes ... to get the sexually explicit books out,” she told the Post. “To make it so that they cannot come back.”