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Notes -
I'll take "libraries" as my example context.
It's common in the US to have libraries in schools, at least in middle school and high school. There are also public libraries that are often after-school locations for nearby underage students. (Setting aside college/university libraries as not relevant to this point.) On the face of it, a library is a big collection of books--how much does the inclusion or exclusion of any given book matter, within the big sea of books? Some exclusion is inevitable, barring L-Space (sorry, PTerry).
Enter librarians. Sure, you can search the stacks yourself, but if you are in a rush or inexperienced, asking a resident expert is a very useful approach. Libraries are usually networked, so librarians can pull from a much larger pool of books, but most often, you're going to get recommendations for things that are in the stacks right now.
So you've got the availability of a particular controversial book, and the judgment of the librarian as to how much that book is promoted through placement and explicit recommendation. Librarians are probably the closest group to academia that isn't explicitly academia, and as you might expect, are biased to the left to an extreme degree. Their modal sense of appropriateness is generally governed by those ideological beliefs--among other things, that sexually descriptive material is not harmful to children, and may be helpful. As a result, Drag Queen Story Hour is now a thing, despite many parents' concerns about men wearing women's underwear that want to spend more time with their children.
That’s a valid class of concern, and one I’ve voiced whenever ALA Book Ban pieces are taken as fact. And it can be a ‘grooming’-style problem, if the adult is directly promoting specific titles to individual students, if the content is predominately sexual and sexy, or if there is an effort to encourage students to hide the material from parents.
But it’s often not, and the examples brought forth here aren’t that.
That doesn’t make them good, either as books or as librarian decisions. At the very least, they’re an intentional effort to bypass and contradict some subset of parent decisions about appropriate content.
But the differences between these two criticisms are severe. A parent can not betray their own trust when making these sort of appropriate content decisions, where a bad parent could groom their own child; a wrongly-trusted adult can groom a child while acting within accepted content.
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