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Another holiday, another uncomfortable intrusion of the culture war by psychos into my child's life.
Maybe I was oblivious as a kid. I probably was. But somehow I don't remember children's books being as blatantly propagandized as now. Literally every single book my 3 year old daughter got for Christmas is either packed to the gills with LGBTQ "families" or interracial families mixed to a degree that I'm pretty sure is genetically impossible. Like I don't think White Woman + Latino Man = 1 Asian Child, 1 Black Child and 1 tan baby. We didn't set out for books with overt propaganda. We wanted books about nature, farming, the seasons, the months, learning to read, numbers, etc. And yet here we are.
And like I said, maybe I was oblivious as a kid. But then again, I actually got my daughter a lot of the classics I grew up with, and I still don't see it. Goodnight Moon, Where The Wild Things Are, The Hungry Caterpillar, etc still seem like straightforward children's books to me.
It's just baffling to me that books like that appear to be the default option when you tell family "We want books about X" and they search the internet for "Children's Books about X" and just click Buy on the first 5 results. We got like, 12 pseudo random children's books for Christmas, and not one single family in any of them looks like her, despite us being the majority demographic of our nation. It's one thing to be an adult, seeing the precise opposite of reality being crammed down your throat by our cultural overlords. You can by and large tune it out, thanks to the decades of actual life you've lived standing in opposition to pretend nonsense. There is something profoundly disturbing about watching them attempt to brainwash your child any which way they can into believing the world is the opposite of the way it is.
Ah well, Merry Christmas I guess. She liked the stool I built her, and although she balks at me reading the copy of the Hobbit I slipped in the drawer. Just not old enough for all those words without pictures yet.
I am curious what proposition, overt or covert, you take the depiction of interracial or LGBT families to be propaganda for.
I suspect most people are not thinking about the plausibility of genetic relationship between depicted family members when buying children's books. For one, people can have family members whom they are not genetically related to. For two, children's book authors are known to take creative liberties with reality for the purpose of telling an entertaining story or imparting a moral. For example, they may depict an animal doing something it is quite unlikely for it to do in reality (like a caterpillar eating chocolate cake) or imagine entirely new creatures which do not exist (like large furred horned hominids or dragons).
To the exclusion of all else. That's what I'm complaining about. It's to the exclusion of all else. Representation of families like ours, the majority of my nation, if this semi-random sampling of search engine recommended examples is to be believe, have been all but completely extirpated from contemporary children's book.
If representation matters, as the people advocating inclusion of interracial or LGBT families claim it does, why have they erased my family?
My guess is that there's still going to be great amounts of older children's books available representing in the great majority heterosexual families of your country's majority ethnicity (or animals obviously intended to represent that ethnicity like Berenstain Bears in US etc.), no? At least when I go out in bookstores to check what they have, they usually have reprints of old classics front and center.
My guess is that a lot of modern children's books authors specifically think about the great majorities of existing children's books not showcasing groups other than heterosexual families of a country's majority ethnicity, and thus go above and beyond the call of duty to increase the general representativeness.
But that creates its own problem, the way that the actual percentage of any minority population within the general population is misrepresented. Whether that be thinking that black people are a greater share of the US population than they are, or LGBT people (especially trans). If people are presented with "Should we make sweeping social changes to accommodate 2% of the general population?" they are much less likely to say "yes" than if they are presented with "Should we make sweeping social changes to accommodate this sub-population (which you think is 10-20% of the population rather than 2%, because you've been deluged with books and social media where in an ensemble case of five, at least one is this particular sub-population)?"
It's also easy and lazy, and may be down to "do I want my book to be published?" even more than "do I want to be Diverse and Inclusive?" because see the YA fiction kerfuffles over race and transgender. Publishers nowadays may be more inclined to go for "we want DEI" and to not even consider a book that has all-white family, so if you're a kids' book author and you want a career, be darn sure to mix up the races and orientations of your characters.
There's also the stupid partisan political stuff, like the gay White House rabbits. No kid is going to read those books, but adults who want to feel like they're sticking it to the Man will fall over themselves to buy those kind of books. Personally I think the whole mania around the kind of pets the Presidents and Vice-Presidents own is crazy, but people do get all worked up over it. So the Pences had a pet rabbit, one of their daughters wrote kids' books about it, and of course this had to get political, because the fussbudgets can't let anything lie:
I don't know how many 6-8 year olds were longing for a book about a rabbit getting gay married, but hey, John Oliver is a hack and this let everybody show off how progressive they were. And it wasn't even thinly-disguised, the first page outright states that this rabbit is part of the Pence family. Haw-haw, Pence is anti-gay and wants gay conversion torture camps set up everywhere, let's make his daughters' pet rabbit gay and get gay married, that'll show him!
(How old is Oliver, again? I think 6-8 years of age is too high for his mental age).
I dunno, what amount of children's books would you surmise are about gay couples? We have a bunch of old and modern ones at our house, and leafing through them, I've spotted some cases where some background couple might be gay, but obviously since they're background they're not being featured in a major role.
I have perhaps more experience in watching kids' TV, and out of all the children's shows I've seen, I've seen one instance where there's a bit player gay couple (for the record it would be Chip & Potato, where the main character's family's (which is as traditional a straight 3-child family with a cop father and, for the most of the series, homemaker mom you could imagine) neighborhood also has a couple of smartly dressed male zebras who appear to have adopted children. They don't actually go "we're gay and have gay zebra sex in our bedrooms" or anything like that and feature in maybe two episodes. This is my understanding of the general extent of representation in this field, at the moment.
I think that John Oliver thing can indeed be marked in the category of "it's a bit, not actually intended for children's books oeuvre", as you indicated.
I wouldn't freak out about things like "fleeting background gay kiss" in a movie, even a kid's movie. I think the recent flop by Disney, Strange World, is being presented as (by both sides) "it was because it was gay/inter-racial/strong women" but I think mostly it was probably awful (I'm just going by the trailer and the synopsis in Wikipedia).
Funnily enough, had they made a movie about the family patriarch, Jaeger Clade, and his adventures in the Strange World, I think it would have been a lot better. He seems the most interesting character in the trailer; his grandson, Ethan, is only there to be Gay Teenager First Out LGBT Character in a Disney Movie, and Searcher (Jaeger's son, Ethan's father) is insufferably wet. Look at the trailer and see if you agree.
The art style is also terrible, I've read it described as "Cal Arts style" but I don't know if it's so. It's that recent style where all the faces look the same (big eyes, potato nose, small chin, generally expressions of surprise or anger) like the female faces in "Frozen" all being identical, and the male and indeed female faces in this one being the same. Black, white, male, female, all have the 'big eyes, potato nose, big open-mouth expressions'.
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