As if anyone was ever harmed by such books.

Children’s literature can still be judged on its pedagogical merits. Not all books are good, and that’s why we have book reviews and experts writing recommendations for which books can be worthy additions to the school curriculum.

Heartstopper happens to be a work with quite high pedagogical merit because it approaches sensitive issues with tenderness, age-appropriateness and responsibility (especially when medical themes are explored in the story).

But some books can be potentially harmful and they shouldn’t be read by children still learning about the world, especially if they don’t have access to other reliable sources of information to counterbalance the bad information of some books.

To talk from personal experience, when I was growing up as a young gay teenager in a conservative country where there was no sex education in schools (at all, not even straight sex education) and no public real or fictional healthy models of queer relationships available, my only source of representation was yaoi manga that seemed to end up in the general comics book section of a chain bookstore. Even the non-pornographic manga did give me extremely harmful ideas about how relationship dynamics between two men might look like, both romantically and sexually. I did suffer real harm later on when as an older teenager I began dating, and the contribution of reading bad representation is not trivial to that.

For my younger self, I wish that I did have access to good books like Heartstopper, and someone informed enough to tell me that I shouldn’t be reading the bad books until I was mature enough to understand why they are bad and how healthy relationships look like.

Hungary’s law of course doesn’t care about queer youth getting access to good books and avoiding bad books. Hungary’s law just wants queer youth to disappear.

You don’t like a product? You don’t buy it for you or for your kids as long as you materially provide for them.

It’s not as simple. As we see from the US (but also to a tamer extend in some EU regions including in the bible-belts of western member states), even if the “market freedom” argument is established and there’s no doubt about the right to sell children’s literature with queer characters, those “concerned parents” move the goalpost to the school system (assigned reading in language classes) and libraries.

The argument that must be had is not about free markets, but about a child’s inalienable right to develop their personality outside the control of their parents. The statement “children do not belong to their parents” remains a controversial one. In one country I am familiar with, “our children belong to us, so the school does not have a right to talk to them about things we do not approve” is now being used against the introduction of (straight-only) sex education.

It’s more crucial to have a discussion about whether all children should have the right to read children’s literature with queer themes, not only the children of parents who do not oppose the idea.