My friend, Beck, who I adore mightily, posted this story yesterday on a message board where my girlfriends and I hang out.

SAVANNAH, Mo. — A children’s book about two male penguins that raise a baby penguin has been moved to the nonfiction section of two public library branches after parents complained it had homosexual undertones.

The illustrated book, “And Tango Makes Three,” is based on a true story of two male penguins, named Roy and Silo, who adopted an abandoned egg at New York City’s Central Park Zoo in the late 1990s.

Okay, now here’s the thing, I am sick of this attitude. Seriously. A library is a place any person can go and check out books. It’s not the place for rabidly paranoid people to take out their issues on the rest of us. Keep that at home, please.

If you think a story about penguins adopting an egg is a threat to the mind of your child, don’t check out the book. Wow, how simple was that? But no, they couldn’t stop there, no, they had to take their paranoia up a notch and make the book next to impossible for anyone else to find because kids aren’t often in the nonfiction section.

This kind of petty, small minded hysteria is destructive. And I’m not just saying this as an author, I’m saying this as a parent and a citizen. It’s one thing to hold a set of personal beliefs, it’s another to shove them down everyone else’s throat and affect other people’s choices. I don’t want that, I don’t need that and I don’t want people threatened by penguins making my parenting and reading choices.