“I want awareness,” says JoAn Karkos, about her quixotic quest to discredit “It’s Perfectly Normal,” the controversial children’s book now available, thanks to her, in bulk at local libraries.

She’s succeeded, sort of. More people have read the sex-ed tome during the past three months than the past three years; the Lewiston library’s lone copy gathered dust until Karkos took it out, never to be returned. Now she claims the book is obscene, and wants the library punished.

If Karkos wishes to find obscenity, she could visit the adult bookstore down the street from the library. Or even read the city of Lewiston’s obscenity ordinance, which utilizes many graphic adjectives, verbs, nouns and compound phrases to describe just what is obscene.

Better still, she should log onto the Internet. Within its unedited vastness, whole new genres of obscene material are being created, almost by the hour. There’s enough raw material tangled in the Web to keep even the most diligent “anti-obscenity activist” busy for several lifetimes.

Karkos’ campaign against “It’s Perfectly Normal” is foundering from her myopia. She is rallying against a single book she finds objectionable; yet in now trying to parlay her outrage into punitive action, Karkos is killing chances of gaining traction for a rational, honest dialogue about sexual education and children.

Her sentiments have sympathizers who agree sex education has gone too far, too fast. In voicing her opinions about childhood exposure to these complex topics, Karkos speaks for many concerned and frustrated parents.

Yet by stealing books and bellowing about obscenity, she divorces herself from this support to cast herself as the lone arbiter of community standards. Here, her zealot act gets tiring. She might as well holler into a hurricane.

Instead of leading the community into an insightful examination of proper sexual education, Karkos only seems willing to scream until she gets her way. The more Karkos has claimed “It’s Perfectly Normal” is wrong, the more people have said it’s right. She claims to want “awareness,” but behaves like she would rather have assimilation.

As long as the battleground is one book, this war of “awareness” will actually be one of attrition.

We suggest a truce. The civil charge pending against Karkos for failing to return “It’s Perfectly Normal” should be dropped; the Lewiston library now has multiple copies, and Karkos has paid any potential fines near-equivalent with her remuneration for the missing copies.

Karkos, in return, should withdraw her baseless obscenity complaint against the library, before police can turn her down. This whole entertaining exercise has generated heat, but no light.

And, despite all this attention, no real awareness whatsoever.