Ban a Book for Christ!

The American Library Association celebrates… er… recognizes the Banned Book Week in early October every year. Fortunately, most of the young students facing book banning are mature enough to read the banned books and smart enough to understand their relevance for life in the world as it really is. Unfortunately, those in the school districts and public libraries where books are banned are joined in a countervailing commitment to ignorance and toxic judgmentalism. Rewriting history, a hallmark of autocracies, is a high priority. Racial injustice and LGBTQ+ references are among their favorite targets.

Apparently, they do not want their educational system to teach tolerance and understanding of all sorts of real-world people or to learn from the horrors of the past in order to prevent such horribles from happening again. Oh yes, and they do not see the connection between slavery, brutal discrimination, and cruelty from past historical events, even matters that continue into the present day, in the likes of mass shootings here, the Ukraine invasion and, most recently, the horrors of the Hamas/Israeli war where thousands of innocents have died and will die.

Writing an OpEd for the October 4th Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik expounds further: “Over the last year, according to Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the [American Library Assn.’s] Office for Intellectual Freedom, what has been most striking is the pivot of censorship advocates from books in school libraries to books in public libraries… ‘Last year, about 16% of demands to remove books involved public libraries,’ Caldwell-Stone says. ‘This year, to date, it’s 49%.’

“We’re seeing groups go to school or library board meetings to demand the removal of multiple titles all at once — 25, 50, 100 titles or more, often based on lists they get from advocacy groups on social media… That’s a sea change, she told me, because ‘public libraries are the places that we’ve created for freewheeling inquiry, for the marketplace of ideas. Demands to remove books because they don’t comport with someone’s beliefs or their political or religious agenda are attacks on the very thought of a library as a place that protects 1st amendment rights to access a wide variety of views.’… These amount to demands that ‘the government tell us what to read, what to think, what to believe,’ she says…

“Other than that, not much has changed in the last year about demands for censorship of material accessible in public, except for two things… First, there’s more of it: This year through Aug. 31, the ALA has tracked 695 attempts to remove or otherwise restrict access to library materials, aimed at 1,915 titles. That’s an increase of 20% in the number of titles challenged, making 2023 a high-water mark in a database that dates back 20 years… The association says most of the challenges concerned books written by or about a person of color or a member of the LGBTQ+ community.

“The second change is that a backlash has been gaining strength among parents and others who don’t want their kids or themselves deprived of access to books because fringe members of their communities want to impose their beliefs or political ideologies on everyone else.

“It’s a ‘multi-pronged’ fight, says Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America, the advocacy group for writers, readers and free expression generally, waged in court and state legislatures as well as before city, county, school and library boards… ‘Overwhelmingly, Americans reject book bans,’ Nossel says. ‘They know this is not the concept of free speech that we all are raised with and that we are proud of. When they point out that students have rights and that ‘parents’ rights’ are not just the rights of a single individual who may be objecting, but the rights of the overwhelming majority of parents who want their children to have the freedom to read, they can assert themselves and get these bans reversed.’”

As suggested most frequently book-banning laws, like those in Florida, can cause bans to be triggered by single parent or a single student who might be “uncomfortable” with a book or even a lesson plan. It’s no secret that such efforts to ban books are almost exclusively in venues with very high evangelical constituents who have elected very MAGA politicians to most of the salient elected offices. They impose their personal religious values on those of all other faiths, proselytizing that Christianity should be the designated US official religion, that while tolerating those of other beliefs, but governed by their interpretation of Christian values.

Hiltzik continues: “Things began to change in the 1970s. In that period, the school board in a district neighboring the one I grew up in, following along with a right-wing parents organization, ordered nine books removed from its secondary school libraries as ‘anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Sem[i]tic, and just plain filthy.’

“The board was slapped down by the Supreme Court in a landmark 1982 opinion finding that decisions to remove books once they had been acquired could not be ‘exercised in a narrowly partisan or political manner,’ as was the case there. That was the last time the court ruled on a book ban, and it remains binding precedent.

“Defenders of book-banning often conceal their points behind a scrim of rhetorical hair-splitting or other pettifoggery. After the Florida Department of Education (possibly the most misleadingly-named government agency in the United States) released a list of 300 books removed from school library shelves in 2022, a spokeswoman for the department declared, ‘Florida does not ban books.’ ’” But the recently reconfigured US Supreme Court, representing a dramatic shift to the far right, is reversing precedents and issuing distorted views of the plain meaning of the Constitution in favor of state and local control regardless of constitutional limits, especially in allowing religious doctrine to prevail over First Amendment rights. Stand-back and stand-by!

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you believe in theocracy as “good government,” you are in luck, even though the MAGA-dominated majority in Congress does not seem to know how to govern… at all.