The Battle For Books

Those Book Burning Bastards Are At It Again

[Just a heads-up. I’m feeling pretty sweary today so if you don’t like to hear salty language, you may want to skip this piece.]

So, there’s an awful lot of book-banning going on these days and I’m feeling some kind of way about it. For a country that values its freedoms and liberties above just about everything, this kind of censorship is an affront to all those liberal democratic values. There are three stories in particular that have my pants in a bunch.

First, in 2021, a group of stick-up-their-ass snowflakes residing in Llano County (Texas, of course) decided that the PUBLIC library should not be making certain children’s books available. Their objections were that they books were inappropriate. Surprising absolutely nobody, the banned titles included a few important texts on the history of racism in America [Isabel Wilkerson’s, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and Susan Bartoletti’s, They Called Themselves the K.K.K.], the usual LGBTQIA+ literature [Tillie Walden’s, Spinning], and silly books about butts [Dawn McMillan’s, I Need a New Butt].

Llano County has a library board with a process for reviewing citizen’s objections to books in their collection. The library board, after consulting with the county commissioner’s board, decided the books were not inappropriate and left them in the collection. Well, unaccustomed to being told, “no,” our plucky brigade of meddling morons appealed to a county judge to intervene, and he did. Judge Ron Cunningham told the public library to remove the titles in question. At the same time, the county board decided to dissolve the existing library board and appoint the plaintiffs to the new board. To make a short story long, a lawsuit was filed by some pissed off local citizens and a federal judge ruled that the library board may not remove any more books while the lawsuit is pending.

Yes, book bans are tying up federal circuit court dockets because a few moms listen to too much talk radio and, all historical precedence to the contrary, believe that censoring media will make all the uncomfortable shit go away.

It’s not just Texas, of course. Ignorance is more contagious than COVID by a long shot. Missouri house Republicans just voted to defund ALL the public libraries in the state. That budget line item amounts to just $4.5M of a $45B state budget. It’s a miserably small budget, so this is clearly not about dazzling the fiscal conservatives in Missouri. In 2022, the state passed a law prohibiting sexually explicit content in school libraries. The Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association, with the help of the ACLU, filed a lawsuit against the state arguing the law violates the First Amendment. The dumbasses in Jefferson City aren’t standing for that shit. So, the move to eliminate the state budget for public libraries is just sour grapes.

Then there’s Jamestown, Michigan. A small, incorporated township in Western Michigan where, in 2022, SIXTY-TWO PERCENT of primary voters decided to defund the township’s library system. A fifty-person confederacy of dunces threw a fit about Gender Queer, Kiss Number 8, and Spinning, books with LGBTQIA+ themes, because they believed the library was grooming young children. Now, if any of you know actual librarians, you are probably keenly aware that they mostly don’t like people. They like libraries because they are places that help other people keep to themselves. So, the idea that they would be grooming children so they could spend time with them is ridiculous. But, nonetheless, the dingbats prevailed, despite the library board standing firm and refusing to ban books. The township public library is going to close this year.

This is where the unchristian swearing begins. You have been warned…

There is no right granted or implied by any legal standard that protects an individual from being offended. But, despite a long and detailed historical account of book banning, one that demonstrates its connection to totalitarianism, there persists a whole lot of ignorant fucking people who think it’s how we make America great again. You don’t need a graduate degree in history to unravel how book bans have been used in the past century. Book bans are an entirely ineffective way for a political or religious faction to obtain or reinforce its power. There is no other purpose for banning a book. Books don’t get banned because of a preponderance of correlation errors or poor grammar. They get banned because a childish contingent of entitled people are protecting their cultural, religious, or economic hegemony. That’s it.

Targeting books on America’s racist past has become a form of soft racism. The racist people banning the books are still able to say that they’re against racism while hiding that they don’t like the way these books make them uncomfortable about their racism. The plea is something to the effect of, “Why do you want white children to feel bad about being white?” Well, Gayle, I want them to feel bad enough that they learn not to enslave people again.

Grooming is a real thing. Bad people do it all the time to manipulate other people into doing bad things. So, it’s not that I don’t think that young people are being groomed by adults who want to have sex with them. That is a horrifying reality of the world we live in. However, a book that references a gay or lesbian character ain’t grooming shit. There is a legal definition for grooming, or enticement, and it is a method used by offenders that involves building trust with a child and the adults around a child in an effort to gain access to and time alone with them. Referring to or informing about LGBT people is not grooming. Drag queens reading books to children is not grooming children for sexual abuse any more than a war veteran reading to children is recruiting children for combat.

Banning The Hate U Give or Brave New World or The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t about grooming or reverse racism or libertinism. It’s a desperate ploy at holding onto power. And let’s be honest, banning The Hate U Give is simply a way to get around saying publicly that you are either afraid of or dislike black people. Book banning is a soft form of prejudice, but it hides nothing.

Now, you may ask, “But what about explicit sexual material? Do you want your third grader reading about or seeing people having sex?” No. No I don’t. But you know what? School librarians are pretty smart folks. They understand this concern. They observe standards of age-appropriate language and content and organize their books accordingly. Public libraries follow the same standards. My oldest child was a very early reader and developed a voracious appetite for books. He was always reading far above his grade level. He was in grade school and plowing through YA novels and getting bored with them. We had to make some choices along the way about what he was ready to read. We did tell him that he needed to be older to read certain books, but he found alternatives and our intervention did nothing to slow him down.

If you don’t like what is in a book, try doing what adults do, don’t read it. Hell, don’t let your kids read it. Just grow the fuck up. I can’t stop anyone from being racist, sexist, or transphobic. I can’t make someone who hates Muslims suddenly like them. But you know what can fix all those problems? Books. Fucking books. You get a chance to enter into someone else’s story and see life in myriad ways. You can play with ideas in a safe space for a while. If you hate black people, you can read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and maybe understand what life was like for a black man growing up during Jim Crow and the struggles that made him who he was.

Here's my hot take, though. The book banning brigade are zealous Christians. That’s not the hot take, by the way. Here it is: I am convinced that their crusade against books that they don’t like stems from the way they read the bible. It’s not that the bible tells them to hate those things in the books they want to ban. It doesn’t. It’s that some enthusiastic asshole with zero knowledge of the scriptures or the Christian faith convinced them that the bible is a rule book and that it is to be taken literally. This empty-headed narcissist then locks these people in an echo chamber that he says will protect them from the evil outside. And they read their bibles and approved books about the bible that reinforce that the bible is a rule book with some talismanic power to protect them from suffering and poverty if they just memorize it and pray hard enough with it. Now, there is always one of these people who still sends their kid to public school. One day they find a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in their kid’s backpack. Now, the idiot-in-residence at the local church preached some sermons about how this book, a book he has not read, teaches kids how to be witches and use demonic spells. And you know why he believes this? Because he believes that the primeval history in Genesis proves that the world is 6000 years old instead of appreciating the order it describes. He insists on reading the Proverbs as some kind of promise from God instead of understanding them as bits of wisdom and knowledge from human beings on how to live well. To summarize, he lacks an imagination. He can’t find God anywhere but in the pages of a book. The bad news for these people is that God is not in the bible. In fact, the bible is an incomplete snapshot of God. At best, it is a glimpse into the created order as experienced by Ancient Near Eastern nomadic people trying to find their place in the world.

Books, music, and visual arts will always be a target for those who seek power because they are powerful vessels for containing and conveying meaning. The fight to preserve our books and libraries is an existential one. The book-banning contingent is working really hard to bring our libraries to heel. The public library may be our most important democratic institution and it is one worth fighting for. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.