Banned Books Week seems like the perfect time to point out that we aren’t really in the midst of a book-banning crisis.
The left would like you to think that we are. While they’re getting people (actually) banned from YouTube and social media, they’re trying to sell a counter-narrative – that conservatives are the real censors.
When the right gets a book removed, the media refers to it as a ban. When the left gets a book like “To Kill A Mockingbird” removed, it’s referred to as just that – a removal. Life moves on.
They also conveniently ignore the fact that a lot of the books being objected to by the right have graphic, arguably pornographic, descriptions and drawings and are available in school libraries.
Mainstream news articles claim that most of the “banned” books are by LGBTQ people, ignoring the fact that the books contain drawings of oral sex, descriptions of masturbation, and other material parents might not want their kids reading without their knowledge. Some of these same mainstream stations had to cut away from Gov. DeSantis when he held up some of the offending pages because the images weren’t something we allow on TV.
They’re also wildly overstating the “bans” themselves.
PEN America recently said their annual study showed there were “3,362 book bans affecting 1,557 unique titles” in public schools across the country during the last school year. This is because they included any action taken against a book based on its content by parent or community challenges. They count books with age restrictions and parental permission requirements as banned if those books didn’t have those restrictions previously. They count books that have been removed for review and not yet returned as banned.
A volunteer committee at one school whose job was to review titles was accused of book banning for not approving some of those titles. The National Review pointed out that…
"If parents want, they can, in only a few minutes, order This Book Is Gay, Out of Darkness, or We Are the Ants at a reasonable price. But Granbury Independent School District has no constitutional obligation to stock its shelves with novels touching on rape, abortion, or transgenderism … there’s no rule that state schools must keep books on a shelf in perpetuity simply because a librarian ordered it. If such requirements did exist, do they also have a duty to carry The Road to Serfdom or The War against Boys? Why are schools banning Heroes of Liberty or Ben Shapiro’s books?”
And so, to butcher a quote from the author of a famously banned book, the news of the banning of these books has been greatly exaggerated.
We have 2 librarians in my book club and we recently had a contentious discussion on this topic. Nuance is dead, I think.
The hypocrisy of the democrats has no bounds and certainly is not limited to claims of book banning. While driving today, I listened to an radio interview where a democrat U.S. Representative was berating the Republican party for the "chaos" in the House. Chaos which the democrats voted in block to create. He expressed outrage that while the Republicans were attempting to decide on a new speaker, nothing was being done on important issues such as the economy, cities like New York being overrun with illegal aliens, etc., all issues created by the democrats. It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.