For Book Banners, It's Never Enough

Fans of reading restrictions like to point at the most extreme cases, books with graphic depictions of sex acts. And there's no doubt that there are some works out there that even I would be inclined to keep away from younger eyes. 

But the thing to remember is that reading restrictions don't work the extremes of what's out there. There's no instance where folks calling for book bans announce, "Okay, now that this list of ten really objectionable books has been pulled from the library, we're satisfied and you'll never hear from us again."

Getting stuff banned is like some sort of crack-laced super-Pringles, and calls for reasonable restraint always escalate to ridiculous levels.

Take this case in Ohio, where a teacher was suspended because she had four books with LGBTQ characters in her classroom. The books have no sexual actions depicted. They were not required reading, or even prominently displayed. They were just in the classroom. The teacher is suing the district. Good for her. 

Or in Tennessee, where Knox County Schools has its new list of 48 books banned from all district buildings. The list contains the usuals like 13 Reasons Why and Perks of Being a Wallflower, plus works by Ellen Hopkins, there are some others as well. Like Draw Me A Star by Eric Carle, the collage artist who brought us the hungry, hungry caterpillar. But Draw Me A Star includes a pair of rough collage depictions of a nude man and woman (who look way less like a man and women than the hungry caterpillar looks like a caterpillar). If you know the work of architectural artists David McCauley, you may be aware that he did the same thing for the human body. Can't have that. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak is another frequent target because it shows a boy with a penis. Shel Silverstein's A Light In The Attic doesn't have any sex of LGBTQ content, but it's frequently targeted because it promotes disobedience. And there's Slaughterhouse Five, a longstanding feature on ban lists because there is a picture that uses a couple of rough circles to represent breasts (well, that and it's anti-war, but I'm sure that's not a problem). And something by Toni Morrison, because what's a ban list without something from one of our greatest authors.

Or in North Carolina, where the popular children's manga Unico has been yanked, not because of any sexual content at all, but because one mom objects to a scene where a man attacks a cat and where a character uses a gun. Her first grader purchased the book, recommended for grades 3-7, at a Scholastic Book fair. Scholastic Book Fairs are a frequent target of Moms for Liberty and other far right groups pushing a conservative alternative.

It all goes way, way beyond trying to remove a handful of sexually explicit books. For many of the book ban crowd, it's about hiding any aspects of human existence that they don't want to have acknowledged in front of the children and, in some cases, going a step further by trying to create an image of reality that only allows for what they believe should be real. And when you are trying to curate and dictate reality according to your own narrow vision of what reality should be, your work is never done.