View From the Ramparts: The myth of ‘book bans’
Despite media hysteria, not a single book has been banned
We’re seeing a steady barrage of stories of late about red states “banning” certain books. The left-wing media is making their usual comparisons to Nazis and book burning, and the increasingly partisan NAACP has issued a “travel alert” for Florida based at least in part on supposed “book bans” in the Sunshine State.
(Ironically, the only books that have been burned in this country of late were Bibles burned during BLM protests in Portland three summers ago.)
That doesn’t stop the incessant claim that Republicans are banning books, of course.
Much of the media coverage is based on a recent report by the American Library Association, which issued a list of the “most banned” books in the United States.
And yet ... and yet, every book on that list is freely available for purchase. There is no prohibition on reading the book, no possible punishment for possessing it. Their publishers are not targeted for fines or imprisonment, nor are books being seized or burned.
Instead, what so offends the ALA is that taxpayers insist on having a voice in the selection of books to be purchased by their local public library or school district.
What is really happening isn’t book banning, but librarians being overruled by the folks elected by the taxpayers to run the public libraries and school systems.
And they don’t like it.
There are tens of thousands of new titles published every year in the United States and allied nations. Each public library, each school district, will purchase only a tiny fraction of those.
The question is who decides which titles to purchase?
What the ALA prefers is that its members be allowed to exercise their “expertise” on which books to purchase in secrecy, with no input from the community.
If the ALA’s membership was truly reflective and representative of the communities that employ them, that might be a fine process. Unfortunately, the ALA holds to decidedly left-wing political views — making it fair to extrapolate from that to guess that a majority of its members likely hold similar views. And that those views seep into purchasing decisions, which may not reflect the values of the communities these libraries serve.
Particularly in school libraries, one presumes that before any title is ordered the question is asked as to whether that specific book is appropriate for children of certain ages.
It is only when the folks who foot the bill for both the books and the librarians’ salaries ask the same question of age-appropriateness that the we suddenly hear of “banning” books.
But if choosing not to purchase a specific work were truly an act of censorship, then I’m afraid I must plead guilt to “censoring” Yoko Ono these past 40 years.
The bigger question ought to be why are book-purchasing decisions made in secret in the first place? What supposed “expertise” could librarians possibly possess on what makes a book appropriate for this or that age group?
Oddly, when woke activists mount very public pressure campaigns to try to get major publishers like Penguin, Simon & Schuster, or Hachette to refuse to publish books from certain viewpoints or by certain authors (such as the proposed blanket ban on any former Trump administration members), the ALA has nothing to say. And when those same activists pressure Amazon and Barnes & Noble to “deplatform” designated authors and viewpoints by refusing to carry those books, the ALA is likewise silent.
Give the wokesters credit: Preventing a book from ever being published in the first place is not only far less messy than burning those already in circulation, it’s more effective at silencing dissent as well.
That the ALA feels that the democratization of public library procurement is more of a threat than behind-the-scenes efforts to prevent books from ever seeing the light of day betrays the real motive at work here.
Power.
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Something tells me that no one in the Fahrenheit 451 forest is going to be a woke book.
Well said