Linda Dunn
Isn’t it ironic that at the same time we’re trusting (and seemingly expecting) teachers to become expert marksmen and protect our children from bad actors armed with “assault weapons,” we don’t trust them to choose age-appropriate books for their classrooms? Or to professionally and accurately teach our children true facts that might be “uncomfortable?” Or to accommodate children who are struggling with the realization they don’t fit into what we as a society consider “normal?”
And we want to turn public school librarians into felons for daring to give our children books that we fear might lead them to develop values different from our own?
This is dangerous for a reason best explained by Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom: “When you choose censorship as your tool for controlling access to information and controlling individuals’ ability to learn more about various ideas, inevitably it’s going to sweep up ideas and materials that you actually agree with.”
Governor Holcomb recently signed into law a bill that requires schools to publish their library catalogues online, create a process in which community members can request certain books be banned, and removes the legal defense librarians currently have to claim a book was available for “educational” purposes if felony charges arose against them for making available books that are “harmful to minors.”
According to the Indiana Code, “harmful to minors” means the material contains:
- nudity, sexual content or “sado-masochistic abuse”
- a persuasiveness for minors to engage in sexual activities
- offensive content to community standards for adults considering what’s suitable to minors to see
- content void of “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” for kids
How many books did you read as a child that would have been banned under these “guidelines?” And why must we subject school librarians to being charged with a felony for allowing a child to read a book that their parent finds objectionable?
The Bible is the sixth most challenged book. Do we want a situation where a librarian can become a felon because they allowed a child to check out a Bible?
The safest and least expensive solution for schools will be to simply strip classrooms of all but textbooks and close their school libraries.
Fortunately, most children will still be able to visit public libraries.
Until the book banners come for them as well.
And it’s not just books that many groups in our country want to ban in the name of “protecting the children.” One school recently banned “Rainbowland” from being performed by first-graders because “[Miley] Cyrus is controversial” and Dolly Parton had too many “drag queen followers.”
Earlier this year, a Texas school district canceled a field trip to see James and the Giant Peach because eight actors covered 20 characters and thus some of them were performing cross-gender which, as Main Street Theater marketing director Shannon Emerick noted, “…has been the case for as long as theater has existed.”
Famous artwork is also controversial as noted by the recent dust-up about a principal being fired for allegedly failing to warn parents their children would be viewing Michelangelo’s David. Many dictionaries and encyclopedias include a picture of this famous work. Should these be included in book bans?
The list of things various groups demand we ban could fill a very thick book and if it did, that book would presumably be banned from school libraries.
We boast about this being a free country, but when it comes to letting other people enjoy their freedom to read something we don’t like, sing a song we dislike or even just live as their authentic selves, we’re suddenly opposed to them having the same rights as the rest of us.
And it’s not sufficient to prevent our family members from doing whatever it is we dislike; we have to extend those bans to people we don’t even know.
The US has dropped to 17th in the world for personal freedoms and 125th for literacy. We can sit on our hands and watch silently as more and more freedoms are stripped away and more and more seemingly innocent acts become felonies, or we can just give up and give the conservatives what they want:
Just ban everything.
Except firearms, of course.
That’s protected by the Second Amendment.
The rest of the Constitution apparently doesn’t matter.
A lifelong resident of Hancock County, Linda Dunn is an author and retired Department of Defense employee.
