"...It’s important to note that most Americans — including a majority of Republicans — support teachers and librarians and oppose book bans. The attacks are the work of a minuscule minority of conservatives. When The Washington Post analyzed 986 complaints against specific books filed during the 2021-2022 school year, it found that the majority were issued by the same 11 people. (You read that right. 11.) Across the red states, hundreds of popular titles have been removed from public school and community libraries, in many cases on the basis of a single complaint.
Americans are finally beginning to fight back, and the pushback isn’t coming only from advocacy organizations like the American Library Association and PEN America. Authors and artists are fighting back. Students are fighting back. Parents are fighting back. If everyone who opposes book bans got involved, the whole effort would die overnight. Book banners do not have numbers on their side.
They don’t have reality on their side, either. These days books exist in forms that cannot be reduced to ashes. If your library is no longer allowed to offer a particular title, there’s a good chance you can get it online from the Digital Public Library of America, which just launched an initiative called The Banned Book Club. Banned titles are available through a free e-reader app..."
Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/opinion/book-bans-education-librarians.html?smid=em-share
#10
ReplyDeleteThe idea of books being banned based on a single complaint is absolutely insane. If anything else operated this way, society would be unable to function. For example, nobody would be able to have jobs because every employee has had a complaint against them at one point or another. 11 people filing 900 complaints is a waste of time to everyone.
I remember reading Carrie by Stephen King from my middle school library when I was only twelve years old. The book was full of obscenities and explicit content, yet the children's book "Bad Kitty" has been banned for mentioning a same-sex couple.
I remember this happening with film in middle school, too. In 6th grade social studies we were allowed to watch a movie about Greek mythology that contained nudity but we had to turn off the Children's show "Good Luck Charlie" because one episode that we weren't even watching contained a child with same-sex parents.
Other book topics get banned also, like topics of racism or the holocaust. Ultimately, extremist parents want to keep their children sheltered from the world so they can feed them their own rhetoric. It is not right or fair to the rest of the population.