Banning books in schools (1 Viewer)

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    Optimus Prime

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    Excellent article I thought deserved its own thread
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    On the surface, it would appear that book censors and censored authors like myself can agree on one thing: Books are powerful.

    Particularly books for children and teens.

    Why else would people like me spend so much time and energy writing them?

    Why else would censors spend so much time and energy trying to keep them out of kids’ hands?

    In a country where the average adult is reading fewer and fewer books, it’s a surprise to find Americans arguing so much about them.

    In this election year, parents and politicians — so many politicians — are jumping into the fray to say how powerful books can be.

    Granted, politicians often make what I do sound like witchcraft, but I take this as a compliment.

    I’ll admit, one of my first thoughts about the current wildfire of attempted censorship was: How quaint.

    Conservatives seemed to be dusting off their playbook from 1958, when the only way our stories could get to kids was through schools and libraries.

    While both are still crucial sanctuaries for readers, they’re hardly the only options. Plenty of booksellers supply titles that are taken off school shelves.

    And words can be very widely shared free of charge on social media and the rest of the internet. If you take my book off a shelf, you keep it away from that shelf, but you hardly keep it away from readers.

    As censorship wars have raged in so many communities, damaging the lives of countless teachers, librarians, parents and children, it’s begun to feel less and less quaint.

    This is not your father’s book censorship…..

    Here’s something I never thought I’d be nostalgic for: sincere censors. When my first novel, “Boy Meets Boy,” was published in 2003, it was immediately the subject of many challenges, some of which kept the book from ever getting on a shelf in the first place.

    At the time, a challenge usually meant one parent trying to get a book pulled from a school or a library, going through a formal process.

    I often reminded myself to try to find some sympathy for these parents; yes, they were wrong, and their desire to control what other people in the community got to read was wrong — but more often than not, the challenge was coming from fear of a changing world, a genuine (if incorrect) belief that being gay would lead kids straight to ruination and hell, and/or the misbegotten notion that if all the books that challenged the (homophobic, racist) status quo went away, then the status quo would remain intact.

    It was, in some ways, as personal to them as it was to those of us on the other side of the challenge.

    And nine times out of 10, the book would remain on the shelf.

    It’s not like that now. What I’ve come to believe, as I’ve talked to authors and librarians and teachers, is that attacks are less and less about the actual books.

    We’re being used as targets in a much larger proxy war.

    The goal of that war isn’t just to curtail intellectual freedom but to eviscerate the public education system in this country.

    Censors are scorching the earth, without care for how many kids get burned.

    Racism and homophobia are still very much present, but it’s also a power grab, a money grab. The goal for many is a for-profit, more authoritarian and much less diverse culture, one in which truth is whatever you’re told it is, your identity is determined by its acceptability and the past is a lie that the future is forced to emulate.

    The politicians who holler and post and draw up their lists of “harmful” books aren’t actually scared of our books.

    They are using our books to scare people.

     
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    ATLANTA (AP) — The U.S. Department of Education has found that a suburban Atlanta school district's decision to remove some books from its libraries may have created a hostile environment that violated federal laws against race and sex discrimination.

    The legal intervention by the department's Office of Civil Rights could curb efforts to ban books in other public school districts nationwide, especially when bans are focused on books that include content about LGBTQ and nonwhite people.

    The Forsyth County school district settled the complaint, agreeing to explain the book removal process to students and offer “supportive measures” to students who may have been harmed. Forsyth County will also include questions about the issue in its yearly school climate survey of middle and high school students next year.

    The federal intervention came after months of contention over books in the 54,000-student district. Forsyth is Georgia's most affluent county, a rapidly growing suburb about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of downtown Atlanta.

    Forsyth County in January 2022 removed eight books, including Toni Morrison's “The Bluest Eye,” but allowed seven to return after further consideration. It excluded only “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a memoir about growing up as gay Black man by George M. Johnson.

    Federal officials wrote in a letter Friday that Forsyth County erred not so much in the removals, saying “the district limited its book screening process to sexually explicit material.” Instead, officials found that the problem was how district officials talked about removals at school board meetings.

    “Communications at board meetings conveyed the impression that books were being screened to exclude diverse authors and characters, including people who are LGBTQI+ and authors who are not white, leading to increased fears and possibly harassment,” the department wrote............

     
    Communists. Satanists. Neighbors who lace Halloween candy with heroin.


    Every era has its bogeyman, the cartoonish villain who parents worry will corrupt their babies. Today’s fearsome predator, apparently, is the local librarian.


    States across the nation are passing laws to criminally prosecute school and library personnel for providing books deemed sexually explicit, obscene or otherwise “harmful” to children, as The Post’s Hannah Natanson reported.

    To be clear: Every state already has laws on the books banning distribution of obscene material to children, but most have carveouts to ensure that educators can provide accurate information about sex ed and other critical subjects.

    In the past couple of years, though, at least five states have successfully enacted legislation that further puts librarians, educators or book publishers in the crosshairs.

    An additional 15 states have introduced similar bills. As a result, librarians might reasonably fear that stocking picture books about gay penguins could subject them to steep fines (up to $10,000 in North Dakota) or years of imprisonment (up to 10 years, in Oklahoma)……..

    This criminalization of library science dovetails with other efforts in recent years to protect students from the morally corrupting influence of woke material — as well as, at times, the morally corrupting influence of un-woke material.


    Recall that just a few years ago, much of public education discourse involved debates over whether students should be exposed to depictions of Jewish ghettoes in World War II, Klansmen in the United States, or other disturbing historical events.

    Objections primarily came from progressives, who argued that such materials might upset children from historically marginalized groups.


    As recently as 2020, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was one of the most frequently challenged books nationwide, largely because of its use of racial slurs, according to the American Library Association.

    Today, members of the same political coalition that once mocked progressives for demanding “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” wish to shield children from the potential trauma of reading “Heather Has Two Mommies.”

    Those who once admonished students for being snowflakes now apparently believe children are too fragile to mount a musical with a gay character — or access reference books on puberty……..

    In Oklahoma, which ranks 49th in education nationwide, the state’s top school official is devoting energy to banning use of the word “diverse” in computer science curriculums because it is too “woke.”

    In a telling Florida incident, a science teacher was investigated this month for showing her students a Disney film. Her transgression, apparently, was featuring a movie with a gay character — not, as you might imagine, screening a fictional film as an ecology lesson. (I speak as a product of the Florida school system, where my seventh-grade physics unit revolved around a screening of “Flubber.”)…….

     
    Across the country, right-wing activists are seeking to ban thousands of books from schools and other public libraries. Those promoting the bans often claim they are acting to protect children from pornography.

    But the bans frequently target books "by and about people of color and LGBTQ individuals." Many of the books deemed pornography by activities are actually highly acclaimed novels.

    Now, one state is fighting back.

    Illinois is poised to become the first state to ban book bans. Legislation approved by the Illinois legislature, which Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) is expected to sign imminently, establishes an official policy against book bans:

    It is further declared to be the policy of the State to encourage and protect the freedom of libraries and library systems to acquire materials without external limitation and to be protected against attempts to ban, remove, or otherwise restrict access to books or other materials.
    The policy has some teeth. The Illinois government provides about $62 million in funding to libraries around the state. Last year, this money was granted to 877 public libraries and 712 school libraries.

    In order to be eligible for these grants, a library must "adopt the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights… or, in the alternative, develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials within the library or library system."............

     
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    A coalition of publishers, booksellers, librarians and readers filed a lawsuit on Friday against the Arkansas state government, over a book ban law set to go into effect in August.

    Carol Coffey, the president of the Arkansas Library Association and a plaintiff in the case, told the Guardian: “Library workers across Arkansas are rightly concerned that the overly broad edicts of Act 372 will prevent them from serving their patrons as they have always done, by providing a wide variety of materials to fill their information needs, and perhaps more importantly, materials that allow each child to see themselves in the books in their library.”

    The plaintiffs argue the new law is illegal because it is a direct attack on free speech guaranteed by the first and 14th amendments to the US constitution…….

     
    SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The Good Book is being treated like a bad book in Utah after a parent frustrated by efforts to ban materials from schools convinced a suburban district that some Bible verses were too vulgar or violent for younger children.

    And the Book of Mormon could be next.

    The 72,000-student Davis School District north of Salt Lake City removed the Bible from its elementary and middle schools while keeping it in high schools after a committee reviewed the scripture in response to a parental complaint. The district has removed other titles, including Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” and John Green’s “Looking for Alaska,” following a 2022 state law requiring districts to include parents in decisions over what constitutes “sensitive material.”

    On Friday, a complaint was submitted about the signature scripture of the predominant faith in Utah, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church. District spokesperson Chris Williams confirmed that someone filed a review request for the Book of Mormon but would not say what reasons were listed. Citing a school board privacy policy, he also would not say whether it was from the same person who complained about the Bible.



    Representatives for the church declined to comment on the challenge. Members of the faith also read the Bible.

    Williams said the district doesn’t differentiate between requests to review books and doesn’t consider whether complaints may be submitted as satire. The reviews are handled by a committee made up of teachers, parents and administrators in the largely conservative community.

    The committee published its decision about the Bible in an online database of review requests and did not elaborate on its reasoning or which passages it found overly violent or vulgar…….

     
    SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The Good Book is being treated like a bad book in Utah after a parent frustrated by efforts to ban materials from schools convinced a suburban district that some Bible verses were too vulgar or violent for younger children.

    And the Book of Mormon could be next.

    The 72,000-student Davis School District north of Salt Lake City removed the Bible from its elementary and middle schools while keeping it in high schools after a committee reviewed the scripture in response to a parental complaint. The district has removed other titles, including Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” and John Green’s “Looking for Alaska,” following a 2022 state law requiring districts to include parents in decisions over what constitutes “sensitive material.”

    On Friday, a complaint was submitted about the signature scripture of the predominant faith in Utah, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church. District spokesperson Chris Williams confirmed that someone filed a review request for the Book of Mormon but would not say what reasons were listed. Citing a school board privacy policy, he also would not say whether it was from the same person who complained about the Bible.



    Representatives for the church declined to comment on the challenge. Members of the faith also read the Bible.

    Williams said the district doesn’t differentiate between requests to review books and doesn’t consider whether complaints may be submitted as satire. The reviews are handled by a committee made up of teachers, parents and administrators in the largely conservative community.

    The committee published its decision about the Bible in an online database of review requests and did not elaborate on its reasoning or which passages it found overly violent or vulgar…….


    Millions of people die. It's the most violent book ever.
     
    Arkansas booksellers and librarians have filed a lawsuit challenging a new state law that would punish them with up to a year in prison for providing “harmful” books to people under age 18.


    The suit challenges two parts of the law, Act 372, which is due to take effect on Aug. 1. One section makes it a criminal offense to knowingly lend, make available or show to a minor any material deemed “harmful” to them.

    State law defines material as “harmful to minors” if it contains nudity or sexual content and appeals to a “prurient interest in sex,” “lacks serious literary, scientific, medical, artistic or political value for minors” and if, by current community standards, it is “inappropriate for minors.”


    The plaintiffs also contest a section of the law that requires county and municipal libraries to establish written guidelines for the “selection, relocation and retention” of materials, including a process for individuals to challenge their “appropriateness” and request that they be moved to an area inaccessible to children.

    By passing Act 372, which also strikes a statute that protected librarians from being prosecuted for circulating material “claimed to be obscene,”

    Arkansas became one of at least seven states that have passed laws criminalizing librarians and school employees who provide books deemed sexually explicit or “harmful” to minors, The Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson reported in May. Another dozen states have considered similar bills.


    None of the bill’s four sponsors in the Arkansas General Assembly responded to a request for comment. In a May op-ed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, state Sen. Dan Sullivan defended Act 372, saying that it simply expands existing prohibitions on “displaying” harmful material and creates a process for parents to “appeal the decisions of unelected librarians to local elected officials.”…….

     
    My question - that is rarely answered - is this: If you oppose "banning books," in public school libraries does that mean that any librarian should be able to make any book, magazine, or text material on the internet available to any child of any age? That any objection to a particular selection should be immediately dismissed to avoid being a book ban supporter?

    For example if "Heather has Two Mommies" was subtitled "and they BOTH Love Honor and Obey her Morman Daddy!" would the people who support it, still support it?
     
    My question - that is rarely answered - is this: If you oppose "banning books," in public school libraries does that mean that any librarian should be able to make any book, magazine, or text material on the internet available to any child of any age? That any objection to a particular selection should be immediately dismissed to avoid being a book ban supporter?

    For example if "Heather has Two Mommies" was subtitled "and they BOTH Love Honor and Obey her Morman Daddy!" would the people who support it, still support it?
    Yes. Those that don't like it don't have to read it. Keep your kids away from libraries if you think that is happening. Spoiler alert, it's not. The fact that you have to imagine the worst possible situation to try to get a "gotcha" moment is telling of the weakness of your position.
     
    My question - that is rarely answered - is this: If you oppose "banning books," in public school libraries does that mean that any librarian should be able to make any book, magazine, or text material on the internet available to any child of any age? That any objection to a particular selection should be immediately dismissed to avoid being a book ban supporter?

    For example if "Heather has Two Mommies" was subtitled "and they BOTH Love Honor and Obey her Morman Daddy!" would the people who support it, still support it?
    Why is it, in your scenario, that the parents don’t know what books their kids check out? Why do you want to tell other families what books their kids can or most importantly - can NOT read?
     
    My question - that is rarely answered -
    I'll take that at face value.
    is this: If you oppose "banning books," in public school libraries does that mean that any librarian should be able to make any book, magazine, or text material on the internet available to any child of any age? That any objection to a particular selection should be immediately dismissed to avoid being a book ban supporter?

    For example if "Heather has Two Mommies" was subtitled "and they BOTH Love Honor and Obey her Morman Daddy!" would the people who support it, still support it?
    This sounds like a feeble attempt at a "gotcha!", but personally, I think such a book can be a tool to teach my child about the misogyny in Abrahamic religions, (and the correct spelling of Mormon :hihi: ).

    You wrote "banning books" in quotes... it's not just about book banning, it is about the what, the why, and the who: right wing white nationalist religious zealots trying to whitewash history to their liking, and eliminate everything and everyone that doesn't fit within their right-wing white nationalist religious zealot ideology.

    Ironic, how bent out of shape the GOP got when Hillary Clinton said "it takes a village to raise a child"... good times. Apparently it takes a village and the federal government.
     
    Why is it, in your scenario, that the parents don’t know what books their kids check out? Why do you want to tell other families what books their kids can or most importantly - can NOT read?
    As far as I know, libraries do not notify parents of what books their kids check out. If a kid checks out a book their parents would object to them reading, they may have read it three times on the bus before the parent ever sees it.

    I'd be happy with the system that parents good opt out of having their kids check out books all together, has to be notified of the title before their student checks out a book, or simply says whatever the librarian wants my kid to read I'm sure is perfectly fine.
     
    As far as I know, libraries do not notify parents of what books their kids check out. If a kid checks out a book their parents would object to them reading, they may have read it three times on the bus before the parent ever sees it.

    I'd be happy with the system that parents good opt out of having their kids check out books all together, has to be notified of the title before their student checks out a book, or simply says whatever the librarian wants my kid to read I'm sure is perfectly fine.

    You would be ok with a system where parents say their kids aren't allowed to read library books?
     
    Brandi Burkman arrived at the Texas school board meeting with a printed speech, a plastic-sheeted library book and a swelling sense of fury.

    The 43-year-old mother of three approached the podium at the Sept. 9, 2021, meeting of the Leander Independent School District board with her 16-year-old son in tow. As Burkman began to speak, the teen hoisted white posters scrawled with sentences in black marker. They were taken from the book he’d discovered a week earlier in his AP English classroom and brought home for supplemental reading: “Lawn Boy,” a novel by Jonathan Evison.

    Burkman’s three-minute speech recounted passages that describe a sexual encounter between two 10-year-old boys. Quoting pages 19, 91, 174 and 230, she told the roomful of adults how the boys meet in the bushes after a church youth group gathering, touch each other’s penises and progress to oral sex.

    “What sort of diversity are you intending to teach my child with material like this?” Burkman asked, her voice shaking, her son expressionless. “Who normalizes sex acts between fourth-graders?”

    She did not wait for an answer: “I’ll tell you who. Pedophiles.”

    Burkman’s remarks set off a tsunami of condemnation that, a year later, would see the book “Lawn Boy” challenged in at least 35 school districts spanning 20 states and temporarily removed from shelves in almost half those places, according to a Washington Post analysis. Most of those districts — 63 percent — later returned the text to shelves after a review, while at least four banned the book for good. The plethora of complaints, 87 percent of which were brought by parents, The Post found, rendered “Lawn Boy” the second-most challenged book of 2021, according to the American Library Association.

    The complaints against “Lawn Boy” came amid a historic nationwide spike in schoolbook challenges and bans as conflicts simmer over what to teach about race, racism, history, sex and gender. Already, 25 states have passed laws restricting what teachers can say about these topics or limiting the rights of transgender students at school, a Post analysis previously found.

    “Lawn Boy,” and the people who targeted it, also illustrate how misinformation germinates. Days after Burkman’s speech, a Virginia mother inspired by her comments falsely asserted during a school board meeting that “Lawn Boy” depicts a sexual encounter between an adult man and a 10-year-old. Her claim, caught on video, was repeated on social media and in news reports and magnified by prominent politicians, spawning pedophilia claims in nearly a dozen school districts, The Post found.

    The saga of “Lawn Boy” further shows how concerns about public education spread, fueled by conservative media coverage, political speeches and advocacy from religious and parents’ rights groups. In response, mothers and fathers across the country scoured their school library catalogues, signed up for public comment at school board meetings and filed challenges against books.

    And what happened to “Lawn Boy” reveals the little room left for nuance or forgiveness in the American political debate. Evison, the author, never meant for his book to be placed in school libraries, he told The Post in an interview. He was surprised when the American Library Association gave “Lawn Boy” an award in 2019 for its appeal to teens.

    Evison believes some librarians who chose the novel did so because of the award — and he says that, if any recommended it to lower- or middle-schoolers, they probably confused it with the children’s book “Lawn Boy,” by Gary Paulsen. (The Post found no documented cases in which this confusion happened.)............

    If the author of Lawn Boy did not think that book should be in school libraries, doesn't that mean that one need not be a right wing racist bigot transfer homophobe knuckle dragging Christian Fundy in order to oppose certain books being in school libraries? Is it possible that there are some books which are appropriate for kids to read with parental supervision and guidance, but not necessarily to be made available to them with no such guidance?

    Why do you think and organization like the American Library Association decided that it was a wonderful book for kids?

    For what it's worth, and more on a humorous note, I was a person who confused the children's book Lawn Boy with the inappropriate for children book lawn boy. I read it to see what was the issue and I thought it was because the children's book Lawn Boy is about a kid who inherits a lawn mower and makes money with it. I assume Democrats would hate it because it seemed to advocate a form of capitalism. Actually not a form of capitalism just basic capitalism.
     
    If the author of Lawn Boy did not think that book should be in school libraries, doesn't that mean that one need not be a right wing racist bigot transfer homophobe knuckle dragging Christian Fundy in order to oppose certain books being in school libraries?

    No, but that doesn't necessarily make them right, does it?

    Is it possible that there are some books which are appropriate for kids to read with parental supervision and guidance, but not necessarily to be made available to them with no such guidance?

    The librarian provides guidance. The trained, informed librarian.

    Why do you think and organization like the American Library Association decided that it was a wonderful book for kids?

    I don't know, I've never read it. Have you?

    For what it's worth, and more on a humorous note, I was a person who confused the children's book Lawn Boy with the inappropriate for children book lawn boy. I read it to see what was the issue and I thought it was because the children's book Lawn Boy is about a kid who inherits a lawn mower and makes money with it. I assume Democrats would hate it because it seemed to advocate a form of capitalism. Actually not a form of capitalism just basic capitalism.

    What would you say to a book that has graphic depictions of incest, rape, and sex with well-hung and virile men? Does that sound like a children's book?
     
    As far as I know, libraries do not notify parents of what books their kids check out. If a kid checks out a book their parents would object to them reading, they may have read it three times on the bus before the parent ever sees it
    This smacks of someone frightened that their children might find out the stuff they've been taught is filled with BS. What is it that you need to hide from your kids so important to you that you want to violate others people's rights?
     
    As far as I know, libraries do not notify parents of what books their kids check out. If a kid checks out a book their parents would object to them reading, they may have read it three times on the bus before the parent ever sees it.

    I'd be happy with the system that parents good opt out of having their kids check out books all together, has to be notified of the title before their student checks out a book, or simply says whatever the librarian wants my kid to read I'm sure is perfectly fine.
    The public library has no time nor the funds to notify parents. If the parents are so paranoid that their kid will see something they shouldn’t they shouldn’t send their kid to the library at all.

    If you‘re talking about schools, I would imagine you can tell them your kid can’t check out books or tell their teacher that you don’t want them to have books.

    Or, you know - here’s a thought - if your child sees something that causes questions, you could use it as a learning experience. You could discuss it with your child and tell them your point of view. That seems a lot more reasonable to me than teaching your child that you don’t value books, which is sort of what they would assume if you kept them out of the library.
     
    No, but that doesn't necessarily make them right, does it?
    Nope.
    The librarian provides guidance. The trained, informed librarian.
    The same librarians who provided "Lawn Boy" by Evison to children.
    I don't know, I've never read it. Have you?
    Indeed I have. It has a adult narrator who describes explictly oral sex between himself and a 4th grade ten year old boy. This isn't a sweet puppy love story that happens to have a couple of males crushing on each other instead of a boy and a girl. If it was about a boy and a girl and was that explicit, I would say that it is child pornography, if the written word can be child pornography.
    What would you say to a book that has graphic depictions of incest, rape, and sex with well-hung and virile men? Does that sound like a children's book?
    No, and if you mean the bible, I don't believe that every part of it is suitable for children.

    When I was a child, I was taught the bible through children's stories with illustrations of animals climbing up the ramp to the ark and Jesus carrying the cross. It was a sanitized version, the Mel Gipson version would not have been shown to me as a child.

    At an appropriate age, a young person can learn that the men of Sodom bent over backwards to be welcoming to guests. Even then it doesn't mean that they need explicit descriptions of MTM oral sex at the age of eight or ten, or any age really. Nor explicit drawings of oral sex as in the book "Gender Queer."
     

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