This legislation removes state funding from libraries or schools that ban books. I'm concerned that this will have the unintended consequence that conservative groups will still ban books, libraries will lose funding, and perhaps be forced to close. This outcome won't bother conservatives one bit.
Agreed. Wouldn’t school choice make more sense? If parents are given vouchers for example, everyone can support a library that they want to and there is no decrease in school funding
Ok, but what is the end game? Those parents will either have to homeschool, which they can already do, or you are going to force your kids to attend school with the families you paid a premium to avoid living near.
Seems right to me. Homeschool and teach your kids directly, in whatever form that may take, and with all the rebellion, exemplary results, and/or indoctrination it may come with; or, use your available resources to get your kids trained roughly the way you want; or, let your kids be taught with and by whatever system is available with minimal to zero input. Stratification and discrimination between individuals is pretty natural, even if it's morally abhorrent. Mandates ain't gonna change any of it.
I'm not strictly opposed to the voting public being able to decide what books will be purchased with taxpayer dollars. But, if you actually want to go that route, then you need to be comfortable with the voting public deciding that they can purchase books that you personally dislike, as is the case in Illinois!
Otherwise you're not arguing in favor of democracy, you're arguing in favor of your own personal moralizing.
Except realistically you've never going to accurately gauge exactly which books taxpayers do and don't agree should be purchased with 'their' dollars, nor are individual vote counts going to determine the choice of books that public libraries choose to stock. If the public happen to vote for a party that once in government then decides particular books should be restricted in public availability, it's still censorship. I'd like to think there were basic constitutional principles in place that determined on what grounds such censorship is and isn't genuinely in the interest of sustaining a healthy liberal democracy.
I mean, yeah that IS a form of censorship. A majority saying “we allow free access to any knowledge except X domain or Y specific book”.
But just think this through.
Imagine how terribly ideological available book selections would become if we had to have “the voting public” decide which books were available. I have a feeling that you would not be happy with the books that the voting majority decides are “acceptable”.
It’s not “censorship” for the voting public to decide what books will be provided in a public library any more than it’s a “restriction on freedom of movement” for the voting public to decide what routes will be provided in public bus service.
Censorship is the act of suppressing content that is viewed as objectionable. There is nothing in the word that indicates the method of censorship. Allowing a subset of people to dictate what is freely available based on that group’s moral beliefs is censorship. Cut and dry.
And you act like it’s just the money of the people that don’t want the books that is being used. What about the money of the people that want the books available? Should it be up to you to say the library can’t use those people’s money to buy those books?
Quit acting like this is about the money spent when it is purely about you wanting to foist your morals onto others and using the cost as a scapegoat.
And lastly, it is not, and should not ever be the case that everyone has to agree on every dollar that the government spends. Money is spent on good programs that you as an individual will never directly benefit from. Does that mean that we should allow voters to decide how every dollar is spent? Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. So long social security and Medicare and the majority don’t currently use them.
I can understand the principle here. Just to confirm, though, you'd then have no problems with controversial books being donated by private groups to public libraries, is that right? Or are there other considerations in your calculus.
No, because taxpayers are still paying for the shelf space. It’s their building and they get to decide what’s in it. Now, if private groups want to rent space and make certain books available there, they’re welcome to do that.
Lmao you’re literally arguing about the cost of the shelf space for a book in a library now? What if the people that donated the books also donated money for shelf space? It’s literally free to tax payers then. You must realize at this point that you don’t actually care about the cost, you care about having your majority opinion be the only available opinion.
The cost itself is obviously incidental--the point is that public ownership of the shelves means public control of what's on the shelves. It's not "censorship" for the public to control what content is given a platform in taxpayer funded libraries, any more than it's "censorship" for Apple to decide what products are given shelf space in its stores.
> It's not "censorship" for the public to control what content is given a platform in taxpayer funded libraries, any more than it's "censorship" for Apple to decide what products are given shelf space in its stores.
Wait, but both of those are censorship of a form; Apple is just allowed to censor whatever it wants.
Taken to the extreme, should a library be allowed to stock only books that promote the political party of whoever won the latest election?
Obviously decisions for shelf space have to be made. If those decisions for shelf space are made solely by the government's dislike of the material, though, that feels pretty obviously like government censorship to me.
I'm confused. The conservative position should be that libraries, being maintained by the government, have a requirement to provide any and all media requested, unless it is strictly illegal. If I and my fellow citizens ask my library to maintain a collection of literal erotica, what right do you or anyone else have to prevent that?
Isn't doing so a violation of the implied first amendment right to access to information?
You are correct that this is the exact same dynamic as "big tech" censorship. This topic pertains to the de jure government [0], which should make freedom of speech as codified in the first amendment more relevant.
Your mistake is expecting consistency from a group that has devolved to seeing hypocrisy as a virtue. It's no longer about lofty ideas and the categorical imperative, but rather fake bravado strong men pushing half-baked agendas to demonstrate naked power.
[0] (being a libertarian I believe there is a strong argument that the tech monopolies constitute de facto government. but that isn't even relevant here)
Being a taxpayer doesn't grant you the right to censor access to information for the public at large. You'd think we would've long ago passed the simple idea of book bans, but we haven't run out of simple people yet, so here we are. Citizens are free to ban books in their own homes, versus censoring books for others.
Illinois tilts strongly to the left above I-80, so outside of a few rural western or southern counties, this is an immaterial policy change.
(i have children, and they are free to read whatever material they select from a public library)
You're free to your opinion. No one is forcing you to live in Illinois. I pay some taxes there, and I am very happy with their policies. Find a jurisdiction that suits your ideals. This is democracy doing its thing.
If they want someone other than you "average" taxpayer to pay for the books in question, let me know where to wire the funds. Knowledge is power. Censorship is used to control.
EDIT: I believe we've run this subthread to its conclusion. Best to you.
And of course that wholly ignores cases where the books are donated or acquired for free from publishers, which often happens with libraries.
Taken to it's conclusion here you are saying that every citizen has veto power over the individual uses of any public resource, so, like, can I ban all pickup trucks from highways? We shouldn't spend public funds maintaining roads for them when they do significantly more damage than sedans.
Taking my ideas to their conclusion means that everyone pays for what they use, which is not what the policies you are suggesting will do. The contrapositive of “you use it if and only if you pay for it” says that if you don’t use it you don’t pay for it. So if state roads followed my principle (ie. they ran like private roads), then sure you can ban pickup trucks. But since you prevent them from using it, you don’t get to make them pay for it.
You are saying that even if you use a library you can ban other people from using it in the way they desire, or from offering certain services to others, whether or not those people also pay for it.
And you're going further than saying that this is done in a democratic manner, but instead that any individual can enjoin the library from providing services. Maybe that's not what you intend to be arguing for, but it is the argument you're putting forward.
Did I say that? The comment I recall making simply stated that you can’t make me pay for your books, and then claim I’m censoring you when I refuse. The public library in its current state would not even exist if I had it my way.
Yes. You didn't say "libraries are a violation of the NAP and shouldn't exist" or whatever, you said "You aren’t being censored when someone doesn’t let you buy books with their money."
And, key to this issue are that
1. It isn't your money, it's state money and the state democratically decided to purchase books with it, for the benefit of the citizenry because an educated populace is good for the general welfare.
And
2. You didn't object to the generic purchase of books, but these particular books. And yes, using the state and state funding to disfavor or limit access to certain viewpoints or categories of information is definitionally censorship.
Much as with public schools, as long as the state decides they exist in general, they have to be funded fairly without a bias towards our against any particular viewpoint other than, like, education.
If you want to take the principled position that libraries are bad say that, and nothing else. Otherwise, I'll respond to what you say.
I’m saying it right now. Public libraries like the ones we currently have should not exist. That’s the stance I’m taking, you should not have the right to force me to buy you books whether they are books that align with my politics or not.
If it’s voluntary because it was voted for, surely anything else voted for by the same governments that voted for taxation is also voluntary right? Shall I enumerate a few examples to check your consistency?
I never said anything about voluntary. I believe that one of the core functions of government is to exist as the legitimate body by which we compel other people to do things. The exact mechanics vary from government to government (for example libertarians might limit government to compelling people to obey the NAP and meet their contractual obligations, while other forms of democracy obligate people to do whatever the electorate decides (which, technically, is also what happens in a libertarian society!).
This is true whether or not I agree with a particular policy of the government. Governments are legitimate even when they do things I, personally, disagree with. And in fact I generally think that to effectively function governments must be able to operate with a bluntness that will leave some people unhappy (you're free to read that as "I don't believe a libertarian society can effectively function at scale).
Just to check, what do you propose society do with people who do not have the economic resources to access published works normally? Should the lower class be limited to only propaganda provided by the upper classes? If not how do we ensure free access to information for everyone and prosperity and general welfare of those less fortunate?
Or, actually, since as far as I can tell your objection applies to all taxation, how does a government maintain funding? Like on your framing it isn't ethical to force me to pay the salary of a bureaucrat I don't elect, so how do you maintain the judiciary and executive needed to function?
I definitely agree that nobody should have veto power. If Illinois taxpayers want to outsource the job of socializing their children to the American Library Association, that’s their prerogative. I’m objecting to the framing of this as a “Bill of Rights.”
I’m confused by your framing, how is banning book bans outsourcing the job of socializing children? What role do potential book bans have on children’s social development?
I’m also a bit curious why a child’s right to access certain literature can’t be specified in a “Bill of Rights”.
You’re begging the question. The taxpayers are just deciding what materials to provide through a taxpayer-funded service, no different than the taxpayers choosing what public transit routes to provide. Since public libraries are an important vehicle for socializing children, the public is entitled to curate the material available in libraries towards those ends. Again, it’s no different than choosing public transit routes that service the voting public’s particular priorities.
And nobody has a “right” to have the government provide them free access to any particular information in public libraries. The government can’t dictate to parents what materials they allow their children to access. But the public doesn’t have to pay and make that material available in public libraries.
> And nobody has a “right” to have the government provide them free access to any particular information in public libraries.
I might have a difference idea of democracy from you, but this feels a deep undemocratic way to go. Democracy dies in the darkness, free access to information is one of the cornerstones of democracy. All democracies have some sort of a public archive which distributes knowledge to the general public, most of the time for free. In the absence of such system you will at best have aristocracy.
So yes, if we want to live in a democracy—or at least how I understand democracy—everybody should have the “right” to have the government provide them with free access to any particular information. Particularly in the school system as a part of public and universal education (another important aspect of democracy).
Regarding the public transit analogy. Ideally in a democratic society where transportation equity is provided, the public should be entitled to provide input into the transportation system, but everybody living inside a reasonable density should be provided with some transit option (I live in a pretty rural place near Seattle but still I have two bus lines near my home which go to two ferry terminals, where there are four ferry lines, I consider my transportation needs “provided for” in the system). However in this ideal democracy, the input only goes to policy makers, who ultimately decide (or curate) frequency, routes, etc. based on both these inputs, but also experts in the field. If everybody is covered, and riders have some input, I would call that system democratic. What wouldn’t be democratic is if non-riding taxpayers would decide that people in certain area (say Vashon Island) shouldn’t get any buses. Or that buses should be banned in some areas (say between Woodenville and Bothell).
> I might have a difference idea of democracy from you, but this feels a deep undemocratic way to go. Democracy dies in the darkness, free access to information is one of the cornerstones of democracy. All democracies have some sort of a public archive which distributes knowledge to the general public, most of the time for free. In the absence of such system you will at best have aristocracy.
That’s not democracy, it’s liberalism. Real democracy includes the right of the majority to decide which ideas will be promoted at the public expense and which ideas will not receive a public platform.
> And nobody has a “right” to have the government provide them free access to any particular information in public libraries. The government can’t dictate to parents what materials they allow their children to access. But the public doesn’t have to pay and make that material available in public libraries.
Don't we though?
Presuming that we have decided that the government will provide public libraries (a service we'll assume is intended to promote the general welfare, or somesuch), it wouldn't be legal, as I understand it, to pass a law refusing to let libraries purchase the Bible, nor could the law prevent libraries from storing books on black history, by black authors. Either ban would run into equal protection and 1a issues.
You're making this an argument about purchasing books, but in almost all cases, the actual things happening here are removal (and destruction) of books already on library shelves. And while there are costs to sustain and store stock at libraries, those costs are extremely low comparatively, and removal of existing books is almost certainly 1a relevant.
(To be clear, this is legitimately a question. You know more about constitutional jurisprudence than I do, but my understanding is that libraries banning books isn't usually acceptable from a power of the purse situation, much as like apparently title VI complaints about discriminatory transit practices can also succeed)
> Illinois tilts strongly to the left above I-80, so outside of a few rural western or southern counties, this is an immaterial policy change.
I think this is actually far less true today than it once was. Yes, Chicago alone makes IL a blue state, but outside Chicago it's not so clear anymore - even north of i80.
It's been rather jarring on my last few visits back home to the West Chicago suburbs. We used to joke about the i80 boundary separating the yokels from regular people. Now I encounter plenty of overt right-wingers without even going south of i88. Just the gun craze alone has converted a lot of people IMO. Concealed carry and little NO PARKING style gun stickers on business entrances everywhere becoming normalized in the state I'm sure has played a role here.
It's a totally different culture of no-flag-too-big and they'll-take-your-guns vs. what I grew up in.
> Being a taxpayer doesn't grant you the right to censor access to information for the public at large.
You’re inverting the situation. Public libraries are taxpayer funded public services. Being a taxpayer gives you a right to vote on what your tax dollars are used to purchase.
> (i have children, and they are free to read whatever material they select from a public library)
I think this approach does kids a disservice. Kids have undeveloped brains, and lack both knowledge and life experience. What basis do they have for deciding what to read? It’s your job as a parent to curate society’s knowledge to teach them about what’s good and right, and what will help them be healthy and productive citizens.
I'm criticizing the phrasing, not the action itself. Local governments are mere organs of the state government. Taxpayers at the local level can vote to curate their library collections however they want, and taxpayers at the state level can overrule them.
Libraries are a public service so of course taxpayers deserve of a voice. And of course there exist some books which should not be offered in libraries.
To be fair - anywhere with a high concentration of people tilts strongly to the left. That seems to be the overarching pattern: Sparsely populated counties tilt to the right, highly populated counties tilt to the left. Analysts call it the "Rural-Urban divide".
You'll see this even in "Red" states. I would go so far as to say that what defines a "red" state is the number of voting districts which are sparsely populated.
Remember the graphic which showed in the 2020 election how the vast majority of the map swung for Trump? As the Democrats are fond of saying, "Land doesn't Vote..."
> Being a taxpayer doesn't grant you the right to censor access to information for the public at large.
You're right. Who cares if the taxpayers collectively decided that some material was not age-appropriate?
/s
That's the point of using your vote, right? So that some individual employed by the government can't enforce their minority ideology onto the majority population without some sort of blowback.
> And most of the controversy involves school libraries - although there are some exceptions.
This is splitting hairs: removing books from school libraries is a de facto ban on those books. Neither the article nor law implies that "book ban" in this context means anything other than "school book ban."
Sorry about the link. Not great for my credibility.
The concrete "book bans" I've heard about have been that Maus is no longer required reading in 8th grade, or that explicit sex pictures are banned from middle school libraries. Neither seem terrible to me.
What are the most egregious bans I might actually be upset by?
Please don't take this as a slight: why does your personal emotional reaction matter here? The idea that public libraries should be open sources of information shouldn't require hot-blooded sentiment from you or me. It's an extension of principles that you and I (notionally) agree on.
That being said: I, for one, think that 8th graders should have Maus accessible to them; it's a difficult book substantively and in terms of presentation, but I don't think reading it is going to "damage" any 8th grader. "Required" is besides the point.
I own Maus myself and am a big fan. I agree about public libraries. Less convinced about school libraries for minors.
My point was that when Maus stopped being part of required reading in one school district, that was reported as a "book ban", which is very misleading.
So now I'm suspicious of other reported "book bans" until I've heard the details.
If you bring a banned book into a library, they will reject it and turn it away on the basis of state extortion for risk of being defunded or other legal issues. That's what we're talking about here.
We're not talking about curation, and it is bizarre mental gymnastics to propose they are remotely similar.
EDIT. BTW even curation-excluded books are accepted by libraries. Libraries operate in networks, and they exchange / send overflow books to each other all the time.
> A ban implies to me the book cannot be sold at all which is hardly splitting hairs.
Every American that I know (including myself) understands the phrase "book ban" to refer widely, if not exclusively, to school libraries in the context of American politics. It's been nearly 70 years since we've had otherwise politically notable book bans[1].
> And did you find it just as egregious when Huckleberry Finn was banned in new york and california schools and public libraries for using the "n" word?
I would argue then that every American you know (including you) is a tiny bit wrong? I (and everyone I know) consider a book ban to be something like when 19th century Russia stated that no book could be written in Lithuanian. That’s a proper book ban. It was illegal to even own a book written in that language, and books that did exist were destroyed. Russia did book bans right! To say what’s going on now is a “book ban” that requires legislation is gas lighting at best and a false flag at worst.
Right, there is not shared meaning, so maybe that’s the point of my post. To me 19th century Lithuanians had a real book ban, as I as an American, think about them.
If a school decided to ban Twinkies from their lunch menu I wouldn’t say we have a food ban crisis that the state of Illinois would need to legislate. A parent could still buy Twinkies at home and enjoy them as often as they wanted.
"when 19th century Russia stated that no book could be written in Lithuanian"
That's a lie. Or shall I say "gas lighting at best and a false flag at worst"?
"The Lithuanian press ban (Lithuanian: spaudos draudimas) was a ban on all Lithuanian language publications printed in the Latin alphabet in force from 1865 to 1904 within the Russian Empire, which controlled Lithuania proper at the time. Lithuanian-language publications that used Cyrillic were allowed and even encouraged." [0]
That's a surprising way to frame what the Wikipedia page says. The ban was part of a russification attempt. One of the stated goals, on the page you linked, is "Replace Lithuanian parish schools with Russian grammar schools". Up to that point, Lithuanian had not been written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Polish language was widely used, and its use of Latin alphabet had a huge inspiration on Lithuanian orthography.
To make my point stronger: I would call it a book ban, if English language books were illegal to write in the Latin alphabet, and only allowed in the Cyrillic alphabet. This would be consistent with the situation of Lithuanian language book ban (except it would not replace kindergarten and lower grades with Russian grammar schools).
Calling it a lie seems at the very least ignorant of the actual situation, or worse, willful twisting of history. If the former, I invite you to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_book_smugglers to find out on which day they are celebrated!
Well, everyone can read the Wikipedia pages and their references, and make their own minds. Our views are so fundamentally different that I see no reason to continue discussion.
'Banning all books on Lithuanian language' and 'banning books in Lithuanian language written in Latin alphabet and encouraging transition to books in Lithuanian language written in Cyrillic alphabet' are different things.
Former would have had a goal of discontinuing written Lithuanian language and the latter had a goal of switching Lithuanian language from Latin to Cyrillic alphabet.
Misrepresenting the latter as the former is a lie.
The only thing important part is “these books are banned” and “these books are encouraged.” That you don’t care about the specifics says more about you than the ban.
That’s an interesting take... Like, you can write any book you want using the English language, as long as you use Kanji to write it down? You wouldn’t consider that a problem?
But regardless you are only reinforcing the point that it was a real ban. The fact that they were banned and the books they didn’t want banned were encouraged really only continues to make my case.
"Like, you can write any book you want using the English language, as long as you use Kanji to write it down? You wouldn’t consider that a problem?"
Right now Kazakhstan is transitioning from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet. This year children will be taught only Latin letters and they won't be able to read the texts in Kazakh language written in Cyrillic in the last 80 years.
I have never met an American, or anyone of any nationality that understands "book bans" refer exclusively to school libraries.
You are the first.
Book bans are bans on books, at a national or state/local government level.
Bans on books within a school have been a thing for a relatively long time where I am. Usually managed by the local school council for various different reasons.
There are two operative phrases that you skipped over: "if not exclusively," and "in American politics."
I'm aware that there are ample other ways to (and entities that) ban books. Their severity is not meaningfully diminished by this conversation, and introducing them is a distraction.
1. is usually exclusive
2. if not exclusive, then is the case in the majority of cases
The proposed case that "Book Bans" refer almost exclusively to school libraries is obviously false if you just take a look at a dictionary. It is evidently not "widely known to mean X" if common definitions do not explicitly state that.
All definitions state that it is an act of banning a book. But do not explicitly state that it is exclusive to some arbitrary bureaucratic level.
Either way, it is strange to just decide that a "Book Ban" must refer almost exclusively to a school.
You are the one who claimed every American to understand this to be a ban on books in schools. Which is complete nonsense as evidenced just by this thread.
I think there is a reason to point this out. Twisting language to drive, in this case a political point, is called propaganda. Calling it a ban implies something more severe than what is happening. Which is content regulation.
I’m British though quite an avid follower of US news. I have listened to podcasts discussing book bans (e.g. Jon Ronson) and much of the discussion was around removing books from school libraries.
Additionally, I searched “fox news book bans” and “nbc book bans” and these were the first links that came up.
> Maia Kobabe’s book "Gender Queer" became one of the most banned books in the country in 2022. The book has been at the center of the debate over what books should be banned in schools.
> School districts in 26 states have banned more than 1,000 books in the past nine months
Additionally, the Wikipedia article “ 2021–2022 book banning in the United States” discusses various cases of books being withdrawn from school libraries.
>A ban implies to me the book cannot be sold at all which is hardly splitting hairs.
That's just not true. "Banned book" has meant "book banned from schools and libraries" for a very long time. This is the meaning used by the American Library Association.
It is, for the time being and for most practical purposes, impossible to ban a book from being published in the USA. Other countries have bigger problems but that is not what people discuss in American politics.
>And did you find it just as egregious when Huckleberry Finn was banned in new york and california schools and public libraries for using the "n" word?
Are you implying these books are so unpopular that a good chunk of their influence and profitability is very much dependent on left-wing public school librarians subsidizing them by making sure they are included in the catalogues?
We should remember that a school library has limited space, so a decision is being made about what to include no matter what.
If you think ideology/doctrine doesn't already play a role in these decisions, I invite you to check if the library of your local high school has a physical copy of say "When Harry Became Sally", "The Bell Curve", or even "The Blank Slate".
In principle, my libertarian side would have agreed with you that imposing these choices in a centralized way is not a good idea. But those principles are only meaningful in a classical liberal context. Not when scourges of affirmative action, indoctrination, ideological subsidies [1] and pseudo-liberal bureaucratic processes are used to impose ludicrous ideas upon us.
> Are you implying these books are so unpopular that a good chunk of their influence and profitability is very much dependent on left-wing public school librarians subsidizing them by making sure they are included in the catalogues?
No; please don't editorialize. It's obvious that the goal of these bans is to ensure that children and young adults who otherwise wouldn't have access to these books continue to not have access.
> I invite you to check if the library of your local high school has a physical copy of say "When Harry Became Sally", "The Bell Curve", or even "The Blank Slate"
It has two of the three[1][2]. You need to reevaluate your assumptions here.
(And note: I grew up in a district where students simultaneously have access to one of the largest public library systems in the world, by default. I'm positive I could find all three additionally in that system.)
> No; please don't editorialize. It's obvious that the goal of these bans is to ensure that children and young adults who otherwise wouldn't have access to these books continue to not have access.
I agree that the main goal is to reduce the access of children and young adults to these book, compared to the status quo. I don't think anyone is disputing that, one of the common rationales given being that these books are "inappropriate" for them.
However, framing this as a de facto book ban is definitely "editorializing".
> It has two of the three[1][2]. You need to reevaluate your assumptions here.
Touché. That isn't the typical high school though. It seems like a very good one, with competitive merit-based admission, and eight Nobel Prize-winning alumni. [1] Even then, you can see the biases of the high school librarians if you take a look at the collections page [2]: "LGBTQIA+", "BIPOC Reading List", "Grade 1: Inclusion contributes to a community’s diversity", "Indigenous Math & Science Collection", "Diverse Voices", etc.
Do you disagree that these are topics favored by left-wingers? Do they have collections promoting "Nuclear Energy", "Classics", "Freedom", "Family Values", "Meritocracy", or even "Personal Responsibility"?
> I grew up in a district where students simultaneously have access to one of the largest public library systems.
Good for them. I very much support that. Although there are significant biases in the procurement process for the public libraries, I assume their situation is probably much better than public school libraries.
> Framing this as a de facto book ban is definitely "editorializing" though.
I don't know what else you'd call the use of state authority to restrict access to books, without painful euphemisms.
And note: the use of "book ban" to describe partisan curtailments of reading materials is not itself partisan[1]. You can find similar uses of the phrase in any partisan or non-partisan news source.
> Do you disagree that these are topics favored by left-wingers? Do they have collections promoting "Nuclear Energy", "Classics", "Freedom", "Family Values", "Meritocracy", or even "Personal Responsibility"?
There was a classics topic in our library. I think it would behoove you to think one step beyond this and observe that topical selections in libraries reflect three pressures:
1. What the audience (i.e., students in this case) actually wants to read;
2. What the librarian thinks will induce reading among the audience;
3. The librarian's own biases.
You're focusing on (3), when the reality is that (1) and (2) matter more. Asking high schoolers to get excited about a library section on "personal responsibility" or "meritocracy" sounds like a bad joke.
> I don't know what else you'd call the use of state authority to restrict access to books, without painful euphemisms.
First of all, this isn't just about state authority. Parental authority also plays a role. In many cases, removing books from circulation happens due to complaints by parents. This is just some form of parental/public input on what taxpayer money is being spent on, and what kind of books are appropriate for children.
Also, in our current situation, state authority is very often used in ways I would consider inappropriate. For example, in a lot of cases, affirmative action is not only allowed, but required by law. So, there aren't really many good reasons to strictly stick to classical liberal principles.
> And note: the use of "book ban" to describe partisan curtailments of reading materials is not itself partisan[1].
> Asking high schoolers to get excited about a library section on "personal responsibility" or "meritocracy" sounds like a bad joke.
Maybe, but probably there are ways to hype up and sensationalize everything. Besides, I could come up with a lot of "exciting" topics which also probably wouldn't be emphasized: "Victims of Communism", "The Green Revolution in India", "Lysenkoism", etc.
Although you didn't say it explicitly, I assume we both can agree that the librarian's own biases do have a significant effect, and what the typical direction of those biases are. You may think this is a good thing, but that's besides the point.
Also, your (2) is also very much subject to personal biases.
> This is just some form of parental/public input on what taxpayer money is being spent on, and what kind of books are appropriate for children.
Parental opinions don't make a book ban into not-a-book-ban. They make it into a book ban fueled by parents. Road to hell, good intentions, etc.
The other point is bizarre: two wrongs don't make a right. Political revanchism because you don't like the other things your government does is not socially healthy (arguably, substantially less healthy than any of the topics that are being banned).
Children and teenagers aren't stupid: what you're proposing is replacing subjects that they're interested in with ones that you're interested in, with your interest being an ideological one. I think it's worth taking a step back and considering whether you'd be a worse librarian than the ones that we have; the ones at hand can at least offer the sound justification that increasingly large numbers of students feel comfortable self-identifying as LGBTQ.
> The other point is bizarre: two wrongs don't make a right.
It's not bizarre. It's not just about moral principles, but also practical realities.
> Children and teenagers aren't stupid
TBH, I kinda think they are, and I'm not exempting my teenage self. They are definitely impulsive, impressionable, and prone to fads and groupthink.
Have you heard of the book "Lord of the Flies"? Interestingly, this particular book has also been subject to what you would call a ban, at least in one case in because it's "racist". [1]
> Children and teenagers aren't stupid: what you're proposing is replacing subjects that they're interested in with ones that you're interested in, with your interest being an ideological one.
I don't think any of the topics I came up with are more ideological than the ones I mentioned from the library collections. However, probably what you count as ideological is itself influenced by the ideological glasses one's wearing.
> I think it's worth taking a step back and considering whether you'd be a worse librarian than the ones that we have; the ones at hand can at least offer the sound justification that increasingly large numbers of students feel comfortable self-identifying as LGBTQ.
Me personally? Maybe, but I could make suggestions which are definitely an improvement, but I don't think enough high school librarians would consider doing it. An example would be not purchasing any books by Ibram X. Kendi.
> This is just some form of parental/public input on what taxpayer money is being spent on, and what kind of books are appropriate for children.
Actually I think I would have less problems if the only people who can go to school policy discussions and make these requests are parents whose children are literally in that school system right now. I have repeatedly witnessed people who don’t have children in that school system show up to these things and debate about this. It’s very stupid.
It is a school's job to provide every student with a comprehensive and well-rounded education, preparing them for their adult life in the best way possible. This includes exposing them to a variety of potential career paths, and providing them with role models.
The only reason they need collections like "LGBTQIA+" and "Diverse Voices" in the first place is because literally the rest of the collection will already be filled with "Classics", "Freedom", and "Family Values". Those are considered the default in society, there is no need to explicitly highlight them when you will already come across them without even trying.
I don’t understand it is the school’s job to provide a well-rounded education for students. Classics, freedom, and family values are bedrocks of civilization, “LGBTQIA+” and “Diverse voices” destroy, undermine, and subvert civilization and ought to be banned from school libraries and curriculum for the benefit of society.
> However, framing this as a de facto book ban is definitely "editorializing"
If public schools are purposely preventing books that would otherwise be present from being included in their libraries, how is that anything other than a book ban? A ban doesn't have to be across an entire legal jurisdiction to be a ban; if someone got wasted and tried to start a fight at a bar and then was never allowed back in again, you'd still say they were "banned" even if they were able to go to other bars in the city.
>If you think ideology/doctrine doesn't already play a role in these decisions, I invite you to check if the library of your local high school has a physical copy of say "When Harry Became Sally", "The Bell Curve", or even "The Blank Slate".
Or "The Turner Diaries" or "The Camp of the Saints" if you want some more extreme examples.
What about when libraries have books but then the state govt demands these books get taken out? How much context are we allowed to include in a judgement of an action?
Never having a book, having it but having it be removed for non-content-related reasons, having it removed for content-related reasons, having the content removal decision come from librarians, or parents, or politicians, the public record of comments about why something is removed, all of these things are obviously important. Flattening it to "yeah lots of books aren't in libraries" is a _bit_ reductive!
Good things are good, bad things are bad. Sometimes it's hard to write laws that work around this, but at the very least moral judgements can be made, with space for nuance.
It’s still not a banning. Banning would be if you’re no longer allowed to bring a copy to school at all. In my high school (and boy am I dating myself here) The Anarchist’s Cookbook was actually banned.
There’s a big difference between saying “we don’t think Tropic of Cancer is appropriate for high school kids so we’re going to remove it” and “Tropic of Cancer is banned in our schools”.
The “book bans” happening are mostly the former and while I do think they’re mostly stupid, they’re nowhere near what you’d think is happening from headlines. Very little actual banning is occurring.
I do think it's important to think about the fact that school libraries are where kids tend to access a lot of books (there are of course city libraries, but those places are also being targeted). At least my experience was around that. And many libraries will have a request system, so if a kid is like "I want to read this", then libraries are able to often put in a purchase order, and then make that available for other students.
At least based on my own school experiences, I do think that teachers of a certain ... authoritarian bent would be more than happy to make up a stink of books brought in that would be "banned" from the library if a copy circulating were brought to their attention. Power structures in schools are like that. But that's just conjecture.
I think the general point of the "book ban" terminology is that librarians and schools generally had leeway to bring in more or less anything to the library, and that autonomy is being stripped away for very dark reasons. This is the age of the internet, but from my own childhood, if my school and city library suddenly decided to not provide certain kinds of book, I would just not have access to that at all.
All that to say that you're right on the word in some sense, but it feels fitting to me.
I’m guessing books aren’t really popular among the kids these days anyway. It’s really just a political fight now.
The people complaining about banning are being either intentionally alarmist (if they understand what’s going on) or knee-jerk reactionary. It’s the exact same as when the religious people are mad the state mandates we teach evolution.
School districts and states have to select what kids learn, since we have finite time and resources to reach them, in the same way that libraries have to choose which books occupy finite shelf space.
I don’t agree with a lot of the decisions, but people are acting like it’s some right wing fascism every time they remove Henry Miller a library.
This is the fifth or sixth time someone has started a thread with this “gotcha,” and the answer is still no: curation is a logistical concern, not a doctrinal one. Banning is a consequence of doctrine; curation is a consequence of books being expensive to categorize and store.
I disagree that the fact that it is removed from a shelf for doctrinal reasons is banning. It’s only banning if it’s actually banned, meaning you can’t have it at all, like Mein Kampf in Germany.
There’s surely a more accurate term than banning or curation here.
Mein Kampf has never been banned from possession in Germany. It just has not been published in the post-WW2 decades because the copyright holder, the Free State of Bavaria, decided to just not publish it and withhold the right to do so from anybody else. One could readily purchase, sell, or trade old copies at an antiquarian bookstore.
It's now in the public domain, so one could even set up a little publishing company and publish it oneself.
And it's an incredibly awful book, measured to all the 'fame' it holds in certain circles.
I recently looked up one of these books that was on the "banned" list. Someone had scanned it in on archive.org. I just checked, and it was either the #1 banned book on most lists, or made the top 10. Gender Queer by Kobabe.
This is apparently what it would be censorship to keep out of gradeschool libraries. If you're ok with the book, then I guess there's not much more to talk about. If you're now not ok with the book, then I guess this is the first time you actually saw inside of it.
We're told that there is a difference between doctrine and curation, and maybe in some theoretical world this is true. But in the world we actually live in, doctrine's already being pushed... they're just pretending that they're "merely curating". And they're demanding that the other side not be allowed any oversight on that curation. When they curate, good, when anyone else does it, well... they're the "bad guys".
Personally, I could not care less. If you want this book in schools, it does not affect me. But you should know what book it is we're talking about. Take a look, click the link.
> I would not bat an eye at this in a high school library, no. I checked out books that were substantially more adult in nature than this appears to be.
Maybe you wouldn't, but be honest with yourself - how many parents want their school to hold and keep pornographic material?
If you want to show your kids sexually graphic images, then sure, fine, have at it. You're complaining that you can't show these images to other people's kids, and you're complaining that those parents are a problem?
Then you tell your librarian that your child may not check this book out specifically. I seriously don’t understand the problem here. Maybe another child will appreciate a depiction of healthy communication in sexual interactions, because highschool teens are definitely having sex, but if you don’t want your child learning boundaries and healthy communication that’s ok too!
You didn’t answer my question why can’t adults pick and choose what material is appropriate for their children only? If you don’t think it’s appropriate just don’t let your own children get their hands on it. I don’t understand why this has to be a debate.
I’m actually not that invested in ideology or whatever. You’re prescribing something to me I don’t really care about. I’ve read the book for fun, as an adult, didn’t feel titillated or aroused at all. It’s about as sexual as putting a condom on a banana, and I was definitely doing that in highschool. But even then parents who were uncomfortable could sign a thing preventing their children from attending sex ed. I think we parents can do the same thing for sex ed related books! No big deal.
> If you don’t think it’s appropriate just don’t let your own children get their hands on it.
Society doesn't allow it. Porn operators get into legal trouble for allowing access to kids. Movie theatre operations get into serious trouble for allowing kids in to see movies they are not supposed to.
Your argument of "let the kids have everything and make the parents perform the restrictions" is so stupid it's literally never been tried.
> I’m actually not that invested in ideology or whatever.
I find that hard to believe, considering
a) you reacting to an "age-appropriate material" argument being no different from a reaction to "no sex ed" argument.
and
b) what you are proposing, in general, has literally never been successful before. ALL societies places restrictions on kids whether their parents like it or not. Some are more restrictive and some are less, but they all have restrictions exclusively for children.
Dude what are you talking about, I’m not talking about whether or not a kid can go in a strip club lol. I’m just saying if you don’t want your kid reading a book in a school library just talk to your librarian like a normal human being. Just like if you don’t want your kid participating in sex ed just sign a waiver. Equating sex ed with porn is weird but there are already avenues to exclude your child from it if you want to.
> You didn’t answer my question why can’t adults pick and choose what material is appropriate for their children only?
Because it is impossible on a practical level to do so with a public school system and a constant low-intensity campaign to infiltrate schools with pornographic garbage.
How many hundreds of hours of spare time per year would a parent need to expend to discover the 3 books they don't personally want their child to be exposed to?
For that matter, would their wishes even be respected? Or would we have school employees letting them read it on the sly, as some bizarrely-conceived revolution against the oppressors? There's more than enough evidence of schools taking the opportunity to hide disturbing developments about children from their own parents.
Most parents are sending their kids to bed with a phone and the kid is watching far more graphic sex than what is in these books.
I see a study from 2022 that 10% have watched porn by the age of 9.
The average age a kid first watched internet porn in the US right now is 12.
Parents are just a joke. Worried about “Nick and Charlie" in school while their kid goes to bed and watches a BDSM gang bang in HD video.
Total denial I am sure. "Not my innocent little angel". Even if the kid is in the 10% not watching porn , surely their friends tell them all about what they watched.
I would think the kids think these books are a total joke.
I'm not talking about showing anything to anyone. I said that I checked out books that were significantly more "adult" when I was an adolescent, and I appreciated the ability to do so.
We're also not talking about pornography. None of the material here fails the Miller test.
You checked out visual depictions of fellatio in your high school library? Given that books not unlike the linked one have been showing up in public school libraries for at least the last 20 years, I can't say I'm surprised.
And moreso, you can't see it from someone else's perspective who might have a problem with this?
I said “adult,” not visual. The books I was thinking of were published in 1979[1] and 1978[1], respectively.
It doesn’t matter whether I or anyone else has a problem with it. What matters is whether adolescents have a right to read it, which they do. I exercised that right as a student, and I would like other students to be able to do the same.
I'm having trouble telling whether or not you clicked the archive.org link or not. It's a "graphic novel". I don't see what the big deal is calling it a comic book, but oh well.
Click it. See for yourself.
> What matters is whether adolescents have a right to read it, w
They don't have any such right, best that I can understand the legal framework of the western world.
For instance, they don't have the right to have sex with adults. Anyone who claimed that they were being denied such a right, well... do we really need to spell out how those claimants would be treated?
Minors are permitted by responsible adults to read age-appropriate books. We don't say that refusing to put The Anarchist Cookbook up in 4th grade libraries is censorship. At least non-lunatics don't. There are books that they will be allowed to read once legal adults, but that reading earlier might have adverse developmental effects. It's generally agreed that actual pornography is one such category.
If your kid never, ever saw a pornographic image (or an erotica one) before 15, you and his friends' parents are really monitoring them closely.
For me it was a playboy at 13, for my friends probably the same, but I'm sure the internet bring the age lower,and pack more actions.
When I think about your link of a graphic novel and the first playboy I read, I'm pretty sure any parent would prefer the graphic novel where a poorly done 2 image strip depicts a fellation, and the text besides is... Less than erotic let's say.
And btw: i read 'when I was 5 I killed myself' from Buten at around the same age (maybe 14), as well as flowers for algernon and 1984, I don't think they are age-appropriate books, but they are worth reading when adolescent, because you experience them harder, and formative.
It’s a graphic novel depicting a sex act, albeit not particularly erotically.
The entire point of my other comments was that I checked out other books in high school, books that are widely considered excellent and have been for decades, that contained far more explicit “inappropriate” content. The only things different here are the facts that it’s (1) drawn, and (2) concerns LGBTQ identity.
> They don't have any such right, best that I can understand the legal framework of the western world.
We live under a negative legal scheme, not a positive one. I’m not aware of any law that says that children cannot read what they’d like to read, either federal or state.
Obscenity in the US has a distinct legal test[1], one that you and I both understand this book (and Sophie’s Choice) would pass easily. It also doesn’t mention children anywhere.
Finally: nobody in this thread wants children to be hurt, or to be exposed to things that will hurt them. But books, especially ones that are presented and explainable within an educational context, do not hurt children. If anything, adults tend to hurt themselves and others more based on books than children do.
> I’m persuaded that one of the reasons European Americans underperform relative to Asian immigrants—especially at the bottom of the income spectrum—is that Asian families strongly discourage teenage preoccupation with sexual activity and relationships in favor of focusing energies on education
No, it’s because the barriers to immigration are much higher to Asian immigrants than the people who already live here. You will also see this in Nigerian-American families. The effect goes away after a few generations, and in the case of black immigrants racism is so effective the effect goes away with their children.
> No, it’s because the barriers to immigration are much higher to Asian immigrants than the people who already live here
Incorrect. By far the main vehicle for permanent immigration under American law is family reunification, which isn’t based on skills or education. A large fraction of the Asian American population is also refugees from countries like Vietnam and Korea. There are a huge number of poor Asian immigrants, and they vastly outperform similarly lower income European Americans: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/make-y... (use the chart to compare economic outcomes of Asians in the bottom 1/5 to whites in the bottom 1/5). See also: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2057150X209738... (“Rather than being a class phenomenon, Asian cultural factors have important effects for most second-generation Asian Americans regardless of the socioeconomic status of their parents.”). The effect does go away over time, but that’s because kids adopt American culture. E.g. Mindy Kaling and her new show.
Nigerian immigrants also outperform European Americans (and Asian anmericans) even after taking into account income and education: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231211001971. Their parenting style tends to be extremely rigid and disciplined.
It’s difficult to take this kind of heavy-handedness seriously: Judy Blume? Really?
It’s also unclear what the boundary is for you here: is any mention of sex or violence verboten? Are educators and authors meant to pretend that middle schoolers don’t know what death is, to minimize the Holocaust or other human travesties, or contradict the school’s own sex ed programs? In what world does that make children better socially adjusted, much less prepared for adulthood?
Ultimately, if exposure to adult topics is a problem for you, then you should probably consider homeschooling (or a private system that will allow you or another adult, not regulated by the state, to micromanage your child’s life). But socialization outcomes for homeschooling are overwhelmingly poor, as are outcomes for schools that hide the world from their students: they fail to accomplish the basic goal of preparation for actual life.
You know, because there was a previous thread about this exact book, how misleading that claim is. The book was endorsed for 16-17 year olds, and the ALA category for books for 16 years olds is 12-18.
That seems like a minor wrinkle that doesn’t change my point. The ALA gave the book an award in a category that’s for 12-18 year olds. That’s exactly what’s conveyed by the ALA website: https://www.ala.org/awardsgrants/alex-awards
Nonsense. Curation is not purely logistical. It requires some judgment to select which books they believe are good and appropriate for their audience. Otherwise you wouldn’t need a librarian at all, just a random number generator to randomly select however many books will fit in the library out of all the books available.
Obviously they pick some books and not others for some reasons. If you like their reasons you call it curation, if you don’t like their reasons you call it banning.
That reason is called popularity. Librarians discard books that aren’t frequently requested so that they can bring in books that are frequently requested.
Randomly selecting books for rotation would bias by sheer publication volume. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my local library to be 40% Atkins Diet by volume, regardless of how positive I might feel about it.
I'm sure if they filled the school library with pornography and comic books, that would be really popular with 13-17 year olds, but they don't do that. Obviously there are considerations aside from purely what is popular that go into deciding which books to put in the school library.
> This is the fifth or sixth time someone has started a thread with this “gotcha,”
This is not a "gotcha" or loophole of some type. Words have meanings[1]. If your argument relies on changing the meaning of a common word in the dictionary, it's your argument that is wrong, not the damn dictionary!
I mean, where are you going with this?
Are you seriously advocating that school libraries and librarians have free reign to determine which books to hold? Because that's how you get Intelligent Design introduced into schools. It's how you perpetuate stereotypes and bigotry.[2].
We don't want individuals exclusively responsible for determining what ideas may or may not be available to people. By having the ruling authority perform the determination, it becomes a collective determination by the taxpayers.
If the taxpayers are unhappy, they express their unhappiness with their vote.
I want to know, after reading your many emotionally charged arguments for why this must be called a "ban", exactly why you feel that the decision on literature suitability be made by selected individuals, and not by a voted-in government.
[2] I've been atheist for decades, and I argued multiple times against allowing individuals within schools to determine what goes into the minds of children, because I've seen multiple times that the only end-result of allowing this is that the more passionate (engaged? Ideologues? Insane?) people tend to move into those positions that allow them to propagate their ideology.
Context matters. The context is the reactionary attempt to erase gender-is-a-spectrum and similar LGBT concepts from "public" life, in its many forms.
Restrictions come in many forms. It used to be marriage is special, then WC symbols are sacred, now we're back to think-of-the-children and their precious little minds. And one particular form is that some books are now banned from school libraries.
I wholeheartedly support the demand for more correct wording, but unfortunately it doesn't really matter.
> The context is the reactionary attempt to erase gender-is-a-spectrum and similar LGBT concepts from "public" life, in its many forms.
Maybe. Maybe the "reactionary attempt" would have been non-existent if the advocates weren't using sexually graphic material, as linked in the thread above.
Do you also think that teaching of sex ed should include videos from pornhub?
> Do you also think that teaching of sex ed should include videos from pornhub?
In general it seems completely okay to include the discussion of porn in sex ed, and thus to show actual porn in sex ed.
It might make sense show it separately to boys and girls, mostly because boys are behind in development (on average), so the discussion of it should be different, but also because of the expected questions, etc.
Of course it's a doctrinal concern. The books are not chosen at random. Some will make it, some not. Somebody is going to make a choice, according to somebody's own (or external - like recommendations) judgement. The question is who has the power to control the choice, and who gets to say "my opinion is common sense, your opinion is dangerous ideological extremism".
The point was that curation is trivially not doctrinal. Doctrinal censorship might masquerade as curation, but curation itself is a normal part of running a useful library.
There are many reasons to have no copies of a book, with the simplest being that nobody has requested it yet. Framing that as “banning” is ridiculous, since it falsely implies a doctrinal intent where only ignorance or concern for stated demands exists.
> The point was that curation is trivially not doctrinal.
What you said is not curation, it's just managing the stock. Having 57 copies or 56 copies does not substantially alter availavbility. If somebody removed all copies of Atkins books, because "nobody needs them anymore" - then yes, this would be a doctrinal decision. Admittedly, since diets (for some reason) aren't part of culture wars (yet?), not a very controversial or scandalous one, but if some Atkins die-hards occupied a political position, or, in the contrary, Atkins were declared racist for some reason, it could become one.
> There are many reasons to have no copies of a book, with the simplest being that nobody has requested it yet
But how I can "request" a book that isn't in the library? Most libraries I've used do not have this function, not at least any that I could locate as a regular patron. On the contrary, I am reasonably sure most of the books featured on my local library's home page, aren't there because some patron came to them and asked for this specific book, which previously wasn't part of the collection and wouldn't be unless specifically requested (in fact, again, I know no way of doing this). Looking at their published collection developing policy I see (among others):
Provide a diverse and inclusive collection that contains content by and about a wide array of people and cultures
Consider the appropriateness to scope of the collection as it is developed
Content created by and representative of marginalized and underrepresented groups
Attention of critics, reviewers, awards and public
Suitability for intended audience
Literary or stylistic quality
Tell me these are non-doctrinal criteria. Of course they are - one's high quality suitable inclusive book is another's offensive bigoted trash. Again, it's about who has the power to make such decisions. Of course, the librarians, seeing themselves as The Experts (TM) would claim exclusive right to make such decisions on behalf of people paying for their library. But are they entitled to that, absent any control and supervision?
> This is splitting hairs: removing books from school libraries is a de facto ban on those books.
No, it isn't. You're trivialising actual book bans by referring to public education literature selection as a "ban".
Lots of books aren't in the school library; doesn't mean that they're banned - you can still buy them and read them to your kids, take them out of public libraries, read them on the internet ... all without any legal or unofficial consequences.
I'm not trivializing anything; they're different things, with contextual phrases.
Removing these books from school libraries is done with the understanding that the students won't otherwise be able to access them, i.e. they can't get to a bookstore or public library without their parent and their parent will also refuse to keep it at home. That is a de facto ban.
Now: you might happen to think that it's good that these books can't be accessed, which is something that can (and is) being discussed. But I don't think it's worth mincing words over what's happening, especially given that it's a standard (and non-partisan) use of the phrase "book ban" in the US.
I don't even understand what this would mean for school libraries. I literally understand what it means, because it is toothless - it simply requires libraries to declare that they are against censorship. I don't understand what that declaration means for school libraries. It certainly doesn't require them to shelve donated erotic literature or the works of prominent neo-Nazis.
Questions of school library censorship have always been about age-appropriateness, or blasphemy, or antiquated common but now forbidden ideas. If not buying and not accepting donations of that material isn't a ban, then what could possibly be? If it does count as a ban, every school library now has to carry the complete works of Lyndon LaRouche?
edit: a real ban on bans in my eyes would be a state restriction on local governments passing book bans that apply to public schools and libraries. It wouldn't be aimed at the libraries themselves.
So if I donate a pornographic novel to an elementary school in Illinois, besides being an asshole, have I put them in a position of having to circulate it or lose funding?
No library system is under any particular obligation to stock what you give them, much less accept donations to begin with. It's unclear why they would be, much less why this would be a "gotcha" in this context.
Because they are under an obligation to not stock or not stock for doctrinal, partisan, etc. reasons.
In other words: there are plenty of reasons to not stock a book that are not partisan or doctrinal. We don't expect public schools to pay for expensive medieval manuscripts, for example, or to stock books in languages that aren't represented in their district.
> I don't see how pornographic bans wouldn't qualify as "doctrinal" though they are not particularly partisan.
You're leading with the assumption that you and I (or anyone else, really) agrees on what "pornography" is, much less that we agree in a non-partisan context.
The context here is that there's been a significant effort in the last ~18 months to reclassify LGBTQ fiction and non-fiction as pornographic and have it removed from school libraries on that ground. Justifications for that vary, from the more staid pearl-clutching ones, to rehashes of old and dangerous stereotypes about gays predating on children. That is absolutely a doctrinal concern, even if the nominal topic ("don't show children porn") is one that appears reasonable and uncontroversial on face value.
"Doctrinal" isn't defined in the bill so far as I can see, which means it has its ordinary definition, something along the lines of relating to the message of the text. Pornography bans are justified by obscenity, which has a specific test given by SCOTUS, of which the third prong is that it "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value," which is effectively tantamount to saying that it has no message that can be disagreed with.
So if you're attempting to ban it because it's obscene, that's okay. But if you're trying to call it pornographic because the lead characters are in a romantic relationship and happen to be of the same sex... well, that's not obscene, and your attempt to call it pornographic is doctrinal disapproval.
Oh, so it's the doctrine of the text that matters, not the doctrine that is the reason behind the "censorship." That makes more sense. I mean the Miller Test is a doctrine after all. To clarify something; I think the ALA bill of rights is overall good. It's just the 2nd clause (which is the only part required to be adopted by this law) that I was struggling to find a way to interpret that wouldn't impair librarians' ability to meaningfully curate.
And to be clear: As a rule, I am in favor of librarians making this decision without interference. Librarians have repeatedly put their livelyhoods at stake in order to protect individuals access to information, and protect the privacy of those same individuals.
The point is to take book decisions out of the hands of locals, and into the hands of librarians. In other words, it changes who gets to promote or censor books.
The distinction between locals in general, and librarians in particular, can be very important, in light of ideological litmus test librarians may have needed to pass on their way through academia:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equalit... - A recent report from the Goldwater Institute found that 80% of job postings for Arizona’s public universities required applicants to submit a statement detailing their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Ah, that makes sense. I sort of assumed it would be similar in distinction to something like a "Local Doctor". The doctor would still have local biases (sometimes pseudo-scientific) towards specific treatments or methodology.
I don’t understand. Did you think that you could just spam libraries with books before this law? Libraries refusing to stock whatever mystery material is thrown at them is a logistical concern, not a matter of “banning.” Confusing the two borders on legal crank reasoning.
> Did you think that you could just spam libraries with books before this law?
Semantic games - especially false equivalences - are part and parcel of the culture wars. "Book bans are fine because librarians have been 'banning' books. Checkmate"
Curation =/= banning. Telling curators (librarians) "You can't have any book on this list even if you want them, or you'll go to jail" is banning books.
The practical difference is that, in one case, the taxpayers collectively decide what's appropriate for their children and what is not. In the other case, a single (or a few) individuals decide what is appropriate for all the taxpayers children.
I don't understand why some people think it's better to ignore the wishes of the voters.
> I guess if you agree with those reasons, it’s “curation”, if you don’t, it’s “banning”.
Curation is part of the job for librarians, and it's a specialized skill. I don't have to agree with an ideology to accept what they do is curation - a Librarian in a Taliban library still curates their collection regardless of my endorsement of Sharia. If they are instructed by Kabul to remove specific texts, then it's a ban.
Someone decides what music gets played on radio and what the TV lineup looks like and calling that selection "banning" is reaching IMO . When the legislature is coming up with a blacklist, then it's blatantly "banning" to me
Thanks for engaging my extreme example on its own terms. If that's what this law actually does, I'm kind of okay with that. I trust a random librarian's judgement far more than any law passed by grandstanding politicians in order to stir up anger.
I'm not sure what your point is (or if you read my comment correctly). I definitely think that letting librarians make the decision is better than a law that bans all books with depictions of sex from all grades. I have read this specific book and I would have been on the side of allowing it in high-schools, but not junior highs. However, I can see how a reasonable person would disagree with me, and the most prurient parts of chapter 9 are no more titillating than my junior high sex-education class, which I recall as being less titillating than looking at pictures of topless women in National Geographic, and that was definitely available in the library.
Sexual education at early age is very important. Teaching kids what sex is, and how to recognize it, and teaching them that it is something that adults do to adults.
Child sexual abuse happens to a large part because kids don't understand what's happening to them early on, the actual grooming part, then when it's too late they don't want to speak about it.
Obviously there are better and worse books for every topic. And the context of these political actions make it clear that it's not about the quality of the presentation.
Couldn’t we leave this up to the affected constituents only? If you don’t have a child in the school you can’t request a book be removed. You can request that your child not have access to a book. If you don’t reside in the library area you can’t request a book be removed, but you can put a restriction that your account cannot check out certain books. Isn’t that enough to respect everyone’s desires here? Why do we even need a law like this?
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for flamewar and ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're flaming or battling for. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
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We've banned this account for using HN primarily for flamewar and ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're flaming or battling for. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I don't know if it's literally the same people, but it's pretty amusing watching conservatives be hardcore no compromises first amendment absolutists when it comes to speech they agree with, while simultaneously being willing to define it as narrowly as necessary when it comes to silencing speech they don't agree with.
The central premise is always centered around the teaching to kids. Show me powerful conservatives who want trans/LGBT books banned from Amazon, or pressuring major book publishers, or outright actual bans in which parents aren't allowed to teach their children from these books. It starts and ends at the classroom/children.
It's always "about the children", until it suddenly isn't. It was "about the children" when conservatives were attacking gender-affirming care, until suddenly laws were introduced to ban it for everyone. It was "about the children" when conservatives attacked drag shows, until suddenly laws were introduced to ban it in public for everyone. Why is it going to be different this time?
Axios puts it nicely: it "states that a health professional who provides gender-affirming care to a trans person under 26 — or even refers a patient to another provider — could be sentenced to jail and lose their medical license."
1) that bill was introduced in march and went nowhere... so not really anything at all, tons of lawmakers push pie-in-the-sky legistation bec they're nuts but aside from hitting the committee, it goes nowhere bec it's nuts.
2) This appears to limit it to under 26, and while yes, theoretically that is an adult, it's not all adults and is really meant to prevent people who don't have fully developed brains from making life altering decisions. Its the same reason most doctors will refuse to perform hysterectomies on women under the age of 30. kids and young adults make really dumb decisions that they often regret for the rest of their lives... why not protect them from that, especially at a time when there is a clear social contagion.
Look at where we are right now: I showed you that conservative politicians introduced legislation to ban transitioning for some adults. Where before the point was "it's just in schools and with kids", now it's suddenly "why not protect them from social contagion". Can't you at least keep your principles for 3-4 comments before dropping them?
Protect children from social contagion. But again. It not a passed law. It’s simply something an eccentric no name lawmaker in Texas proposed. It doesn’t appear to have made it out of committee… should we judge the entire Democratic Party based on the crazy proposals of the socialists who are under their umbrella?
There was a dem lawmaker who wanted to add an amendment to some bill in Montana that removed language about pedophilia… should we assume that all democrats are propedophilia now?
And there you go again - "children", except it's "children and adults"! In what other context are people treated as children while 25?
And I asked whether this was enough or not, because (naturally) this is not the only example. Here is a current bill from Florida which "prohibits health insurance policy & health maintenance contract from providing coverage for gender clinical interventions": https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1421/ByVersion
This is in addition to the stronger and more inflammatory language that conservatives are using these days, including the reaction to any corporate interaction with transgender individuals (Budlight etc.)
And one last point I want to get back to:
> social contagion
You believe this to be a social contagion. This is not what current scientific studies indicate, and it is definitely not broadly accepted. You putting it this way says a lot about you.
No sense talking to people who try to discuss in bad faith. If you accuse me of doing something I didn't do I lose all interest in continuing talking to you.
The US is a highly divided society in which schools and teachers are still given the mandate to act in loco parentis. It's not surprising that there's some conflict there.
I see a lot of flagged comments of people claiming that "degenerate books" were pushed on people.
Is that really a thing? Is it more than isolated incidents? From my information bubble, those claims seem so foreign to me.
Can someone give me multiple examples with:
1) name of the book
2) problematic example in the book
3) the age of people to which the book was accessible
I'm not going to search for multiple examples, I'll leave that up to you. But here is the first result from Google
https://nypost.com/2023/02/28/knox-zajac-reads-aloud-from-po...
Feel free to Google keywords such as "school board" "read" "book" "kids" for more examples.
I don't have or want kids so have never had an opinion on this.
I see “Nick and Charlie" mentioned in an article. A book about two gay boys that get drunk and fool around.
If you just look at the cover it is going to be super triggering to some repressed parent. Especially since many of the fathers are going to have unexpressed homoerotic fantasies themselves.
To me, the whole thing seems like a huge unproductive distraction from actual learning. Imagine if parents gave a shit about the math books to this degree.
There is a big difference between Lolita by Vladimir Naboko and To Kill A Mocking Bird by Harper Lee in a school library.
Fahrenheit 451 is coming true every day in the land of the free - you can't change history by banning books - the world being what it is , tales of slavery and Jim Crow will be eternal outside the South.
248 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadIt's crazy how transactional some fundamental American values have become lately.
Otherwise you're not arguing in favor of democracy, you're arguing in favor of your own personal moralizing.
But just think this through.
Imagine how terribly ideological available book selections would become if we had to have “the voting public” decide which books were available. I have a feeling that you would not be happy with the books that the voting majority decides are “acceptable”.
And you act like it’s just the money of the people that don’t want the books that is being used. What about the money of the people that want the books available? Should it be up to you to say the library can’t use those people’s money to buy those books?
Quit acting like this is about the money spent when it is purely about you wanting to foist your morals onto others and using the cost as a scapegoat.
And lastly, it is not, and should not ever be the case that everyone has to agree on every dollar that the government spends. Money is spent on good programs that you as an individual will never directly benefit from. Does that mean that we should allow voters to decide how every dollar is spent? Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. So long social security and Medicare and the majority don’t currently use them.
Wait, but both of those are censorship of a form; Apple is just allowed to censor whatever it wants.
Taken to the extreme, should a library be allowed to stock only books that promote the political party of whoever won the latest election?
Obviously decisions for shelf space have to be made. If those decisions for shelf space are made solely by the government's dislike of the material, though, that feels pretty obviously like government censorship to me.
Isn't doing so a violation of the implied first amendment right to access to information?
Your mistake is expecting consistency from a group that has devolved to seeing hypocrisy as a virtue. It's no longer about lofty ideas and the categorical imperative, but rather fake bravado strong men pushing half-baked agendas to demonstrate naked power.
[0] (being a libertarian I believe there is a strong argument that the tech monopolies constitute de facto government. but that isn't even relevant here)
Illinois tilts strongly to the left above I-80, so outside of a few rural western or southern counties, this is an immaterial policy change.
(i have children, and they are free to read whatever material they select from a public library)
If they want someone other than you "average" taxpayer to pay for the books in question, let me know where to wire the funds. Knowledge is power. Censorship is used to control.
EDIT: I believe we've run this subthread to its conclusion. Best to you.
And of course that wholly ignores cases where the books are donated or acquired for free from publishers, which often happens with libraries.
Taken to it's conclusion here you are saying that every citizen has veto power over the individual uses of any public resource, so, like, can I ban all pickup trucks from highways? We shouldn't spend public funds maintaining roads for them when they do significantly more damage than sedans.
You are saying that even if you use a library you can ban other people from using it in the way they desire, or from offering certain services to others, whether or not those people also pay for it.
And you're going further than saying that this is done in a democratic manner, but instead that any individual can enjoin the library from providing services. Maybe that's not what you intend to be arguing for, but it is the argument you're putting forward.
And, key to this issue are that
1. It isn't your money, it's state money and the state democratically decided to purchase books with it, for the benefit of the citizenry because an educated populace is good for the general welfare.
And
2. You didn't object to the generic purchase of books, but these particular books. And yes, using the state and state funding to disfavor or limit access to certain viewpoints or categories of information is definitionally censorship.
Much as with public schools, as long as the state decides they exist in general, they have to be funded fairly without a bias towards our against any particular viewpoint other than, like, education.
If you want to take the principled position that libraries are bad say that, and nothing else. Otherwise, I'll respond to what you say.
If it’s voluntary because it was voted for, surely anything else voted for by the same governments that voted for taxation is also voluntary right? Shall I enumerate a few examples to check your consistency?
I never said anything about voluntary. I believe that one of the core functions of government is to exist as the legitimate body by which we compel other people to do things. The exact mechanics vary from government to government (for example libertarians might limit government to compelling people to obey the NAP and meet their contractual obligations, while other forms of democracy obligate people to do whatever the electorate decides (which, technically, is also what happens in a libertarian society!).
This is true whether or not I agree with a particular policy of the government. Governments are legitimate even when they do things I, personally, disagree with. And in fact I generally think that to effectively function governments must be able to operate with a bluntness that will leave some people unhappy (you're free to read that as "I don't believe a libertarian society can effectively function at scale).
Just to check, what do you propose society do with people who do not have the economic resources to access published works normally? Should the lower class be limited to only propaganda provided by the upper classes? If not how do we ensure free access to information for everyone and prosperity and general welfare of those less fortunate?
Or, actually, since as far as I can tell your objection applies to all taxation, how does a government maintain funding? Like on your framing it isn't ethical to force me to pay the salary of a bureaucrat I don't elect, so how do you maintain the judiciary and executive needed to function?
I’m also a bit curious why a child’s right to access certain literature can’t be specified in a “Bill of Rights”.
And nobody has a “right” to have the government provide them free access to any particular information in public libraries. The government can’t dictate to parents what materials they allow their children to access. But the public doesn’t have to pay and make that material available in public libraries.
I might have a difference idea of democracy from you, but this feels a deep undemocratic way to go. Democracy dies in the darkness, free access to information is one of the cornerstones of democracy. All democracies have some sort of a public archive which distributes knowledge to the general public, most of the time for free. In the absence of such system you will at best have aristocracy.
So yes, if we want to live in a democracy—or at least how I understand democracy—everybody should have the “right” to have the government provide them with free access to any particular information. Particularly in the school system as a part of public and universal education (another important aspect of democracy).
Regarding the public transit analogy. Ideally in a democratic society where transportation equity is provided, the public should be entitled to provide input into the transportation system, but everybody living inside a reasonable density should be provided with some transit option (I live in a pretty rural place near Seattle but still I have two bus lines near my home which go to two ferry terminals, where there are four ferry lines, I consider my transportation needs “provided for” in the system). However in this ideal democracy, the input only goes to policy makers, who ultimately decide (or curate) frequency, routes, etc. based on both these inputs, but also experts in the field. If everybody is covered, and riders have some input, I would call that system democratic. What wouldn’t be democratic is if non-riding taxpayers would decide that people in certain area (say Vashon Island) shouldn’t get any buses. Or that buses should be banned in some areas (say between Woodenville and Bothell).
That’s not democracy, it’s liberalism. Real democracy includes the right of the majority to decide which ideas will be promoted at the public expense and which ideas will not receive a public platform.
Don't we though?
Presuming that we have decided that the government will provide public libraries (a service we'll assume is intended to promote the general welfare, or somesuch), it wouldn't be legal, as I understand it, to pass a law refusing to let libraries purchase the Bible, nor could the law prevent libraries from storing books on black history, by black authors. Either ban would run into equal protection and 1a issues.
You're making this an argument about purchasing books, but in almost all cases, the actual things happening here are removal (and destruction) of books already on library shelves. And while there are costs to sustain and store stock at libraries, those costs are extremely low comparatively, and removal of existing books is almost certainly 1a relevant.
(To be clear, this is legitimately a question. You know more about constitutional jurisprudence than I do, but my understanding is that libraries banning books isn't usually acceptable from a power of the purse situation, much as like apparently title VI complaints about discriminatory transit practices can also succeed)
I think this is actually far less true today than it once was. Yes, Chicago alone makes IL a blue state, but outside Chicago it's not so clear anymore - even north of i80.
It's been rather jarring on my last few visits back home to the West Chicago suburbs. We used to joke about the i80 boundary separating the yokels from regular people. Now I encounter plenty of overt right-wingers without even going south of i88. Just the gun craze alone has converted a lot of people IMO. Concealed carry and little NO PARKING style gun stickers on business entrances everywhere becoming normalized in the state I'm sure has played a role here.
It's a totally different culture of no-flag-too-big and they'll-take-your-guns vs. what I grew up in.
You’re inverting the situation. Public libraries are taxpayer funded public services. Being a taxpayer gives you a right to vote on what your tax dollars are used to purchase.
> (i have children, and they are free to read whatever material they select from a public library)
I think this approach does kids a disservice. Kids have undeveloped brains, and lack both knowledge and life experience. What basis do they have for deciding what to read? It’s your job as a parent to curate society’s knowledge to teach them about what’s good and right, and what will help them be healthy and productive citizens.
How do you imagine the state senators who voted for this bill were elected?
You'll see this even in "Red" states. I would go so far as to say that what defines a "red" state is the number of voting districts which are sparsely populated.
Remember the graphic which showed in the 2020 election how the vast majority of the map swung for Trump? As the Democrats are fond of saying, "Land doesn't Vote..."
Ref: https://www.hillcountrynews.com/stories/analysis-in-texas-el... Ref: https://brilliantmaps.com/2020-county-election-map/
Of course... It's always more complicated than this. This is at best the broad strokes, all models are wrong but some are useful...
You're right. Who cares if the taxpayers collectively decided that some material was not age-appropriate?
/s
That's the point of using your vote, right? So that some individual employed by the government can't enforce their minority ideology onto the majority population without some sort of blowback.
And most of the controversy involves school libraries - although there are some exceptions.
This bill just doesn’t do much. I’m not opposed to it. I guess it might do a little good.
But it’s posturing by politicians.
This is splitting hairs: removing books from school libraries is a de facto ban on those books. Neither the article nor law implies that "book ban" in this context means anything other than "school book ban."
So by your definition, does a school library with 13k books ban 99,99% of all books?
[1]
No. Not stocking a book because it's physically impossible to stock all books in the world is not the same as banning it.
The ALA's statement[1] is clear, and IMO common-sense: proscribing or removing content for doctrinal reasons is the problem.
[1]: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill
The concrete "book bans" I've heard about have been that Maus is no longer required reading in 8th grade, or that explicit sex pictures are banned from middle school libraries. Neither seem terrible to me.
What are the most egregious bans I might actually be upset by?
That being said: I, for one, think that 8th graders should have Maus accessible to them; it's a difficult book substantively and in terms of presentation, but I don't think reading it is going to "damage" any 8th grader. "Required" is besides the point.
My point was that when Maus stopped being part of required reading in one school district, that was reported as a "book ban", which is very misleading.
So now I'm suspicious of other reported "book bans" until I've heard the details.
We're not talking about curation, and it is bizarre mental gymnastics to propose they are remotely similar.
EDIT. BTW even curation-excluded books are accepted by libraries. Libraries operate in networks, and they exchange / send overflow books to each other all the time.
A ban implies to me the book cannot be sold at all which is hardly splitting hairs.
And did you find it just as egregious when Huckleberry Finn was banned in new york and california schools and public libraries for using the "n" word?
Every American that I know (including myself) understands the phrase "book ban" to refer widely, if not exclusively, to school libraries in the context of American politics. It's been nearly 70 years since we've had otherwise politically notable book bans[1].
> And did you find it just as egregious when Huckleberry Finn was banned in new york and california schools and public libraries for using the "n" word?
Yes.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/banned-books-wee...
Seriously: what's the point of this comment? There will always be a worse example; what matters is that there's a shared meaning in this context.
If a school decided to ban Twinkies from their lunch menu I wouldn’t say we have a food ban crisis that the state of Illinois would need to legislate. A parent could still buy Twinkies at home and enjoy them as often as they wanted.
That's a lie. Or shall I say "gas lighting at best and a false flag at worst"?
"The Lithuanian press ban (Lithuanian: spaudos draudimas) was a ban on all Lithuanian language publications printed in the Latin alphabet in force from 1865 to 1904 within the Russian Empire, which controlled Lithuania proper at the time. Lithuanian-language publications that used Cyrillic were allowed and even encouraged." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_press_ban
To make my point stronger: I would call it a book ban, if English language books were illegal to write in the Latin alphabet, and only allowed in the Cyrillic alphabet. This would be consistent with the situation of Lithuanian language book ban (except it would not replace kindergarten and lower grades with Russian grammar schools).
Calling it a lie seems at the very least ignorant of the actual situation, or worse, willful twisting of history. If the former, I invite you to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_book_smugglers to find out on which day they are celebrated!
'Banning all books on Lithuanian language' and 'banning books in Lithuanian language written in Latin alphabet and encouraging transition to books in Lithuanian language written in Cyrillic alphabet' are different things.
Former would have had a goal of discontinuing written Lithuanian language and the latter had a goal of switching Lithuanian language from Latin to Cyrillic alphabet.
Misrepresenting the latter as the former is a lie.
But regardless you are only reinforcing the point that it was a real ban. The fact that they were banned and the books they didn’t want banned were encouraged really only continues to make my case.
Right now Kazakhstan is transitioning from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet. This year children will be taught only Latin letters and they won't be able to read the texts in Kazakh language written in Cyrillic in the last 80 years.
Do you consider this a problem?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_alphabets#Latin_script
You are the first.
Book bans are bans on books, at a national or state/local government level.
Bans on books within a school have been a thing for a relatively long time where I am. Usually managed by the local school council for various different reasons.
I'm aware that there are ample other ways to (and entities that) ban books. Their severity is not meaningfully diminished by this conversation, and introducing them is a distraction.
usually means
1. is usually exclusive 2. if not exclusive, then is the case in the majority of cases
The proposed case that "Book Bans" refer almost exclusively to school libraries is obviously false if you just take a look at a dictionary. It is evidently not "widely known to mean X" if common definitions do not explicitly state that.
All definitions state that it is an act of banning a book. But do not explicitly state that it is exclusive to some arbitrary bureaucratic level.
Either way, it is strange to just decide that a "Book Ban" must refer almost exclusively to a school.
And yes, this is semantics.
I think there is a reason to point this out. Twisting language to drive, in this case a political point, is called propaganda. Calling it a ban implies something more severe than what is happening. Which is content regulation.
Additionally, I searched “fox news book bans” and “nbc book bans” and these were the first links that came up.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/choice-lies-parent-texas-dad-supp...
> Maia Kobabe’s book "Gender Queer" became one of the most banned books in the country in 2022. The book has been at the center of the debate over what books should be banned in schools.
https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/map-book-bans-rise-rcn...
> School districts in 26 states have banned more than 1,000 books in the past nine months
Additionally, the Wikipedia article “ 2021–2022 book banning in the United States” discusses various cases of books being withdrawn from school libraries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%932022_book_banning...
That's just not true. "Banned book" has meant "book banned from schools and libraries" for a very long time. This is the meaning used by the American Library Association.
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbook...
It is, for the time being and for most practical purposes, impossible to ban a book from being published in the USA. Other countries have bigger problems but that is not what people discuss in American politics.
>And did you find it just as egregious when Huckleberry Finn was banned in new york and california schools and public libraries for using the "n" word?
This is a very feeble gotcha.
Are you implying these books are so unpopular that a good chunk of their influence and profitability is very much dependent on left-wing public school librarians subsidizing them by making sure they are included in the catalogues?
We should remember that a school library has limited space, so a decision is being made about what to include no matter what.
If you think ideology/doctrine doesn't already play a role in these decisions, I invite you to check if the library of your local high school has a physical copy of say "When Harry Became Sally", "The Bell Curve", or even "The Blank Slate".
In principle, my libertarian side would have agreed with you that imposing these choices in a centralized way is not a good idea. But those principles are only meaningful in a classical liberal context. Not when scourges of affirmative action, indoctrination, ideological subsidies [1] and pseudo-liberal bureaucratic processes are used to impose ludicrous ideas upon us.
[1]: For examples of that, see https://dc.claremont.org/federal-progressive-subsidy-databas...
No; please don't editorialize. It's obvious that the goal of these bans is to ensure that children and young adults who otherwise wouldn't have access to these books continue to not have access.
> I invite you to check if the library of your local high school has a physical copy of say "When Harry Became Sally", "The Bell Curve", or even "The Blank Slate"
It has two of the three[1][2]. You need to reevaluate your assumptions here.
(And note: I grew up in a district where students simultaneously have access to one of the largest public library systems in the world, by default. I'm positive I could find all three additionally in that system.)
[1]: https://search.follettsoftware.com/metasearch/ui/113378/sear...
[2]: https://search.follettsoftware.com/metasearch/ui/113378/sear...
I agree that the main goal is to reduce the access of children and young adults to these book, compared to the status quo. I don't think anyone is disputing that, one of the common rationales given being that these books are "inappropriate" for them.
However, framing this as a de facto book ban is definitely "editorializing".
> It has two of the three[1][2]. You need to reevaluate your assumptions here.
Touché. That isn't the typical high school though. It seems like a very good one, with competitive merit-based admission, and eight Nobel Prize-winning alumni. [1] Even then, you can see the biases of the high school librarians if you take a look at the collections page [2]: "LGBTQIA+", "BIPOC Reading List", "Grade 1: Inclusion contributes to a community’s diversity", "Indigenous Math & Science Collection", "Diverse Voices", etc.
Do you disagree that these are topics favored by left-wingers? Do they have collections promoting "Nuclear Energy", "Classics", "Freedom", "Family Values", "Meritocracy", or even "Personal Responsibility"?
> I grew up in a district where students simultaneously have access to one of the largest public library systems.
Good for them. I very much support that. Although there are significant biases in the procurement process for the public libraries, I assume their situation is probably much better than public school libraries.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bronx_High_School...
[2] https://collections.follettsoftware.com/collections/public
I don't know what else you'd call the use of state authority to restrict access to books, without painful euphemisms.
And note: the use of "book ban" to describe partisan curtailments of reading materials is not itself partisan[1]. You can find similar uses of the phrase in any partisan or non-partisan news source.
> Do you disagree that these are topics favored by left-wingers? Do they have collections promoting "Nuclear Energy", "Classics", "Freedom", "Family Values", "Meritocracy", or even "Personal Responsibility"?
There was a classics topic in our library. I think it would behoove you to think one step beyond this and observe that topical selections in libraries reflect three pressures:
1. What the audience (i.e., students in this case) actually wants to read;
2. What the librarian thinks will induce reading among the audience;
3. The librarian's own biases.
You're focusing on (3), when the reality is that (1) and (2) matter more. Asking high schoolers to get excited about a library section on "personal responsibility" or "meritocracy" sounds like a bad joke.
[1]: https://www.foxnews.com/us/library-book-bans-united-states-s...
First of all, this isn't just about state authority. Parental authority also plays a role. In many cases, removing books from circulation happens due to complaints by parents. This is just some form of parental/public input on what taxpayer money is being spent on, and what kind of books are appropriate for children.
Also, in our current situation, state authority is very often used in ways I would consider inappropriate. For example, in a lot of cases, affirmative action is not only allowed, but required by law. So, there aren't really many good reasons to strictly stick to classical liberal principles.
> And note: the use of "book ban" to describe partisan curtailments of reading materials is not itself partisan[1].
Fox News generally sucks beyond measure. Here's National Review's take (though it is a bit different than mine): https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/book-curation-is-not-...
> Asking high schoolers to get excited about a library section on "personal responsibility" or "meritocracy" sounds like a bad joke.
Maybe, but probably there are ways to hype up and sensationalize everything. Besides, I could come up with a lot of "exciting" topics which also probably wouldn't be emphasized: "Victims of Communism", "The Green Revolution in India", "Lysenkoism", etc.
Although you didn't say it explicitly, I assume we both can agree that the librarian's own biases do have a significant effect, and what the typical direction of those biases are. You may think this is a good thing, but that's besides the point.
Also, your (2) is also very much subject to personal biases.
Parental opinions don't make a book ban into not-a-book-ban. They make it into a book ban fueled by parents. Road to hell, good intentions, etc.
The other point is bizarre: two wrongs don't make a right. Political revanchism because you don't like the other things your government does is not socially healthy (arguably, substantially less healthy than any of the topics that are being banned).
Children and teenagers aren't stupid: what you're proposing is replacing subjects that they're interested in with ones that you're interested in, with your interest being an ideological one. I think it's worth taking a step back and considering whether you'd be a worse librarian than the ones that we have; the ones at hand can at least offer the sound justification that increasingly large numbers of students feel comfortable self-identifying as LGBTQ.
It's not bizarre. It's not just about moral principles, but also practical realities.
> Children and teenagers aren't stupid
TBH, I kinda think they are, and I'm not exempting my teenage self. They are definitely impulsive, impressionable, and prone to fads and groupthink.
Have you heard of the book "Lord of the Flies"? Interestingly, this particular book has also been subject to what you would call a ban, at least in one case in because it's "racist". [1]
> Children and teenagers aren't stupid: what you're proposing is replacing subjects that they're interested in with ones that you're interested in, with your interest being an ideological one.
I don't think any of the topics I came up with are more ideological than the ones I mentioned from the library collections. However, probably what you count as ideological is itself influenced by the ideological glasses one's wearing.
> I think it's worth taking a step back and considering whether you'd be a worse librarian than the ones that we have; the ones at hand can at least offer the sound justification that increasingly large numbers of students feel comfortable self-identifying as LGBTQ.
Me personally? Maybe, but I could make suggestions which are definitely an improvement, but I don't think enough high school librarians would consider doing it. An example would be not purchasing any books by Ibram X. Kendi.
[1]: https://archive.is/XQKCa#selection-3183.0-3183.398
Actually I think I would have less problems if the only people who can go to school policy discussions and make these requests are parents whose children are literally in that school system right now. I have repeatedly witnessed people who don’t have children in that school system show up to these things and debate about this. It’s very stupid.
The only reason they need collections like "LGBTQIA+" and "Diverse Voices" in the first place is because literally the rest of the collection will already be filled with "Classics", "Freedom", and "Family Values". Those are considered the default in society, there is no need to explicitly highlight them when you will already come across them without even trying.
If public schools are purposely preventing books that would otherwise be present from being included in their libraries, how is that anything other than a book ban? A ban doesn't have to be across an entire legal jurisdiction to be a ban; if someone got wasted and tried to start a fight at a bar and then was never allowed back in again, you'd still say they were "banned" even if they were able to go to other bars in the city.
Or "The Turner Diaries" or "The Camp of the Saints" if you want some more extreme examples.
No, it isn't. There are millions of books that aren't in school libraries. Are they all de facto banned?
Confidently declaring something doesn't make it true. A library deciding not to carry a book is not a book ban.
Never having a book, having it but having it be removed for non-content-related reasons, having it removed for content-related reasons, having the content removal decision come from librarians, or parents, or politicians, the public record of comments about why something is removed, all of these things are obviously important. Flattening it to "yeah lots of books aren't in libraries" is a _bit_ reductive!
Good things are good, bad things are bad. Sometimes it's hard to write laws that work around this, but at the very least moral judgements can be made, with space for nuance.
There’s a big difference between saying “we don’t think Tropic of Cancer is appropriate for high school kids so we’re going to remove it” and “Tropic of Cancer is banned in our schools”.
The “book bans” happening are mostly the former and while I do think they’re mostly stupid, they’re nowhere near what you’d think is happening from headlines. Very little actual banning is occurring.
I do think it's important to think about the fact that school libraries are where kids tend to access a lot of books (there are of course city libraries, but those places are also being targeted). At least my experience was around that. And many libraries will have a request system, so if a kid is like "I want to read this", then libraries are able to often put in a purchase order, and then make that available for other students.
At least based on my own school experiences, I do think that teachers of a certain ... authoritarian bent would be more than happy to make up a stink of books brought in that would be "banned" from the library if a copy circulating were brought to their attention. Power structures in schools are like that. But that's just conjecture.
I think the general point of the "book ban" terminology is that librarians and schools generally had leeway to bring in more or less anything to the library, and that autonomy is being stripped away for very dark reasons. This is the age of the internet, but from my own childhood, if my school and city library suddenly decided to not provide certain kinds of book, I would just not have access to that at all.
All that to say that you're right on the word in some sense, but it feels fitting to me.
The people complaining about banning are being either intentionally alarmist (if they understand what’s going on) or knee-jerk reactionary. It’s the exact same as when the religious people are mad the state mandates we teach evolution.
School districts and states have to select what kids learn, since we have finite time and resources to reach them, in the same way that libraries have to choose which books occupy finite shelf space.
I don’t agree with a lot of the decisions, but people are acting like it’s some right wing fascism every time they remove Henry Miller a library.
There’s surely a more accurate term than banning or curation here.
It's now in the public domain, so one could even set up a little publishing company and publish it oneself.
And it's an incredibly awful book, measured to all the 'fame' it holds in certain circles.
You can see it for yourself.
https://archive.org/details/gender-queer-a-memoir-by-maia-ko...
This is apparently what it would be censorship to keep out of gradeschool libraries. If you're ok with the book, then I guess there's not much more to talk about. If you're now not ok with the book, then I guess this is the first time you actually saw inside of it.
We're told that there is a difference between doctrine and curation, and maybe in some theoretical world this is true. But in the world we actually live in, doctrine's already being pushed... they're just pretending that they're "merely curating". And they're demanding that the other side not be allowed any oversight on that curation. When they curate, good, when anyone else does it, well... they're the "bad guys".
Personally, I could not care less. If you want this book in schools, it does not affect me. But you should know what book it is we're talking about. Take a look, click the link.
Maybe you wouldn't, but be honest with yourself - how many parents want their school to hold and keep pornographic material?
If you want to show your kids sexually graphic images, then sure, fine, have at it. You're complaining that you can't show these images to other people's kids, and you're complaining that those parents are a problem?
I’m actually not that invested in ideology or whatever. You’re prescribing something to me I don’t really care about. I’ve read the book for fun, as an adult, didn’t feel titillated or aroused at all. It’s about as sexual as putting a condom on a banana, and I was definitely doing that in highschool. But even then parents who were uncomfortable could sign a thing preventing their children from attending sex ed. I think we parents can do the same thing for sex ed related books! No big deal.
Society doesn't allow it. Porn operators get into legal trouble for allowing access to kids. Movie theatre operations get into serious trouble for allowing kids in to see movies they are not supposed to.
Your argument of "let the kids have everything and make the parents perform the restrictions" is so stupid it's literally never been tried.
> I’m actually not that invested in ideology or whatever.
I find that hard to believe, considering
a) you reacting to an "age-appropriate material" argument being no different from a reaction to "no sex ed" argument.
and
b) what you are proposing, in general, has literally never been successful before. ALL societies places restrictions on kids whether their parents like it or not. Some are more restrictive and some are less, but they all have restrictions exclusively for children.
Because it is impossible on a practical level to do so with a public school system and a constant low-intensity campaign to infiltrate schools with pornographic garbage.
How many hundreds of hours of spare time per year would a parent need to expend to discover the 3 books they don't personally want their child to be exposed to?
For that matter, would their wishes even be respected? Or would we have school employees letting them read it on the sly, as some bizarrely-conceived revolution against the oppressors? There's more than enough evidence of schools taking the opportunity to hide disturbing developments about children from their own parents.
I see a study from 2022 that 10% have watched porn by the age of 9.
The average age a kid first watched internet porn in the US right now is 12.
Parents are just a joke. Worried about “Nick and Charlie" in school while their kid goes to bed and watches a BDSM gang bang in HD video.
Total denial I am sure. "Not my innocent little angel". Even if the kid is in the 10% not watching porn , surely their friends tell them all about what they watched.
I would think the kids think these books are a total joke.
We're also not talking about pornography. None of the material here fails the Miller test.
And moreso, you can't see it from someone else's perspective who might have a problem with this?
Do you have children?
It doesn’t matter whether I or anyone else has a problem with it. What matters is whether adolescents have a right to read it, which they do. I exercised that right as a student, and I would like other students to be able to do the same.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie%27s_Choice_(novel)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_According_to_Garp
Click it. See for yourself.
> What matters is whether adolescents have a right to read it, w
They don't have any such right, best that I can understand the legal framework of the western world.
For instance, they don't have the right to have sex with adults. Anyone who claimed that they were being denied such a right, well... do we really need to spell out how those claimants would be treated?
Minors are permitted by responsible adults to read age-appropriate books. We don't say that refusing to put The Anarchist Cookbook up in 4th grade libraries is censorship. At least non-lunatics don't. There are books that they will be allowed to read once legal adults, but that reading earlier might have adverse developmental effects. It's generally agreed that actual pornography is one such category.
For me it was a playboy at 13, for my friends probably the same, but I'm sure the internet bring the age lower,and pack more actions.
When I think about your link of a graphic novel and the first playboy I read, I'm pretty sure any parent would prefer the graphic novel where a poorly done 2 image strip depicts a fellation, and the text besides is... Less than erotic let's say.
And btw: i read 'when I was 5 I killed myself' from Buten at around the same age (maybe 14), as well as flowers for algernon and 1984, I don't think they are age-appropriate books, but they are worth reading when adolescent, because you experience them harder, and formative.
Buten in particular wrote hard books.
I did. Please don’t call people liars.
It’s a graphic novel depicting a sex act, albeit not particularly erotically.
The entire point of my other comments was that I checked out other books in high school, books that are widely considered excellent and have been for decades, that contained far more explicit “inappropriate” content. The only things different here are the facts that it’s (1) drawn, and (2) concerns LGBTQ identity.
> They don't have any such right, best that I can understand the legal framework of the western world.
We live under a negative legal scheme, not a positive one. I’m not aware of any law that says that children cannot read what they’d like to read, either federal or state.
Obscenity in the US has a distinct legal test[1], one that you and I both understand this book (and Sophie’s Choice) would pass easily. It also doesn’t mention children anywhere.
Finally: nobody in this thread wants children to be hurt, or to be exposed to things that will hurt them. But books, especially ones that are presented and explainable within an educational context, do not hurt children. If anything, adults tend to hurt themselves and others more based on books than children do.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test
No, it’s because the barriers to immigration are much higher to Asian immigrants than the people who already live here. You will also see this in Nigerian-American families. The effect goes away after a few generations, and in the case of black immigrants racism is so effective the effect goes away with their children.
Incorrect. By far the main vehicle for permanent immigration under American law is family reunification, which isn’t based on skills or education. A large fraction of the Asian American population is also refugees from countries like Vietnam and Korea. There are a huge number of poor Asian immigrants, and they vastly outperform similarly lower income European Americans: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/make-y... (use the chart to compare economic outcomes of Asians in the bottom 1/5 to whites in the bottom 1/5). See also: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2057150X209738... (“Rather than being a class phenomenon, Asian cultural factors have important effects for most second-generation Asian Americans regardless of the socioeconomic status of their parents.”). The effect does go away over time, but that’s because kids adopt American culture. E.g. Mindy Kaling and her new show.
Nigerian immigrants also outperform European Americans (and Asian anmericans) even after taking into account income and education: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231211001971. Their parenting style tends to be extremely rigid and disciplined.
It’s also unclear what the boundary is for you here: is any mention of sex or violence verboten? Are educators and authors meant to pretend that middle schoolers don’t know what death is, to minimize the Holocaust or other human travesties, or contradict the school’s own sex ed programs? In what world does that make children better socially adjusted, much less prepared for adulthood?
Ultimately, if exposure to adult topics is a problem for you, then you should probably consider homeschooling (or a private system that will allow you or another adult, not regulated by the state, to micromanage your child’s life). But socialization outcomes for homeschooling are overwhelmingly poor, as are outcomes for schools that hide the world from their students: they fail to accomplish the basic goal of preparation for actual life.
Obviously they pick some books and not others for some reasons. If you like their reasons you call it curation, if you don’t like their reasons you call it banning.
Randomly selecting books for rotation would bias by sheer publication volume. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my local library to be 40% Atkins Diet by volume, regardless of how positive I might feel about it.
Nobody is talking about pornography; not everything that contains sex or violence is pornographic in nature (much less obscene).
This is not a "gotcha" or loophole of some type. Words have meanings[1]. If your argument relies on changing the meaning of a common word in the dictionary, it's your argument that is wrong, not the damn dictionary!
I mean, where are you going with this?
Are you seriously advocating that school libraries and librarians have free reign to determine which books to hold? Because that's how you get Intelligent Design introduced into schools. It's how you perpetuate stereotypes and bigotry.[2].
We don't want individuals exclusively responsible for determining what ideas may or may not be available to people. By having the ruling authority perform the determination, it becomes a collective determination by the taxpayers.
If the taxpayers are unhappy, they express their unhappiness with their vote.
I want to know, after reading your many emotionally charged arguments for why this must be called a "ban", exactly why you feel that the decision on literature suitability be made by selected individuals, and not by a voted-in government.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ban
[2] I've been atheist for decades, and I argued multiple times against allowing individuals within schools to determine what goes into the minds of children, because I've seen multiple times that the only end-result of allowing this is that the more passionate (engaged? Ideologues? Insane?) people tend to move into those positions that allow them to propagate their ideology.
Restrictions come in many forms. It used to be marriage is special, then WC symbols are sacred, now we're back to think-of-the-children and their precious little minds. And one particular form is that some books are now banned from school libraries.
I wholeheartedly support the demand for more correct wording, but unfortunately it doesn't really matter.
Maybe. Maybe the "reactionary attempt" would have been non-existent if the advocates weren't using sexually graphic material, as linked in the thread above.
Do you also think that teaching of sex ed should include videos from pornhub?
In general it seems completely okay to include the discussion of porn in sex ed, and thus to show actual porn in sex ed.
It might make sense show it separately to boys and girls, mostly because boys are behind in development (on average), so the discussion of it should be different, but also because of the expected questions, etc.
There are many reasons to have no copies of a book, with the simplest being that nobody has requested it yet. Framing that as “banning” is ridiculous, since it falsely implies a doctrinal intent where only ignorance or concern for stated demands exists.
What you said is not curation, it's just managing the stock. Having 57 copies or 56 copies does not substantially alter availavbility. If somebody removed all copies of Atkins books, because "nobody needs them anymore" - then yes, this would be a doctrinal decision. Admittedly, since diets (for some reason) aren't part of culture wars (yet?), not a very controversial or scandalous one, but if some Atkins die-hards occupied a political position, or, in the contrary, Atkins were declared racist for some reason, it could become one.
> There are many reasons to have no copies of a book, with the simplest being that nobody has requested it yet
But how I can "request" a book that isn't in the library? Most libraries I've used do not have this function, not at least any that I could locate as a regular patron. On the contrary, I am reasonably sure most of the books featured on my local library's home page, aren't there because some patron came to them and asked for this specific book, which previously wasn't part of the collection and wouldn't be unless specifically requested (in fact, again, I know no way of doing this). Looking at their published collection developing policy I see (among others):
Provide a diverse and inclusive collection that contains content by and about a wide array of people and cultures
Consider the appropriateness to scope of the collection as it is developed
Content created by and representative of marginalized and underrepresented groups
Attention of critics, reviewers, awards and public
Suitability for intended audience
Literary or stylistic quality
Tell me these are non-doctrinal criteria. Of course they are - one's high quality suitable inclusive book is another's offensive bigoted trash. Again, it's about who has the power to make such decisions. Of course, the librarians, seeing themselves as The Experts (TM) would claim exclusive right to make such decisions on behalf of people paying for their library. But are they entitled to that, absent any control and supervision?
No, it isn't. You're trivialising actual book bans by referring to public education literature selection as a "ban".
Lots of books aren't in the school library; doesn't mean that they're banned - you can still buy them and read them to your kids, take them out of public libraries, read them on the internet ... all without any legal or unofficial consequences.
Removing these books from school libraries is done with the understanding that the students won't otherwise be able to access them, i.e. they can't get to a bookstore or public library without their parent and their parent will also refuse to keep it at home. That is a de facto ban.
Now: you might happen to think that it's good that these books can't be accessed, which is something that can (and is) being discussed. But I don't think it's worth mincing words over what's happening, especially given that it's a standard (and non-partisan) use of the phrase "book ban" in the US.
Questions of school library censorship have always been about age-appropriateness, or blasphemy, or antiquated common but now forbidden ideas. If not buying and not accepting donations of that material isn't a ban, then what could possibly be? If it does count as a ban, every school library now has to carry the complete works of Lyndon LaRouche?
edit: a real ban on bans in my eyes would be a state restriction on local governments passing book bans that apply to public schools and libraries. It wouldn't be aimed at the libraries themselves.
In other words: there are plenty of reasons to not stock a book that are not partisan or doctrinal. We don't expect public schools to pay for expensive medieval manuscripts, for example, or to stock books in languages that aren't represented in their district.
I don't see how pornographic bans wouldn't qualify as "doctrinal" though they are not particularly partisan.
You're leading with the assumption that you and I (or anyone else, really) agrees on what "pornography" is, much less that we agree in a non-partisan context.
The context here is that there's been a significant effort in the last ~18 months to reclassify LGBTQ fiction and non-fiction as pornographic and have it removed from school libraries on that ground. Justifications for that vary, from the more staid pearl-clutching ones, to rehashes of old and dangerous stereotypes about gays predating on children. That is absolutely a doctrinal concern, even if the nominal topic ("don't show children porn") is one that appears reasonable and uncontroversial on face value.
So if you're attempting to ban it because it's obscene, that's okay. But if you're trying to call it pornographic because the lead characters are in a romantic relationship and happen to be of the same sex... well, that's not obscene, and your attempt to call it pornographic is doctrinal disapproval.
And to be clear: As a rule, I am in favor of librarians making this decision without interference. Librarians have repeatedly put their livelyhoods at stake in order to protect individuals access to information, and protect the privacy of those same individuals.
I would think most librarians are people who are relatively local to their library.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-universitys-new-loyalty-oat...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equalit...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equalit... - A recent report from the Goldwater Institute found that 80% of job postings for Arizona’s public universities required applicants to submit a statement detailing their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Semantic games - especially false equivalences - are part and parcel of the culture wars. "Book bans are fine because librarians have been 'banning' books. Checkmate"
Someone still decides the book is not gonna be there, mostly for ideological reasons.
I guess if you agree with those reasons, it’s “curation”, if you don’t, it’s “banning”.
The practical difference is that, in one case, the taxpayers collectively decide what's appropriate for their children and what is not. In the other case, a single (or a few) individuals decide what is appropriate for all the taxpayers children.
I don't understand why some people think it's better to ignore the wishes of the voters.
Curation is part of the job for librarians, and it's a specialized skill. I don't have to agree with an ideology to accept what they do is curation - a Librarian in a Taliban library still curates their collection regardless of my endorsement of Sharia. If they are instructed by Kabul to remove specific texts, then it's a ban.
Someone decides what music gets played on radio and what the TV lineup looks like and calling that selection "banning" is reaching IMO . When the legislature is coming up with a blacklist, then it's blatantly "banning" to me
https://www.kcrg.com/2023/05/19/this-book-is-gay-iowas-loomi...
Child sexual abuse happens to a large part because kids don't understand what's happening to them early on, the actual grooming part, then when it's too late they don't want to speak about it.
Obviously there are better and worse books for every topic. And the context of these political actions make it clear that it's not about the quality of the presentation.
PS: Is it me, or does 2023 feel like 1981 all over again in socioeconomic and political conditions?
https://www.kcrg.com/2023/05/19/this-book-is-gay-iowas-loomi...
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/20/gender-q...
I’d prefer if you could point to the actual text in the law, not some sensationalized headline.
Axios puts it nicely: it "states that a health professional who provides gender-affirming care to a trans person under 26 — or even refers a patient to another provider — could be sentenced to jail and lose their medical license."
Is this sufficient, or do you need more?
1) that bill was introduced in march and went nowhere... so not really anything at all, tons of lawmakers push pie-in-the-sky legistation bec they're nuts but aside from hitting the committee, it goes nowhere bec it's nuts.
2) This appears to limit it to under 26, and while yes, theoretically that is an adult, it's not all adults and is really meant to prevent people who don't have fully developed brains from making life altering decisions. Its the same reason most doctors will refuse to perform hysterectomies on women under the age of 30. kids and young adults make really dumb decisions that they often regret for the rest of their lives... why not protect them from that, especially at a time when there is a clear social contagion.
There was a dem lawmaker who wanted to add an amendment to some bill in Montana that removed language about pedophilia… should we assume that all democrats are propedophilia now?
And there you go again - "children", except it's "children and adults"! In what other context are people treated as children while 25?
And I asked whether this was enough or not, because (naturally) this is not the only example. Here is a current bill from Florida which "prohibits health insurance policy & health maintenance contract from providing coverage for gender clinical interventions": https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1421/ByVersion
This is in addition to the stronger and more inflammatory language that conservatives are using these days, including the reaction to any corporate interaction with transgender individuals (Budlight etc.)
And one last point I want to get back to:
> social contagion
You believe this to be a social contagion. This is not what current scientific studies indicate, and it is definitely not broadly accepted. You putting it this way says a lot about you.
I did no such thing, but if you want to think so, enjoy!
https://www.them.us/story/michael-knowles-transgenderism-cpa...
Is that really a thing? Is it more than isolated incidents? From my information bubble, those claims seem so foreign to me.
Can someone give me multiple examples with: 1) name of the book 2) problematic example in the book 3) the age of people to which the book was accessible
I see “Nick and Charlie" mentioned in an article. A book about two gay boys that get drunk and fool around.
If you just look at the cover it is going to be super triggering to some repressed parent. Especially since many of the fathers are going to have unexpressed homoerotic fantasies themselves.
To me, the whole thing seems like a huge unproductive distraction from actual learning. Imagine if parents gave a shit about the math books to this degree.
Fahrenheit 451 is coming true every day in the land of the free - you can't change history by banning books - the world being what it is , tales of slavery and Jim Crow will be eternal outside the South.