A New Round of Satanic Panic: Book Banning Throughout the United States

I honestly think people who are interested in getting books banned from libraries have too much free time on their hands. I’ve been getting updates from various people about book bans across the United States. Some of these book bans are coming from school boards and others are coming from state legislators.

This is a disturbing trend. When you have the comprehension of a gnat, then you’ll want the people around you to never learn. The main artery to education is reading. In Missouri, legislation targeted graphic novels and comics. In Oklahoma, a school district wants to get rid of popular school texts like To Kill a Mockingbird, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Lord of the Flies, and The Outsiders.

The classroom is the perfect place to discuss information. Stop preventing teenagers from discussing ideas. They need room to speak and learn. They need to have their own agency. They’re not puppets. Stop sugarcoating things and accept that young adults are mature enough to encounter ideas that might be challenging or controversial. You have to let them grow up.

Also, stop calling any old book controversial. What you call controversial says something about you.

Book Banning Is an Ancient and Evil Practice

The roots of banning books come from a conservative ideology: it’s distinctly authoritarian. In the colonies, books were banned if they came off heretical. During the Civil War, multiple southern states outlawed texts that expressed anti-slavery sentiments. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was considered scandalous. Slaveholders publically burned copies of the book.

The Comstock Act of 1873 made it illegal to own obscene or immoral texts. The law criminalized the efforts of birth control advocates.

Idiots are the only people who want to ban books. They think everything is dirty, filthy, and immoral. They refuse to accept reality. They’re embarrassed by Shakespeare. They faint when they hear Oscar Wilde. They’d die if they were caught reading a science book about human sexuality. This is ridiculous. This kind of mentality shouldn’t be allowed in government. We shouldn’t let idiots make choices for the public, especially since they don’t realize they’re acting as pawns for authoritarians.

Let me be clear. We have real issues. A population that is literate isn’t a problem unless you’re an authoritarian.

Let librarians do their jobs and curate book collections for schools and communities. Stop inventing problems that don’t exist. If students want to find content of any type they can do so with a few keystrokes — they have phones and they have computers.

Many of the book bans are based in racism and bigotry. There shouldn’t be a sympathetic view of the South in the Civil War, unlike what the United Daughters of the Confederacy wanted. Treating people as slaves is an abomination. There is NOTHING sympathetic about it. The reality is slaveholders were disgusting people, and they should be remembered as disgusting people who took advantage of others. Their actions shouldn’t be repeated.

There have been decisions about book bans in the past. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court decided “Local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.” The Supreme Court ruled this in Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico, citing students’ First Amendment rights.

In the present, groups are mobilizing to prevent people from learning things. There are people who are trying to destroy public education. It’s a disturbing trend when people refuse to let their neighbors think critically. We cannot let controlling idiots get on school boards or even in school meetings.

Between July 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022, there were 1,586 book bans in 86 school districts across 26 states. That’s according to PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free speech.

The major target: stories featuring LGBTQ+ issues or protagonists. Other no-no topics include storylines about race and racism, sexual content, sexual assault, and death and grief. (I hope you see that last one as outrageous. Because it implies teaching people how to process grief and understand that grief is a natural part of life is too disruptive and controversial.)

In the past couple of years, Texas has had more than 700 book bans… that’s nearly double that of all the other states combined.

Books are also put out of reach by defacing them, giving them too high of a reading level, and putting them literally in impossible places to reach.

Authoritarians Want You to Be Stupid and Compliant

Censorship is about control. People are trying to control what you know. They don’t want you considering that the status quo could be wrong or that history might be worse than you were taught. There are groups of people who want you and your children to remain ignorant. They don’t want progress.

So what can you do? Get involved. Push back when book bans come up in your school district or state. Make it clear that what the other people are doing is nonsensical and authoritarian. They’re going to say you’re too liberal, but the fact that you read is going to be too liberal for them. They hate freedom of speech. They hate people who think for themselves and are different. They want people to be a hivemind.

Have a library in your own home. Buy banned books. Have your teens read banned books over the summer breaks. If some nutjob doesn’t want your kid to read, listen, or watch something — look into it. It might be the thing your kid really needs to consider.

Banning books is wrong. If you don’t want to read something, then don’t. But don’t forbid others from reading it because they might have fantastical ideas.

Book banning is a form of Satanic Panic. Book bans throughout history have caused us to lose knowledge permanently. Those who want power and control have successfully banished texts. People in power will ban ANYTHING: The Bible, Shakespeare’s plays, The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Farewell to Arms.

It’s a way bigger problem when people want to take your books away than your guns.

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Originally published: https://andrealawrence2468.medium.com/a-new-round-of-satanic-panic-book-banning-throughout-the-united-states-b8c6295e4cc1