When I was 8, my par­ents got me a library card. It allowed me to bor­row up to three books at a time. Books took me to won­drous and oth­er­wise inac­ces­si­ble places, put me in the com­pa­ny of fas­ci­nat­ing ideas and peo­ple. Advo­cates of the book ban­ning move­ment sluic­ing across the U.S., on the oth­er hand, put them­selves in the com­pa­ny of some of history’s most abysmal people.

On May 10, 1933 a crowd esti­mat­ed at forty-thou­sand, sur­round­ed by young men in Nazi uni­forms giv­ing the infa­mous raised arm salute, cheered and chant­ed fire incan­ta­tions as thou­sands of books by Jews and oth­er ‘Un-Ger­man’ writ­ers (mean­ing gays, among oth­ers) were burned in Berlin’s most famous thoroughfare.
When British forces burned key parts of Wash­ing­ton in the War of 1812–14, one of the tar­gets was the Library of Con­gress, an act right­ly reviled as barbarity.
A sim­i­lar epi­thet was applied to Bosn­ian Serbs besieg­ing Sara­je­vo, who delib­er­ate­ly tar­get­ed the Nation­al and Uni­ver­si­ty Library of Bosnia and Herze­gov­ina with incen­di­ary shells in August 1992. To add to the crime, snipers tar­get­ed fire­fight­ers and vol­un­teers try­ing to save irre­place­able books and archives.

                                  MODERN EQUIVALENTS

The tar­gets today are main­ly books intend­ed for school cur­ricu­lums. As a par­ent I under­stand con­cerns about what chil­dren have access to read­ing-wise. I don’t, for exam­ple, believe pre-pubes­cent chil­dren need books detail­ing infor­ma­tion on sex­u­al acts or pro­cliv­i­ties. I also know (as does every­one else who’s man­aged to make it to adult­hood) that noth­ing is more guar­an­teed to inter­est young peo­ple in a book than to tell them they can’t read it.
When I was in my ear­ly teens, a copy of “Pey­ton Place” was a cov­et­ed item, passed from hand to hand, the “dirty bits” bookmarked.

I seri­ous­ly doubt read­ing it made any of us sex­u­al preda­tors or deviants (how­ev­er one choos­es to define that), or oth­er­wise adverse­ly affect­ed us psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly. As we knew in our youth and as par­ents we tend to for­get, young peo­ple are a lot smarter than adults give them cred­it for.
A recent exam­ple is a report on a protest at a school board meet­ing where par­ents denounced “All Boys Aren’t Blue”  as porno­graph­ic and demand­ed the mem­oir about grow­ing up Black and queer be banned.
Stu­dents staged a peace­ful counter demon­stra­tion to make the point that remov­ing books about LGBTQ char­ac­ters and racism was discriminatory.
Accord­ing to a report in the New York Times, some par­ents “screamed obscen­i­ties and anti-gay slurs’”
I guess they’d rather their kids learn obscen­i­ty and prej­u­dice at home. One won­ders how many of them have gay chil­dren who will grow up know­ing their par­ents appar­ent­ly hold them in derision.
I had a friend in high school who made three “cry for help lev­el” sui­cide attempts. Some years lat­er, I asked him why. He halt­ing­ly con­fessed it was because one of his par­ents couldn’t accept that he was gay, and he was afraid we too would shun him if we found out. I told him his friends always sus­pect­ed and didn’t care. Sad­ly, we hadn’t known enough, or how, to tell him.

                                     THEN AND NOW

Hate for those “not like us” has a long his­to­ry in book ban­ning. Dur­ing the 16th cen­tu­ry Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion, hun­dred of thou­sands of rare books and man­u­scripts were burned or oth­er­wise destroyed, sim­ply because they were in the care of Catholic monasteries. 
It should also be not­ed that today’s “pro­gres­sives” are as nar­row-mind­ed and guilty as the con­ser­v­a­tives they decry when it comes to book banning. 
Read­ers from all 50 states and 67 coun­tries vot­ed “To Kill a Mock­ing­bird” the best book of the past 125 years in an unof­fi­cial New York Times Book Review sur­vey.
Nonethe­less, the book is among the most fre­quent­ly banned or de-list­ed. Staff mem­bers at one school want­ed it removed from the ninth-grade cur­ricu­lum because they thought it mar­gin­al­ized char­ac­ters of colour, cel­e­brat­ed “white sav­ior­hood” and used racial slurs dozens of times “with­out address­ing their deroga­to­ry nature.”
Sure­ly address­ing deroga­to­ry terms in books is part of the job of teach­ing them. How else do chil­dren learn why they are hurt­ful and there­fore not to use them?

Racism and racist lan­guage were also cit­ed as a rea­son to ban “The Adven­tures of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn”. One won­ders if any of the would-be guardians of racial sen­si­tiv­i­ties read it. The only con­sis­tent­ly decent char­ac­ter is Jim, the run­away slave.
His moral high ground is under­scored by the fact that every ref­er­ence to peo­ple of colour is the ‘N‑word’, which was the norm in the peri­od in which the nov­el is set. Ban­ning it, or expung­ing the racial pejo­ra­tives to suit today’s stan­dards would negate a strik­ing les­son in why such terms and way of think­ing are hurt­ful and moral­ly reprehensible.
I rest my case with one piece of advice: curl up with a good book, before the will­ful­ly unlet­tered try to ban it.

FOOTNOTE: For any­one inter­est­ed in the sub­ject, I high­ly rec­om­mend “BURNING THE BOOKS: A His­to­ry of Knowl­edge Under Attack” by Richard Oven­den, head librar­i­an of the Bodleian Library at England’s Oxford University.

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