‘Banned’ Books
22nd November 2022
If you’ve been to a mainstream bookstore or library in the past few months, you’ve probably encountered a “Banned Books” display. These high-visibility collections serve as totems of progressives’ defiance in their latest imagined controversy: the belief that conservatives are banning books related to LGBT issues from public school libraries. “Banned Books” displays usually feature some traditional texts that may have been pulled from schools at some point in their publication history (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, etc.). But the recent wave of sexually-explicit LGBT titles are always positioned so prominently that a person can only assume that the displays are in reaction to right-wing prudes trying to force their retrograde views on an increasingly progressive populace.
But are LGBT books being “banned”? Not really. Every library curates its collection, making careful choices about their holdings in the limited space they have. While it’s true that many schools decided to pull titles like Gender Queer, This Book is Gay, Flamer, Let’s Talk About It, and All Boys Aren’t Blue from the shelves, this is not a “ban.” These books remain widely available in bookstores and public libraries that are unaffiliated with schools.
So why are leftists pretending otherwise? The claims of “bans” allow LGBT activists to frame routine decisions about which books are appropriate for a school library as evidence of “hate,” discrimination, and “exclusion.” Certainly, some books are being excluded—but this doesn’t mean that LGBT students are. The trendiness of LGBT identity among impressionable young adolescents suggests that there are social rewards from belonging to this category. In fact, schools take pains to include those students, a reality underscored by the open promotion and celebration of LGBT groups in classrooms.