in Book Banning 683 Words

Who decides what you have access to at the library?

A few weeks ago I blogged about book banning. (See Book Banning is Democracy Banning! June 19, 2023.) I planned to blog about “How do you decide what to read next?” on July 14, but my computer had other ideas. I’m saving that post for August because I felt compelled to take a different approach today.

Book challenges and book banning

I didn’t plan to bash anyone in this post; however, I keep reading about more and more cases of book challenges and book banning across the United States and how various state legislatures (Arkansas, to name one) are passing laws that are putting our society on the slippery slope of censorship.

Fortunately, on Saturday, in response to a lawsuit filed by libraries, librarians, bookstore, and publishing companies,  a federal judge temporarily blocked portions of Act 372 in Arkansas, which would criminalize librarians who knowingly let a minor see objectionable sexual content.

Senate Bill 90 in North Carolina is tame by comparison to Arkansas’s Act 372, which had been scheduled to become law tomorrow. NC Senate Bill 90 is still under review and, if signed into law, will add new constraints on public libraries and public school libraries, and will add additional hoops through which librarians, school superintendents, and local school boards must jump. As if their jobs weren’t challenging enough!

Warren County, Virginia and the Houston Independent School District in Texas have been in the news recently, too, on this topic.

This terrifies me! This is the United States of America, and a vocal narrow-minded group of people are yanking local and state governing bodies around as if they have rings in their noses.

Book by book…

Book by book, library by library, school system by school system, the whittling away of our right to read is eating away the foundations on which our country was founded. If not for public education in the United States, how many of our citizens would know how to read?

Public education is under attack by many state legislatures, including the one here in North Carolina. Vouchers to give parents money to send their children to private school? Give me a break! Why would a state legislature give money for private education when one of its responsibilities is to fund and support public education?

The ignorant few will soon decide what we can read and cannot read. Politicians are usurping the roll of professional librarians in deciding which books can go on library shelves.

Pay attention! What’s happening in your state and in your county? The state legislature in North Carolina has a history of voting in the dead of the night. You just never know what you’re going to wake up to in the morning.

This leads me to the question I ask in the blog post title today: Who decides what you can and cannot read?

There’s a connection between today’s question and the current trend toward banning books in the United States.

Do you want politicians deciding what you can and cannot read? Do you want local politicians deciding what your child can or cannot read?

Since my last blog post

I didn’t intend to take a three-week break from blogging this month, but my computer had other ideas. I won’t bore you with the details. I’ll just say, it was unsettling and frustrating being unable to log into my WordPress account for 18 days.

I hope you missed me. I missed y’all!

Until my next blog post

If you haven’t subscribed to my newsletter through my website, https://www.janetmorrisonbooks.com, please do so before you miss any more newsletters. For subscribing, you’ll receive a free downloadable copy of “Slip Sliding Away: A Southern Historical Short Story,” so you can get a feel for my historical fiction writing.

I hope you have a good book to read and time to read it. Read! Read! Read! And please support your local public library!

Make time for friends and relatives, even if you don’t agree with them about politics.

Remember the brave people of Ukraine.

Janet

27 thoughts on “Who decides what you have access to at the library?”

  1. It’s good to see you back Janet. Hope you are having a nice summer. Here it is incredibly hot! Never felt these temperatures before in July and only hoping that things will cool off a little in August… Your question, who decides? I think that Libraries have a responsibility and they have to take their function seriously. While they are centres for learning, research, information and entertainment, they also have to look out for the welfare of young minds, curious, but perhaps not quite ready for many things that should be in libraries. So I do believe there should be restrictions according to age. However, when it comes to adults, the only one who decides what an adult reads is the adult in question. All the best to you Janet. Take good care and enjoy the week!

    Liked by 1 person

  2. It’s nice to be back on the blogosphere, Francis! I’ve been following the news about the heat and fires in the Mediterranean area, and it sounds terrible. Unheard of temperatures! It’s been hot here in NC, but nothing unprecedented like the Mediterranean and the American southwest. I hope you will get some relief from the extreme heat soon. It’s life-threatening.

    Regarding the library book issue, yes, librarians (like my sister) take their responsibilities seriously. They’re trained in age appropriateness, etc. What we’re seeing in the US today is white right-wing extremists trying to take facts they don’t agree with out of our libraries. Under the guise of “protecting children,” they want subjects like the history of slavery removed from school curriculum and school and public libraries. They say if white children learn about slavery in America’s early history, it will make them feel bad. Their solution is that children shouldn’t be taught that there were African slaves in the US. How will racism in the US ever end if present and future generations of children are shielded from knowing the history of race in our country?

    All school and public libraries have in place a process to be followed when a book is challenged. Organized groups that want only their narrow-minded views on library shelves are paralyzing some systems by overwhelming them with book challenges. They’re also trying to take the decision-making process away from trained professionals and putting it in the hands of local elected officials — or in some cases political appointees. In some cases, the people making the decisions aren’t required to even read the book(s) in question. It all stems from the mentality of fear that Trump and his followers have preached and emboldened in a sizeable segment of Americans. They are afraid of losing their white privilege, so they’re lashing out wherever they can. I’m not saying the system shouldn’t be questioned, but what I see today is the very foundations of our country being attacked. (Sorry, I tend to get carried away!) Have a good week.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. I fully agree, what is happening, as you have described it, is a full frontal attack on the foundations of the US! Incredible! Trying to change the past because of your position of power in the present is the technique that the communists have used, and still use, to control people. Knowledge is free and universal and no government has the authority to parcel it out or to conceal it. History is history. There were good men and women and bad ones as well, but we’ve not the right to whitewash them in any way. You have expressed it quite well, perfectly I would say, and I agree. Here in Spain the government is trying to do the same thing, but reversed. Here the left and the ultra left are trying to erase all monuments, even graves, of those who fought for the Franco forces during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). They passed a law calling it Historical Memory and it prohibits any public exhibition of the remains of those whom they have deemed to be the murderers of the war. Of course, all of these supposed murderers are the ones from the Franco side and not from the communist side. I do not support dictators, so I would have been against the Franco regime. He was not a good man, but at least he did one thing right, he kept Spain free from communists…
    Thank you Janet (sorry for the length) although it is still hot here, at least my townhouse has a good A/C system! Thank God! All the best.

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  4. Thank you, Janet – educational as always. It is of great concern to many of us the overall increase in censorship and the erosion of freedom. I was reminded of the historical banning and burning of various forms of literature for political and religious power games of centuries and dictatorships past.

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  7. Yes, indeed! It is frightening and not enough people are connecting the dots. Too few people know history, so they don’t recognize the slippery slope we’re on.

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  8. What you’ve shared here about the state of things in Spain is very troubling. The pendulum all over the world seems to have swung to one of two extremes and what the two have in common is a skewed view and presentation of history.

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  10. For sure! And funny thing, they accuse each other of being to the left or to the right, and no one talks about the issues! No one cares about the problems faced by every day people…

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  11. I think it is up to parents to guide and monitor the media their children consume; books, tv, internet and online games. The accepted violence level for PG-13 astonishes me. I use Common Sense Media as a great info source about how appropriate a show/movie/game might be for my kid’s developmental level and interests. Adults can decide for themselves the media they favor.

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  13. Why can’t they put a rating on the inside cover stating the age group. I don’t think it’s fair to hold a librarian accountable for knowing what is in the book without making it easy to know.

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  15. I also think it’s ultimately up to parents to monitor the media their children consume. I think our country is on a slippery slope to censorship when organized extremist political groups weaponize their idealogy to attempt to get books banned under the guise of protecting children. They don’t have the right to dictate what another person’s child cannot have access to. This, in many cases, is boiling down to trying to whitewash US history so children will not learn that slavery is the basis of most racism in our country. They think if there’s no sex education there will be no teenage pregnancies. All they have to do is thrown in the word pornography and they scare local politicians to death and, in turn, local and state politicians are making blanket policies about what cannot be in public or school libraries. It’s indicative of the fear mentality that’s been adopted by a large segment of our society. The bill still under consideration in the NC Senate is a 26-page so-called “education bill.” It covers everything from kindergarten curriculum to any individual under 18 years old having to have parental permission to get a library card at a public library. Our state legislature is so anti-public education, nothing coming out of Raleigh will surprise me.

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  26. Thanks so much, Barbara! How are things going with your writing? I kept meaning to contact you after I finally got back on WordPress.

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