But behind the noise and the headlines, banners and advocates alike are delighted with the war for the books. The culture war to ban certain books from curricula and libraries provides conservatives with a useful emotional wedge to excite their base. It helps them find candidates for lower positions and raise funds for the movement. The shock does more or less the same on the left. In many districts, liberals have fought this war before, and they come into it with an arsenal full of time-tested arguments. Knowledge is not dangerous, conservatives say, censoring knowledge is what is dangerous.
Matchups always leave both constituencies feeling pleased with themselves. Conservatives warn that a slippery slope begins with the idea that exposure to “obscene” literature will tarnish their children’s souls and that LGBTQ materials will lead them to become gay, lesbian, trans or non-binary, or even to be seduced by a teacher. Liberals, who care about state overreach only when conservatives are in charge, counter that book bans violate First Amendment rights to free thought and expression. Banning books limits speech, they say, and stunts mental growth. And besides, what’s wrong with being gay? These supports, of course, infuriate conservatives and give them the opportunity to denounce libs as amoral know-it-all interventionists who want to pervert and ruin their children. Liberals respond by treating conservatives like illiterate chumps who believe dick moby was a porn novel written by Henry Miller in a phallus celebration orgy. And the cycle of extrapolations and recriminations and denunciations turns like a carousel.
For all the performative energy poured into the conflict, neither side manages to move the issue very far from the benchmark of the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Island Trees School District v. Beak. The court ruled that students have a First Amendment right to read and be informed. Banning a book from the school library because of what it says violates that right. “[L]Neighborhood school boards cannot remove books from school library shelves simply because they do not like the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to prescribe what should be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.” the court said. Only if the book is judged to be “generally vulgar” can it be permanently unarchived. However, schools have more discretion when it comes to checking out required reading books or placing them in campus libraries to begin with. The game is always on to push books out of reading, so the fight over which titles to assign won’t end until the Supreme Court issues a new decision.
The status quo leaves everyone happy. Or should it be that it leaves everyone unhappy but fully engaged, therefore unhappy but satisfied? Depending on their background, a group of parents vents that their children’s schools are dens of depravity and brainwashing. The other group comes to imagine themselves as free thinkers and guardians of the light against the forces of darkness. The furor leaves both sides confident that they are avoiding an informational catastrophe that will dispossess our children.
The battle over book bans would be more alarming if parents, especially banners, paid more attention to non-book media in school. Broadcast television dramas, freely consumed by millions of students, do more to make their sexual choices publicly known than even the most “progressive” curricula. All banned books can be purchased at Barnes and Noble, ordered from Amazon, or borrowed from a friend if they are not available at your local library. Any kid over the age of 12 with access to a computer and a browser can consume more soft, medium, and hard erotica than a porn shop owner from the 1970s, and these same guys can probably tell you more about the varieties of sexual expression than the average Kinsey Institute scholar. That there is no organized protest from TV or the web (or defenses of the material found on them) tells you all you need to know about the seriousness of schoolbook banners.
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