#964: I Never Met a Banned Book I Didn't Want to Read
Nearly 2 years ago (January 2, 2022, to be precise), I posted essay #873 entitled What do Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield and Harry Potter All Have in Common? In that post, I discussed (railed against, to be honest) Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ push to ban innumerable books from public school libraries which, in his opinion, included dangerously “woke” and “immoral” characters, themes and words. At the time, he was convinced that he could easily defeat former POTUS Trump in the Republican primary by placing himself far to the right . . . on such issues as 6-week abortion bans, outlawing the teaching of Critical Race Theory, and anything that smacked of Woke philosophy.
To me, it is axiomatic that those who decry the danger of teaching “CRT” in public schools (which it almost never has been), principles of WOKE (which most of those who fear it haven’t any idea of its definition or meaning) or of banning hundreds of “dangerous,” “pornographic” or “immoral” books (which few have ever read) are living on another planet. Somewhere long ago I read an aphorism which states that “A truly great library contains something in it to offend EVERYBODY.” Having been raised to be a perpetual reader of classics, satires, plays and as much of the world’s truly great literature as possible (with brief forays into the likes of P.G. Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and David Lodge), I have also read the vast majority of books that have been banned going all the way back to the first, Thomas Morton’s 1637 anti-Puritan work New English Canaan, in which he critiqued and attacked Puritan customs so harshly that even the more progressive New English settlers disapproved (and eventually banned) it. Hey, when a book compares you to a crustacean, it’s unlikely you’ll be begging the author for a sequel! (For those who ask where I ever find the time to read so many books in consideration of my jam-packed schedule, I always answer with a chuckle, It’s one of the only benefits of having Crohn’s Disease!” For those who have no idea what this means, you may want to familiarize yourself with its symptomology).
So what leads me to return to this topic once again? Has anything truly changed over the past 23 months? Well, yes and no. Here in Florida - the land of sunshine and political insanity - the number of books removed from public school libraries has grown exponentially. In Hernando County, north of Tampa, six picture books were recently removed from school libraries including the late National Medal of Arts winner Maurice Sendak’s classic In the Night Kitchen ("Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! We bake cake and nothing’s the matter!"), and Caldecott-Honor winner David Shannon’s classic No David! Why? For the simple reason that both books have illustrations that show kids’ naked bottoms, or in one case, a goblin’s bare derriere. Shame, shame! Can you imagine all the harm it would do for a 6-year old to realize that people - even goblins - have tucheses?
Then there's Collier County in southwest Florida, where more than 300 - count -’em 300 - novels have been taken from the shelves, packed up and put into storage. Among the forbidden 300 are works by such monsters, atheists and pederasts as Ernest Hemmingway, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Ayn Rand, Leo Tolstoy and Alice Walker.
A confession: I am currently finishing my second reading of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (which is banned from some libraries), and then diving into the literary wonders of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which is banned throughout school libraries in many parts of the United States. The oh-so-moral harridans of Moms for Liberty need not worry about 10-year olds becoming infected with Anna – one of the first truly liberated women in all Western literature; I cannot imagine too many youngsters will put up with reading any novel of nearly 900 pages that doesn’t star Harry Potter.
Governor DeSantis has criticized what he calls a “book ban hoax,” but PEN America (founded way back in 1922) said school book bans are on the rise nationally, and that in the 2022-23 school year Florida led the national and was responsible for 40% of them. A Florida law (HB1467) passed last year by the state’s Legislature and signed by Gov. DeSantis requires the Florida Department of Education to publish a list of all books objected to by parents and removed in any Florida school district. The department urged all districts to consult the list.
It appears to be working; parents are consulting the list and then contacting their local school board in order to have even more books banned. In Clay County (Northeast Florida) a father who leads a group called “No Left Turn in Education,” - has filed hundreds of book objections and told the state he plans to object to no less than 3,600 more. All those who believe he has read all these books please raise your hand (the right one, not the left).
Before you get suicidal and start contemplating jumping off the front lawn, please read on; it just might be that the book-banners and staunch moralists have gone too far, and are finally beginning to be taken to task by the voting public.
A Brevard County (East-central Florida) School Board member, backed by Moms for Liberty proposed removing all the books on the Florida list; fortunately, this brought out a lot of angry citizens to a board meeting; the proposal was quashed by a vote of 3-2.
A Pennsylvania school board that consistently engaged in banning books and Pride flags, as well as prohibiting transgender athletes from playing on sports teams, managed to slip a last-minute item into their final meeting before leaving office; hastily awarding a $700,000 exit package to the superintendent who supported their agenda. But the Democratic majority that swept the conservative Moms For Liberty slate out of office, hopes to block the unusual — likely illegal — payout and bring calm to the Central Bucks School District, whose affluent suburbs and bucolic farms near Philadelphia have been roiled by infighting for quite some time.
While reporting on various “off-year” elections held earlier this month, most political commentators and analysts owed the Democrat’s success to voter concern and anger over the Supreme Courts’ overturning of Rowe v. Wade; about how states with pro-choice amendments on the ballot played a major role in Democratic victories. What many of these same analysts and commentators missed was, at least to my way of thinking, an even bigger and potentially more important story: the number of Moms for Liberty and Project 1776 -endorsed candidates who went down to defeat in state after state. These progressive successes came mainly in races for local boards of education and state legislatures. This is big news.
According to the American Federation of Teachers, groups like these lost close to 70% of the races where they made endorsements. And while conservatives made some modest inroads in places like the Houston suburbs, they fell short in many of the most high-profile races in swing states like Pennsylvania – where Democrats swept several school boards while rejecting the culture war – as well as Iowa, Ohio and Virginia.
So why did so many Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidates perform so poorly? For one thing, their agenda was simply too extreme for most voters outside of the deepest-red districts. National polling from earlier this year found that the majority of Americans oppose book bans, trust teachers to make curricular decisions, and think schools should teach the history of slavery, racism and segregation.
This dynamic was reflected in the repudiation of figures like Teri Patrick – a school board candidate in West Des Moines, Iowa, who once fought to criminally charge a school district because its library had two books about LGBTQ+ issues. Patrick was endorsed by Moms for Liberty but crushed in the election, receiving a measly 9% of the vote
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Hopefully, these are all good omens. As the late Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O'Neill famously said, “All politics is local.” Let Democracy work its way up from the town to the county to the state and eventually the both houses of Congress and the White House itself.
And getting back to books, let’s conclude with a thought from that most beloved of all American writers, Mark Twain, whose Huckleberry Finn is high up on nearly every list of literature that must never be read by a child:
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.”
Copyright©2023 Kurt Franklin Stone