“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.” ―Benjamin Franklin
Sept. 22-28, 2024, marks the annual observation of Banned Books Week, first established in 1982 by the Office of Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association (ALA). If you’re old enough, you’ll remember that the 1980s were a hotbed of paranoia: the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, the “Satanic Panic”, and the Parents Music Resource Center led the charge to sanitize the lives of children (and adults) everywhere by censoring — or banning — books, music, art, and anything else they deemed objectionable.
As there is nothing new under the sun and everything that goes around comes around, the human desire to control other people has re-emerged for a new generation. Same song, different verse. In 2023, according to the ALA, there were 938 attempts to censor books in the U.S., with 4,240 unique titles challenged nationwide. That’s a 92% increase from 2022.
In my ongoing battle to “believe the best of every person,” I choose to believe much of this is driven not by politically motivated extremists, but by well-meaning parents desperate to protect their children (and themselves) from exposure to material they feel is inappropriate. How we define “objectionable” or “inappropriate” varies, but usually has the same underlying themes: sex, language and race. Almost all the books that have been challenged are written by or about people of color, have a reference to some kind of sexual activity, and/or employ “offensive” language.
All responsible parents are concerned about what their children are reading and watching and hearing. We don’t want our babies to grow up too fast. We want them to hold on to their innocence as long as possible. We don’t let them watch scary movies, and hopefully, we keep them away from violent video games. That’s normal parental behavior.
What strikes me as abnormal is this belief that we have the right to determine what’s appropriate or inappropriate for someone else’s family based on our predilections.
Who bears the responsibility for what children are allowed to read? Parents. Period. If your children bring home a book you disapprove of, it’s your responsibility to explain to your offspring why that book is unacceptable in your household and then return it. Even better, go to the library with your child and help them make their reading choices.
When Ethan was in second grade I took personal issue with the Captain Underpants series because I felt it undermined grammar and spelling lessons. It went back to the library with a snippy, self-righteous note for the school librarian I now regret. The first Harry Potter book (magic was a no-no) never made it out of the car.
On a side note, my attempt to maintain literary purity backfired spectacularly. By the time he was a homeschooled teenager, my second child had assigned himself every book on the banned books list for his summer reading program. If you tell a kid they can’t read something, guess what they’re going to want to read? In the end, he wrote a lot of reports on those books, and we both learned a lot.
Book banning and censorship is a slippery slope. Once you start down that road, where does it end? It doesn’t. There’s something objectionable to someone in every book, including the Bible and the dictionary (which was banned by a Southern California school board in 2010 after a parent complained about the inclusion of a definition for “oral sex”).
At the end of the day, I don’t think it’s about books any more than Prohibition was about sobriety or Jim Crow laws were about public safety. This is about the underlying desire to obtain or maintain control and power and to manipulate others — which is the literal definition of sorcery. No wonder it never ends well.