The GOP Frenzy of Book Banning

As noted in a post yesterday, Glenn Youngkin has appointed anti-gay individuals to his transition team likely signalling that the culture wars will ignignite further in Virginia over the four years as both the Republican Party of Virginia and the national Republican Party seek to incite their white Christian nationalist base and fan the base's fears that they are losing the ability to inflict their beliefs and bigotries on society at large.  Sadly, one can expect the culture wars to be also fanned by Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, and other right wing "news" outlets in the same manner that happened with the Loudoun County schools where a local story was exaggerated and promoted to whip up outrage (deleting , of course, many of the relevant facts that did not play to the far right's agenda).  Throughout this new culture war, public schools and the banning of books will likely be ground zero.  A column in the New YorkTimes looks at this new GOP frenzy.  Here are excerpts:

Virginia’s Spotsylvania County School Board this week voted unanimously to have books with “sexually explicit” material removed from school library shelves. For two members of the school board, this didn’t go far enough; they wanted to see the books incinerated. “I’m sure we’ve got hundreds of people out there that would like to see those books before we burn them,” said one of the members, Kirk Twigg. “Just so we can identify, within our community, that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

This was just one example of an aggressive new censoriousness tearing through America, as the campaign against critical race theory expands into a broader push to purge school libraries of books that affront conservative sensibilities regarding race and gender. Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told me that during her 20 years with the organization, “there’s always been a steady hum of censorship, and the reasons have shifted over time. But I’ve never seen the number of challenges we’ve seen this year.”

Public schools in Virginia Beach have pulled books including Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” out of their libraries pending the results of a challenge by conservative school board members. Schools in North Kansas City, Mo., have done the same with books including the acclaimed memoir “Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel and “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a book of essays about growing up gay and Black by George M. Johnson. In Flagler County, Fla., a member of the school board filed a criminal report over the presence of “All Boys Aren’t Blue” in her district’s school libraries, claiming it violated state obscenity laws.

With the rush to ban critical race theory, conservatives already gave up posturing as defenders of free speech. Still, this sudden mania for book banning is striking. It’s part of a broader attack on public schools, one that draws on anger over critical race theory, mask mandates and sometimes even QAnon-inflected fears about pedophile conspiracies.

The transgressive nature of some recent young adult literature, however, isn’t enough to explain the current nationwide campaign to cleanse libraries of works seen as unwholesome. For one thing, at most schools, parents can already block their own kids’ access to books they object to. And many of the works the right is now up in arms about have been out for years. The Texas lawmaker Matt Krause recently sent school districts a list of around 850 books that he wants information on. Among the titles to be investigated are William Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Middlesex.”

Ashley Hope Pérez’s award-winning “Out of Darkness,” about a romance between a Mexican American girl and a Black boy set against Texas’ 1937 New London school explosion, came out in 2015. . . . . The group No Left Turn in Education, which was founded last year to fight critical race theory in schools, has it on a list of books that are “indoctrinating kids to a dangerous ideology.”

In September, a Texas anti-mask activist named Kara Bell read a passage from “Out of Darkness” at a school board meeting. The scene she chose was one in which a gang of racist white students sexually demean the Mexican heroine. . . . . Video of Bell went viral, and Pérez was deluged with furious and sometimes violent messages, often accusing her of promoting pedophilia. Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, told me he was accused of being a pedophile simply for defending the presence of “Out of Darkness” in school libraries.

This spreading moral panic demonstrates, yet again, why the left needs the First Amendment, even if the veneration of free speech has fallen out fashion among some progressives. Absent a societal commitment to free expression, the question of who can speak becomes purely a question of power, and in much of this country, power belongs to the right.

“What we’re seeing is really this idea that marginalized communities, marginalized groups, don’t have a place in public school libraries, or public libraries, and that libraries should be institutions that only serve the needs of a certain group of people in the community,” said Caldwell-Stone. The fight about who controls school libraries is a microcosm of the fight about who controls America, and the right is on the offense.