I suppose it was meant to be a gotcha moment — Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., reading sexually explicit passages aloud to a clearly hot-and-bothered Senate Judiciary Committee. Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias had the floor, testifying during the “Book Bans: Examining How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature” hearing, and promoting a new Illinois law that prohibits state funding for any library that bans books for "partisan or doctrinal" reasons. The American Library Association documented 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources in 2022 — almost double the number of book ban attempts in 2021 and the highest number recorded since the group started compiling censorship data more than 20 years ago. [...] Anyway. Maybe those of us following along at home were supposed to clutch our pearls at the notion of young adults reading about *that* kind of sex, as opposed to the heterosexual kind that’s baked into every part of our culture and leveraged to sell everything from hamburgers to bottled water to cologne. Maybe we were supposed to view Kennedy and his ilk as our white knights, saving our children from the wages of sin and saving us from having to broach uncomfortable topics at the dinner table. Maybe those of us who oppose book bans with every fiber of our being were supposed to switch teams, now that we heard what really goes on inside library books. Maybe. All I kept thinking was: Stop changing the subject. Stop pretending our problem right now is young people finding too much belonging, too much empathy, too much understanding. Stop pretending that leaving LGBTQ+ young people on the margins, that ostracizing them for who they are and who they love, that banning their stories, that pretending they don’t exist will prepare them — or their straight peers — for full, whole, healthy, harmonious lives. Stop pretending book bans are all about sex. An elementary school in Florida banned Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” a few months ago. A school board in Tennessee banned the Holocaust novel “Maus” because it contains swear words. Stop pretending we can solve the most pressing, dire issues of our time — the climate crisis, the opioid overdose epidemic, gun violence, the recent doubling of childhood poverty, the mental health crisis among young people — without including all sorts of voices, stories, perspectives, ideas, experiences and wisdom in public discourse and policy making. Stop trying to shock us with sex toys. Kids are being slaughtered at school with assault rifles. We live in a perpetual state of shock. Saying “strap-on harness” in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing isn’t shocking; it’s theater. I love theater, but that’s not what we elect representatives for. We elect them to solve problems, not distract us from them. Book bans are a distraction. They’re a distraction that chips away at the ideals we were founded to uphold — free thought, free expression, free speech. And they’re a distraction from becoming a more perfect, more just, more loving, more accepting version of ourselves.
Heidi Stevens for Chicago Tribune on book bans, via The Union Democrat. (09.17.2023)
Heidi Stevens wrote an excellent opinion column in the Chicago Tribune that the book-banning efforts by far-right "parental rights" extremists are all about enforcing a Christian Conservative viewpoint in public schools and libraries.
Stevens had some good quotes here: "Stop pretending book bans are all about sex."
