There are no banned books, just unaccountable officials

By Chris Powell

Despite the complaints on the political left, amplified by politically slanted journalism, no books are being “banned” in public schools or public libraries in Connecticut or anywhere else in the country.

Rather, books stocked in libraries, especially school libraries, increasingly are being challenged by people who find sexually graphic content inappropriate for children.

Age-appropriateness will always be a matter of judgment and community standards, and while they don’t like it, public libraries and public schools are obliged to answer to the public for their judgment and standards.

The arrogance of public schools in the face of this obligation is frequent and sometimes comic, as when people attending school board meetings are ordered to stop speaking — censored — when they read aloud graphic passages from books in school libraries.

The president of the Connecticut Library Association, Douglas Lord, is appalled by the increase in challenges to public and school library books. He says when he became a librarian 30 years ago there were no challenges.

But then 30 years ago government and public education were not doing as many sneaky things with children as they do today.

After all, why should parents trust a state government that, like Connecticut’s, strives to prevent them from learning that their minor children are getting abortions or, in school, undergoing sex-change therapy?

Why should parents trust schools that, like Enfield’s, strive to conceal aspects of their sex-education curriculum?

Why should parents trust schools that, as indicated by the scandal in Greenwich last year, seek to hire only teachers who are politically liberal, the better to politically indoctrinate their students?

Why should parents trust schools whose teachers are almost all members of far-left political groups like the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers?

When most teachers are members of such organizations it can be no surprise that teachers spontaneously propagandize students about transgenderism and racism, quite without relevance to the curriculum supposedly being taught, as was exposed in Southington last year.

Of course resentment of ordinary democratic accountability does not vindicate any particular challenge to a library book. Some challenges may be nutty, like those to Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” which, in confronting and undermining racism, uses a racial epithet. But even with “Huckleberry Finn” there may be a fair question of age-appropriateness, and public library and school administrators are obliged to answer for themselves even to the crazies without resorting to demagoguery about “banned” books.

For since library space is finite even as the supply of books is virtually infinite, no book has ever gotten into a public or school library or curriculum without simultaneously excluding another one.

If not stocking a book or replacing it is “banning,” librarians themselves are the worst book banners even as they often seem to suppose, like school administrators, that their judgment is never to be questioned.

Meanwhile any supposedly banned book is always available via the internet or a bookstore, and the more criticism of a school library book, the more children may seek it out.

The “banned” books controversy is not just a fraud; it also raises a spectacular irony. For even as the political left, led by educators, clamors against the imaginary campaign to ban books, the left itself is campaigning in Connecticut and throughout the country against freedom of expression, especially in academia itself.

Practically every day brings another incident at one institution of higher education or another of censorship against non-left speakers or academics.

The public librarians and political leaders who are so agitated about mere challenges to books are largely indifferent to the censorship and “de-platforming” being committed elsewhere on the political left. To the left in Connecticut, an objection to a library book in Westport is a scandal, while the swarming and chanting that recently prevented the showing of a politically incorrect movie at Central Connecticut State University passed without the left’s criticism or even notice.

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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

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