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Child figures climbing books
It seems so quaint now. There was a time in America when an important rite of passage was when parents took their children to a public library to get their own library cards.
It would open up fascinating new worlds to children far beyond their own immediate circumstances. That was especially important growing up as I did in a small town in Indiana that always seemed far away from anything very interesting.
Learning to read is the most important educational gift we ever receive. It leads to everything else we will ever learn for the rest of our lives.
Among all the dangerous political hatred now being perpetuated by rightwing Republican extremists, one of the very worst is their escalating attempt to demonize what once were among the most respected professions in every community – schoolteachers and librarians.
When Schools Become Battlefields
Slashing taxpayer funding for public schools was always a primary goal of anti-tax Republicans, but that’s become something far more sinister since Donald Trump openly attracted violent white supremacists into the Republican Party. Schools and libraries have become ideological battlefields where Republicans are trying to rewrite history by rolling back racial progress for Black and Brown communities and equal rights under the law for LGBTQ Americans.
The American Library Association (ALA) reports unprecedented threats to ban books from schools and libraries fueled by a blend of hard-right politics and Christian nationalism. Increasingly, it’s backed up with death threats and harassment against teachers and librarians labeled as “smut peddlers,” “groomers” and “pedophiles.”
“It’s time to understand that they’re serious about suppressing information and taking away people’s civil liberties based on their identity and race. They want to go back to 1952,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the ALA’s intellectual freedom office. “We’re being confronted with the potential for another McCarthy era where people’s lives are ruined simply because of what they believe and who they are.”
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In 2021, there were at least 729 attempts to remove 1,597 books from schools and libraries, the most recorded in 20 years of ALA record-keeping. The numbers in 2022 will be even higher. After eight months last year, the partial tally was already 681 attempts to ban 1,650 books.
The Top 10 list of the most banned books in America tells you everything you need to know about who’s behind it. It’s literally a checklist of books about everyone hard-core rightwing Republican extremists target with their virulent political hatred.
Ban ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’?
The most banned book in America is Gender Queer, a memoir written in the form of a graphic novel by cartoonist Maia Kobabe about her adolescence coming out as gender nonbinary and asexual. Many adults have actually read many of the others including To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, The Bluest Eye by Nobel-winning-writer Toni Morrison and Maus, another graphic novel about the Jewish holocaust by Art Spiegelman.
Those five books sum up the political hatred of far-right Republicans for LGBTQ Americans, equal treatment under the law for Black and Brown Americans and educating children about America’s racial history, the horrific rape and torture of American slavery and the only attempt by a fascist government in world history to exterminate the Jewish people through mass murder.
Republican eagerness to ban all those books will fail miserably as it should. Banning books is the worst possible way to keep anyone from reading them. It increases the number of readers who seek them out. Republicans should have listened to their old speeches about America being the greatest democracy on Earth.
Their defeated ex-president did more than anyone to remind every American about the importance of protecting our precious freedoms. He did it by appointing a lawless majority to the U.S. Supreme Court that suddenly abolished 50 years of Constitutional rights for women to make their own decisions about their bodies, their health care and how many children to have.
Can Anyone Feel Safe?
If American women, more than half the population of the United States, can suddenly be stripped of their rights under the law to make decisions about their own lives, how can anyone else feel safe? That’s especially true for racial and religious minorities who continue to face murderous hatred in this country.
Americans will not willingly give up their Constitutional freedoms. A bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress passed Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s Marriage Equality Act codifying into federal law previous Supreme Court decisions legalizing marriage rights for same-sex and interracial couples.
Americans will continue to fight to protect their rights in our democracy to learn the real history of America and read any books they want about their own lives. Every two years, they will be joined by millions more young voters who are already fighting Republican book bans and destruction of college preparatory classes in American history.
Trumped-up Republicans ignore American voters at their own peril.
