For years, each September, I put out a display educating and alerting public library users to Banned Books Week, which is an annual program conducted by the American Library Association (ALA) to help spread awareness about the harm of banning books. Each year, I set up a three-ring binder with an updated list of all the books that were banned or challenged the previous year. My binder has 10 years of pages of this kind. Still, this year, I’m hesitant to draw attention to the display and even more reluctant to overtly celebrate all the different possible displays of authors who are LGBTQ+, people of color or authors that otherwise challenge so-called “traditional values” with their fiction. I now have to face the terrifying possibility that doing so could make our library and staff a target for lunatics.
We librarians work hard to provide access to all books, by the way; unfettered and open access to every kind of book, whether controversial or not, by authors of all kinds regardless if they have been challenged or banned in other places. I’m very careful to make sure that our young people can access what they want to read and they know that they can ask us and we will go get a book for them if they’re uncomfortable. I just feel like putting out a display is drawing fire by proclaiming openly to the powers of hate that we know they’re there. Right now, the cultural climate is so tense, poking them by displaying banned books seems like a way to get a small cadre of bigots in our branch, scoping through our collection and screaming at librarians. Five years ago, it would have felt far-fetched to think this. When I started in this position, I couldn’t have imagined that scenario outside of a YA dystopian series like The Hunger Games.
Today, it is a common reality.
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Tiny little groups of rabid extremists, usually claiming to be Christian or evangelical, but always associated with far-right political ideology, have bitten and torn public libraries to shreds around our country for daring to put books in their collections that they hate. Directors have been fired or had to resign, staff members have been targeted and threatened. One colleague at a neighboring library system had to endure foaming diatribes directed at them while they stood watch over a collection that was paid for by the county, state, and some federal funds, all because the screaming goon heard a rumor that one of the titles in that collection had something about people who were “Gay”. Would-be book banners lose their minds, cause a stink and ruin people’s lives over the most trivial content in books and they regularly claim their buffoonery is ‘for the kids’. Librarians and probably some local officials, now regularly expect mishegoss. So common has the run on library young adult and children’s collections been by mindless (and probably illiterate) goons, primarily in red states and counties, that some boards of trustees have ratified new procedures to minimize the damage when a patron complains.
In some of these county library systems, certain individuals with strong anti-literacy ideas get themselves elected to the board and brutalize the other members until they step down, allowing them to form small locally powerful boards that can completely control the library’s functions. The odd thing is, of course, that not one of them has any sense of how a library works. Soon enough, people stop coming to the library, because the books they want to read are no longer available and because the staff is so broken and the system so marred by the sad misuse by imbeciles that the libraries have to downsize or close. It is happening now. This is not a drill.
The motivation to ‘take control’ of libraries has become the final wretched tool in the belt of the kind of people who think that their morality is the only kind any of us need. They also think that anyone who doesn’t worship or marry the way they do is an abomination. They don’t want the children in a community to see others like them when they read books. They don’t want them to know about the Civil War, slavery or that there are people out there who do not define themselves by one or another gender. If the kids learn about those things, they cannot be indoctrinated and become mental thralls.
These anti-book ‘mammals’ have made arguments that there are books in the children’s collections with ‘pornographic’ content and that children can access these books. This is not the case, nor has it ever been, but book banners have never been willing to actually go see for themselves. They only make an assumption based on a social media post or the hearsay of some other lunatic.
One group, unironically calling itself ‘moms for liberty’ (the capitalization is removed out of spite by the author) claimed that there were such books in a library in a Florida library system near where one of my former bosses worked as director. People lost their collective minds, only to find that the book was a parent’s guide to speak to children about their bodies and things like love and gender and so on. The real problem was—you cannot make this kind of lunacy up—the book made the case that love is love. The mom group called this unacceptable. The head of the youth services department lost their job and was harassed until they moved to another state. I presume they won’t work in the library profession ever again.
This was just one book in one library. These attacks are happening all over the country.
Intellectual liberty and freedom of access were once prized in America. Personal liberty was protected and treasured. Now, we have goons running all over, just looking for something to be offended by, so they can remove other people’s rights.
In the meantime, one of the founding members of that mom group was caught having a ‘polyamorous’ affair and admitted that it wasn’t unusual behavior for her. So much for ‘family values’. The Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina has attended and verbally supported the mom group, has been outspoken about passing legislation to limit and censor library collections and has claimed that some people ‘just need killing’. These are just a few examples.
Most of the groups are all intent on ‘protecting the kids’, or so they say, but what they really want to do is force their dogmatic ideologies on the rest of us. Parents are able to decide what’s right for their children to read, but these groups are not interested in that fact. They want to stop access to what they hate. The thought of a young teen going to the library, finding a book and discovering that their life is changed because they read about another young person who is like them, is enough to cause many of these so-called Americans to blow a gasket.
My patience—and that of many in my profession—for ‘other people’s views’ on books is at its lowest ebb, generally, but actively attacking libraries because someone might read about something you don’t want them to is beyond the frozen limit, to me. I have been an advocate for stronger punishments for those who attempt to destroy library collections, even by banning them. If it was up to me, these people who decide they hate other people reading books ought to be forced to listen to readings of the books they hate in public until they expire from shame. It would probably take forever. If they had normal human responses, they would not try to ban books.
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The ideology behind banning books comes from a strange obsession with sex and other people’s love lives. I learned early on that the Christian preoccupation with sex and sexuality was far more deviant than anything they purported to be “against”. The evangelical community had two regular sermon topics each year. One was tithing (begging members to give ten percent of their income for running the church) and the other was homosexuality. The more vehemently they preached against it, I later learned, the more likely they were participating in it. This proved true both at my home church and later when I briefly converted to Catholicism. While the latter was blaming the Harry Potter craze for spreading “black magic” it failed to cover up a horrifying series of child sexual assaults that will blemish its reputation forever. In the former situation, our preacher actively trounced adulterers as often as possible. I used to feel bad for the people in the front pews who were spittle-flecked at the end of the services. He was caught having an affair with a woman twenty years his junior while his wife was being treated for lupus. He had to move to Alaska to get away from the bad press.
How loudly did Jerry Falwell Junior denounce sexual depravity, only to find that he and his wife regularly made sport with a pool boy? It happens again and again. To name a sexual activity is to discover that a former preacher or politician who came out strongly against it in public was later caught ‘in flagrante delicto’. In other words, the more trenchant certain of these dogmas become against a certain kind of lifestyle, which they consider ‘sinful’, the more likely it is that they are participating in that lifestyle in secret.
The Southern Baptist Council of churches recently faced a shattering series of reports in which it couldn’t begin to catalog the horrific abuses of children, females, males in all kinds of depraved sins that would make a modern adult movie producer retch. Rather than shuttering their churches or closing the entire organization in shame, they put new ‘preachers’ into those churches and prevented more information from being made public to ‘protect the families involved’. Jesus, in Luke says, “It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” Still they appear to be oblivious to the beam in their own eye.
Most, if not all of the revulsion from ecclesiastical groups about books at the library is a matter of choosing to insinuate oneself into other people’s lives. They want everyone to be under their thumb, but not because they want the world to be without sin, as they claim, but because they want the freedom to tell others how to live. As Christopher Hitchens put it in his groundbreaking God is Not Great, the puritans didn’t come to America to be free from persecution so much as to be free to persecute. Strong puritanical and Calvinist obsession with sex remains a very big problem in our country. If it continues to gain ground, we will all be forced to pretend to worship whether we want to or not.
At base, therefore, the distal cause of anti book sentiments is directly related to a widespread frontier worldview based on first century desert religions that are themselves only partially understood. The modern proponents of book banning are almost always associated with faith-based organizations.
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Libraries are a crucial battleground in the relentless assault on our rights. A small, toxic faction of hypocrites, miscreants, and self-righteous individuals is determined to strip away freedoms and impose their narrow beliefs on everyone else. This mindset fuels the pro-life movement and the anti-immigration agenda, both rooted in racism, sexism, misogyny, anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, and a twisted obsession with racial purity. The founders and financiers of these groups often represent the very worst of humanity, wielding their wealth to shape a world they can dominate. Their champions are despicable figures, yet they somehow garner support.
Banned Books Week has evolved from a rare response to ignorance into a critical flashpoint in our struggle to preserve democracy. It has grown from an annual to a daily reality. Libraries are essential for fostering liberty, free inquiry and access to diverse ideas—bulwarks against authoritarianism. You don’t have to like every book on our shelves or even agree with its content; many who seek to ban books don’t bother reading them at all. What matters is defending the right to access information, as it is vital for safeguarding your freedoms. If we don’t stand up against this tide of censorship, we risk losing everything we hold dear.
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