Sexually graphic books in school libraries and actual US Government censorship
WARNING: Due to the nature of this subject, some sexually graphic information is included in the below. It is only named, but younger students should only read with parent supervision.
by Alex Lin
The current issue of school library book banning was introduced to me during class when my teacher gave us the second essay of the year to write for that week. Ms. L went over the handout (a story from The Week, which is a collection of mainstream media put into magazine form) with us, and the whole class had a lot of questions about it because we were all wondering what it was about: why were books being banned? Was this censorship? Our assignment was to annotate the whole article and then give our own personal reaction to it. I began annotating the article and suddenly, I knew exactly what was happening here. Banning books, I wrote, was wrongheaded; the teachers and librarians were doing the right things by putting those books back in the school libraries. Now, Ms. L never clarified what the books were about, or into what detail they went, and The Week portrayed the issue as a type of modern book burning, a 1933 moment, repeated in modern American schools. So naturally, I thought that parents shouldn’t be, as I wrote, “puppying” or helicopter parenting their kids, and in the spirit of the First Amendment, that they should back off.
But we didn’t understand what the actual meaning of censorship was in 2023, and how important this topic was to fully grasp, both for young Americans like me and for all Americans. Instead, we were being manipulated to cry foul at book banning in schools. But was this banning merited? And where was the real censorship happening?
So the topic, it had seemed to me, was about censorship. People in this generation are well aware of it; we seem to hear about it from many sides. Was this book banning the censorship that everyone is worried about? Or is the real censorship actually in a completely different sphere?
Our teacher made no mention of Missouri v. Biden which is a blockbuster suit against the current executive branch from the attorney general of Missouri. What does this suit allege? Oh, just that the Biden administration has been working with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, among others, to actively censor the American people.
In Missouri v Biden, the government lost, and the case was upheld by the Fifth Circuit, which, in September 2023, reinforced the language, severely limiting the executive branch from any and all censorship. It came out that the government was trying to hide, to keep things they didn’t want the public to see. What was being censored? Anti-mask movements from scholars, and warnings from doctors who researched the dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines. Even Hunter Biden’s laptop – the government tried covering it up by saying it was “Russian bots” – and the fact that the New York Post was shut down by Twitter for 45 days.
Then I watched a video with Senator Kennedy of Louisiana about the book ban. He was asking a panel of experts about this issue, one of whom was the Illinois Secretary of State Alexander Giannoulias. He read from two books, one of them being All Boys Aren’t Blue. It was a very graphic passage about dildos and anal sex. How could this be seen as appropriate for a school library? I was disgusted… and very worried about why there are people in that court trying to fight for this type of content to be available to kids at all! Those books should be nowhere near a school. The Illinois Secretary of State and the various people that sat with him at that Senate panel screamed that it was book banning, but in reality, they are surreptitiously trying to weasel these explicit books onto the school library shelves.
How do the media portray librarians?
With such a controversial issue, thousands of articles have been written. But when one does a simple search for book-banning, or censorship, or librarians, a typical article that pops up would be slanted, or censored, to favor the issue as book-banning. Take the example of a Washington Post article from November 11, 2023. Written by Ruby Cramer, this is a portrait of a librarian who is a martyr for the cause.
The article is a portrait of a librarian that emphasizes her struggle with so-called censorship as something wrong and hurtful to her, whose job description includes that she is paid to control what teenagers can see.
“The Librarian Who couldn’t Take it Anymore”
This portrait is of a Puerto Rican-born librarian, Tania Galiñanes, who is panicked because of the “censorship rules”, and has put in her notice to quit. Reading it, one gets a sense that the writer is agreeing with the librarian and feeling sorry for her, with the intent to persuade the reader.
Ruby Cramer uses words like “pure” and “absurd” which essentially paint the librarian as a martyr. “It should have been absurd, kneeling over a box of music she couldn’t read, sent over by a music teacher who wasn’t sure what she was allowed to have in her classroom. But now the library was a place where things like this happened.”
“To Tania, the pure act of reading was becoming more and more political, and as a result, she had to spend much of her time reviewing the books on her shelves — not to suggest one to a student but to ask herself whether the content was too mature for the teenagers at her school.”
Reading this made me question why librarians are paid to do their jobs; they are adults in a teenagers’ school every day and they can’t seem to figure out if these books are mature enough for children’s viewing? Is it such a burden to read through materials and to make sure that they are not out of the range of appropriate subjects?
See the angle here:
“Cramer and Galinanes are both are smarting against Florida’s Department of Education new requirements.
She heard the first-period bell ring, 7:15 a.m. She’d wanted to get to the box right away, but now she saw one of the school administrators at her door, asking whether she’d heard about the latest education mandate in Florida.
‘What’s the name of this thing?’ he said. ‘Freedom Week?’
She exhaled loudly. ‘Freedom Week.’
‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘You know about this.’
Yes, Tania knew about it. It was one more thing the state had asked of them, a mandatory recitation of parts of the Declaration of Independence ‘to reaffirm the American ideals of individual liberty.'”
We see here that Cramer and her subject, this poor beleaguered librarian, would much rather promote licentious materials than to salute the flag or spend any time thinking about the principles of the USA.
So when it all boils down, I thought this case was an easy win and all were going to stand with banning these sexually inappropriate books in libraries, school or otherwise. But right before finishing this opinion piece, I found that Illinois Secretary of State Alexander Giannoulias, one month after the Senate hearing, is still pushing this agenda, using the power of the purse to bring these books, under threat, into public libraries in Illinois. He is on record threatening town libraries with removing their funding if they do not accept LGBTQ+ books with explicit sexual content. These sexual deviants won’t stop!
Look at the numbers:
One wonders what types of books must be included in libraries, so that the funding will be released?
Works Cited:
Theara, Coleman. “How Books Bans Are Affecting Schools and Libraries.” TheWeek.com, 11 Sep. 2022, https://theweek.com/briefing/1016551/how-book-bans-are-affecting-schools-and libraries
Kennedy: SHOCKING MOMENT: John Kennedy Reads Graphic Quotes from Childrens’ Books at Senate Hearing YouTube, 12 September, 2023
Ruby, Cramer. “The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore,” 11 Nov 2023, http://apple.news/AOsXX3sDvQn6uYwgcRZFzkA