Protecting Kids Isn’t “Book Banning,” Just Common Sense

On January 4, the New York Times published a full-page, illustrated story on “Picture Books Being Challenged in America,” portraying the supposed crisis as another instance of “book banning.” But a look at the nine books featured in the Times story paints a somewhat different picture (no pun intended) from what the prefatory text describes.

The story begins by noting that “the number of books removed from schools and challenged in libraries has risen sharply in the past three years,” including “many graphic novels written for teenagers.” It then reports that “picture books intended for young children have also been restricted, challenged, and removed,” with many of them, according to the “free speech” organization PEN America, featuring “protagonists who are L.G.B.T.Q. or people of color.”

While the story acknowledges that “those who push for restricting access to these titles say they are trying to protect children from topics that they’re not ready to stumble upon while alone in a library, or that they’re too young to encounter at all,” it also gives a hearing to those who favor making the books “available” to “young people” and say “it is crucial” for them “to learn about characters different from them and to see their own lives reflected on the page.”

Only in the very last sentence of the text do we learn that the “young people” in question are mostly “children who are 8 or younger.” (That’s why they’re picture books, after all.)

Of the nine children’s books mentioned in the Times story, seven focus on, or seek to normalize, gay relationships, including those involving gay marriage or adoption.

For instance, the book And Tango Makes Three was “made inaccessible to young students in a Florida school district” because it depicts a couple of male penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo who raise a chick together in accordance with a state law “prohibiting instruction on sexual orientation” in lower grades.

Another book cited is Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag. Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California and a hero to the LGBTQ movement, is also known to have had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy while in his mid-30s.

A third book, cited by PEN as tied with the Milk book as “the most banned book of the 2021-22 school year,” features a transgender child and is “based on the experience of its co-author.”

Of the remaining six books, only two might be said to concern “persons of color.” The first reportedly “explores how children experience race in school, out in the world, and with their peers,” and it is not said to have been “banned” anywhere, only to have been mentioned on a website as a book that “might not be appropriate for young people because it contains ‘controversial racial commentary.’” The Times story does not report what the commentary was.

The second book relating to racial issues is a children’s adaptation of the Times’s own widely publicized 1619 Project, a work that has been broadly criticized by prominent historians ranging from conservatives to socialists for its distorted depiction of American history as centrally based on slavery and racial oppression. It should be no wonder that Texas and Florida have prohibited this effort at propagandizing “children ages 7 to 10” from being assigned in schools.

Rather, what is lamentable is that no other states, whose governments should be concerned with inculcating attitudes of civic harmony and patriotism, have followed suit. (In its original form the 1619 Project is already being widely assigned in history classes for older students.)

But let’s remember, additionally, what the real issue is here. Not one of the foregoing books, or others like them, has been, or legally could be, “banned” from sale in the United States. Any parents who wish their children to be exposed to them are free to purchase them online, even if they aren’t available in local bookstores.

What is at issue, rather, is the endeavor of public-school educators to shape the outlooks of young children regarding sexuality or America’s supposedly racist history, rather than leaving the enterprise of molding proper attitudes towards those themes to parents.

There will, of course, be plenty of time for students to learn about issues of race and slavery when they study U.S. history in upper grades – and where, one hopes, they will be exposed to views different from those of Times editors. Nor can one imagine that any child could be prevented, even before high school, from learning about issues of sexuality (in or out of the classroom). So, what’s the hurry?

To be charitable, let’s assume that the purpose of most of those insisting these books be included in school libraries and curricula is not to encourage kids, at an age when the very concept of sexuality is not normally on their horizon, from rethinking their sexual orientation or identity, but just to promote tolerance rather than bigotry towards those who later turn out to be gay, or whose parents are.

The answer to this supposition, I believe, is simple. First of all, in every public policy decision, the interests of many need to be weighed against those of a few. Of course, no child deserves to be picked on or bullied, and it is part of a teacher’s duty to intervene when they observe such behavior.

But second, being taunted or ridiculed for some personal characteristic – one’s physical appearance, intellectual level, style of dress, economic situation, or lack of athletic capacity, for instance – is a universal aspect of childhood. If we are going to reorder a school’s curriculum or library holdings just to protect kids who come from families that are “unconventional” against such offenses, why not go further: how about adding books on how the offspring of conservative parents who live in heavily “blue” states, and vice-versa, are unjustly “persecuted” by their peers?

When it comes to the issue of race, some might respond that children ought to be taught to respect people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. That indeed seems a worthy goal. But versions of the 1619 Project will hardly tend to promote racial concord, as opposed to resentment.

Let’s be frank: those who protest the elimination of books encouraging homosexuality or transgenderism or inculcating one-sidedly negative views of American history from public-school libraries tend to think of most parents as backward hicks, if not outright bigots, whose efforts at forming their children’s religious, moral, and even political views need to be counteracted by schools at the earliest possible age. Following the title of a book once famously authored by Hillary Clinton, they believe “it takes a village to raise a child.”

The battle continues to rage between those who think that the persons who bear the chief responsibility for their children’s moral development are their parents, and those who aim to reassign that responsibility to the leaders of our supposed national “community” – bureaucrats, educrats, and the denizens of PEN America.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, at College of the Holy Cross.