No, Conservatives Are Not “Banning Books”

AMAC Exclusive – By Shane Harris

In the national battle over Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and greater transparency in K-12 education, the left has in recent months opened a new front by leveling accusations that conservatives are “banning books.” But despite the sensationalist coverage from the liberal media, an objective look at the issue soon reveals that the left’s charges of “censorship” against conservatives are the product of a manufactured hysteria in service of a partisan agenda. At the same time, however, in an unabashed display of projection and hypocrisy, it is the left that is engaging in overt censorship efforts, attempting to enforce rigid adherence to their new “woke” interpretation of American history and culture.

A look at one recent high-profile case from a Tennessee school district provides a clear example of how the media spins concerns about the age-appropriateness of certain books into blanket accusations that conservatives are “banning” books they disagree with.

The book in question was Maus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust from author Art Spiegelman, whose parents survived Auschwitz. Last month, the McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the book from its eighth-grade Holocaust curriculum, saying that the work contained inappropriate curse words and depiction of a nude character. Notably, the board emphasized the importance of teaching the Holocaust, but said that Maus would have to be replaced with something else.

The media were quick to label the decision a “ban” on the book, painting it as a Republican conspiracy to not teach students about the Holocaust. The author, unfortunately, joined in the outrage, comparing the school board to Vladimir Putin, who declared the book illegal in Russia in 2015.

All of these accusations, of course, obscure what the board actually said about Maus – namely, that the “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide” were “too adult-oriented” for its use in the eighth-grade curriculum. In other words, not a “ban,” but simply an assertion that the book contained words and themes that were not appropriate for schools to push on 14-year-olds.

As is the job of any school board, the members made an assessment of what is and is not best for students to be exposed to at a certain age. The board might make a similar judgment that first-graders aren’t yet ready to read Huckleberry Finn or The Grapes of Wrath. That doesn’t mean that Mark Twain or John Steinbeck are “banned” – simply that the school itself does not need to expose every student to the images and themes presented in those books at that age. The Tennessee school district in question still kept its Holocaust curriculum, and students could still read the book on their own time – as many have since chosen to do.

A similar pattern has played out as other school districts across the country have also taken steps to review their curriculum. But what about when school boards or outside groups do actually act to remove certain works from school libraries, as has undoubtedly occurred amid rising concerns over Critical Race Theory and left-wing indoctrination in the classroom?

In most cases, the outrage has again been overblown. Liberals have been quick to assert that conservatives are trying to “erase” the experiences of LGBTQ and minority students by “banning” books by authors who identify as part of one of those groups. But this claim again ignores the reality of the material in question.

Take, for example, the novel Gender Queer: A Memoir, which has made its way onto the shelves of many high school libraries. In Florida, one parent was removed from a school board meeting for simply reading one explicit passage from the book. Similar scenes have taken place in other districts, including conservative places like Carmel, Indiana, where one parent claimed that a book available to K-12 students was so obscene that it could not be read aloud on air because it would violate FCC regulations.

What has become apparent amid the push for more transparency in K-12 education is that the same far-left ideologues pushing Critical Race Theory in schools have also embarked on a similar quest to brainwash kids with radical gender theory. Under the guise of promoting “inclusivity” and “validating” the “lived experiences” of “marginalized” groups, progressives are now peddling what sometimes amounts to little more than pornography with a political message to children, and claim that all who oppose its inclusion on library shelves are “bigots.”

To be sure, some school districts and localities have likely taken the push to protect students from age-inappropriate and explicit content too far. Conversations about where to draw the line between monitoring what type of material minors have access to, and plain old censorship can and should be an important part of public discourse – that’s why school board members are elected and why school district residents have a right to address their board members at public meetings, and why schools are supposed to be subject to local control.

But elected Democrats and the leftists who dominate the media and academia have refused to engage in that conversation. Instead, they dishonestly insist that conservatives are on a crusade to ban every idea that they disagree with. Progressives’ argument appears to be that if every public school student cannot access any material at any time, regardless of what type of content their parents and the school board thinks they should have access to, then that amounts to conservatives “banning books” and engaging in “censorship” – no matter the fact that parents, if they so choose, can purchase whatever books they like for their children at home.

It is also true that, for all their self-righteous claims about guarding against conservative “censorship,” many on the left have been prolific censors themselves in recent years – although not of objectively lewd content, but of timeless American classics.

Less than two years ago, several school districts in liberal areas removed books like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, both on charges of “racism” (despite the fact that Taylor is black). Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, in particular, has fallen out of favor with liberals for its supposed “white savior” complex. Apparently, Atticus Finch isn’t “anti-racist” enough for left-wing sensibilities, and his belief in the equality of all people under the law is out of step with the modern left’s identity politics.

The left has also been after Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn for decades, insisting that its use of the n-word and portrayal of the antebellum South, rather than providing students an important insight into the horrors of slavery, is “traumatizing.” Are American parents really to believe that Huck Finn does irreparable harm to high school students, but books intentionally targeting teenagers with sexually explicit material during an already confusing time of their lives do not?

We are also not far removed from the summer of 2020, when the left engaged in a systematic campaign to literally tear down and destroy American history and traditional values. Throughout the United States, left-wing activists vandalized and dismantled statues of America’s greatest heroes, including Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The left has also attempted to “recast” the founding generation as nothing more than racist slaveholders, discarding as wholly irrelevant the great strides they made possible for the advancement of human freedom and equality around the world.

In schools, these assaults on American history and society have been carried further through the teaching of ideologies like Critical Race Theory as not just one viewpoint amongst others, but as objective truth to which every student must adhere. The demand of progressivism, whether in schools or politics, is ideological conformity, and the ruthless destruction of any threat to that orthodoxy. Censorship, then, becomes a convenient tool for the left to both stamp out opposition to their views and with which to levy assaults against conservatives for challenging a progressive takeover of the education system.

Ultimately, the goal of the left’s professed indignation is to shame conservatives into silence so that they can continue their takeover of the education system unfettered. However, parents have shown that they won’t be silenced, and that they will make their voices heard at the ballot box.

While the left may hope to weaponize claims of conservatives “banning books,” the parents who are more engaged than ever in their children’s education know better and are going to continue to hold the schools that they pay for accountable for what they teach.