Dog Whistle: Big Bad Book Bans

The American Library Association Goes Full Marxist

Libraries curate the books they hold based on the needs of the people they serve. An elementary school library will not have books on how to perform dental surgery because elementary school kids are not the appropriate audience for that. It would be weird to find Dr. Suess books in the corporate library of a pharmaceutical company. The law library at Harvard probably does not stock cookbooks.

That does not mean these specific books are banned. They are not included in every library, but that is not the same as a ban. You can still obtain these books from other sources. It is not illegal to read or own such books. As a matter of fact, you can buy nearly any book published from online sources pretty easily today. Sometimes out-of-print books are hard to come by, but that doesn’t mean they’re banned. They’re just scarce.

I hate it when it is stated that books with sexual content are "banned" because they are not in public elementary school libraries. You can buy them in lots of places. You can read them. You can own them.

I lived in Germany for a few years in the 1970s and Hitler’s handbook Mein Kampf was literally banned. You could not buy it anywhere. You could get in legal trouble if a copy of this book was in your possession. This was an actual ban and it was limited to this specific book and we all know the reasons. (That ban has since been lifted, but it’s still a book that makes people skittish.)

Here in America we throw the word “ban” around like it means these books are legally prohibited. This is a redefinition of the word “banned.” The American Library Association (ALA) today considers restrictions on books (which occur at every library on earth) as literal “book bans.” In 2023, the New York Times commented that school libraries were banning books by restricting them.

Banning books means the book is not available or accessible anywhere. (Sort of like what YouTube does to certain videos it doesn't like.)

Elementary school libraries simply lack the financial resources and the space to house a vast collection of books. They have to curate the collection based on their audience. For instance, here are some types of books or book topics you won’t find in an elementary school library:

• How to lose weight after 60

• The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump

• A complete guide to Mohs surgery for dermatologists

• Advances in valve technology for offshore oil rigs

• Justine by the Marquis de Sade

The reason these books are not in the local school library has nothing to do with bans or censorships or restrictions. People over 60 really do want to lose weight, Mohs surgery is something dermatologists might be interested in, and we need to know more about the valves on offshore oil rigs—but those books are just not appropriate or of interest to a 10-year-old. Justine is a novel about sadism and Donald Trump is a political lightning rod for controversy everywhere. I can see why librarians might not want those books in a public elementary school library.

These alleged “book bans” are just a dog whistle. The woke librarian army that now runs our library system is catastrophizing that if anyone challenges their notions of what is fit for a given library, we must be Nazis seeking to ban books. Banning books is an anathema to free speech, which is why they toss the word “ban” around so lightly, hoping that everyone who hears a comment on whether a given book is appropriate for a given library is instantly offended.

But all libraries, even the top-secret Vatican Library, have to make decisions about what books they are going to include and—this just follows logically—what books they are going to exclude.

Those decisions are made every day; librarians make them. What has shifted is that people other than librarians are now trying offer opinions on library collections and librarians are screaming in hysterical over-reaction that books are being banned. When a non-librarian raises a stink about a book being in a specific library (school library, public library, etc.) the ALA army pulls on their rainbow-colored hair and screams censorship. (And don’t think about old-school librarians anymore. They’re gone. The ALA of today is more likely to be at a pride parade than a poetry reading and they tend to have nose rings, blue hair, and preferred pronoun pins.) National Public Radio even ran a story about librarians showing off their tats. Apparently librarian tats are a thing.

But why shouldn’t citizens have a say in what libraries put on their shelves? Why shouldn’t parents be able to express opinions about the books the school libraries offer to their children?

Let’s take a long-distance view of things. Who is it that pays for public libraries, school libraries, and even schools? Taxpayers! Librarians do not self-fund their own libraries, in fact, librarians draw salaries and benefits from taxpayers. In crude economic terms, that means the libraries belong to the public and the librarians work for us taxpayers. Gee, maybe that’s why we call some of these institutions “public libraries” and “public school libraries.”

Yet the ALA wants us to believe we have no right to weigh in on what books we want in these libraries?

Are we expected to fund institutions and not say a word if they do things we do not want them to do? Sounds fascisty.

There are many that say Trump or the Republican party or conservatives are a “threat to democracy.” First of all, we are not a democracy, we are a republic and although we vote, our system is not a democracy in the true political sense of the word. But more importantly to this argument: how does silencing the people underwriting the system serve the public good? How is “democracy” served if the people are denied a voice? How does our country work if taxpayers must pay the bills but have zero say in what is done with the money?

The ALA says that if you have an opinion they disagree with about what books should be in the libraries where they serve—that’s censorship! Having a librarian shush me for articulating an opinion on a library I fund and utilize… now that’s actual censorship.

The same people who are yelling at us for not letting them run an institution we fund are also backing the rewriting of classic books. Now that’s a crime against literature and an actual assault if not on “democracy” on principles of freedom of expression. Classic books from children’s stories (Roald Dahl) to popular literature (Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie), to older classics (Mark Twain) are all being “updated” to make them less offensive to modern ears. Or perhaps it is just to make them more “woke.” For instance, James Bond novels by Ian Fleming talk about women in ways that seem sexist to the modern censors. Roald Dahl used the word “fat” in his books, which is clearly an assault on democracy. Mark Twain used words to describe Black people that we would never use today, although they were common in his era and he made Black people heroic figures in his novels. Agatha Christie was so offensive, she once used the word “Oriental” to describe a person from Asia.

One of my favorite authors of all times is Flannery O’Connor, a woman who wrote magnificent prose and weird short stories, but she was an imperfect person. In fact, many have called her an overt racist, and perhaps she was. She also happens to be one of our greatest writers. Toni Morrison, a Black author and certainly no friend to racists, once commented on Flannery O’Connor, “There’s a woman I love, she’s really hostile, Flannery O’Connor, she’s really really good.” In some ways, O’Connor embodied the best and worst of America. She was an invalid growing up in the rural South in the early 20^th century; she died of lupus in 1964 at the age of 39. She absorbed some of the best and the worst of humanity, while at the same time writing eloquently about enormous topics like grace, redemption, transcendent suffering, and human nature but framing them in simple stories about a man with dementia living in an apartment or kids going to a tent revival meeting or a car trip with an insufferable old grandmother. She wrote a great short story on politics that was set entirely in a barbershop. Some critics say you have to contextualize her racism, that is, realize she was writing in a specific time and place and her writing reflects that era. Efforts can be made to sanitize these works, but are we removing vital organs from her body of work? O’Connor is a great American writer in my mind because she embodies a world that has passed on and she shares it with us, warts and all. And Flannery O’Connor’s America is one worth remembering, both for its errors and its truths.

On the other hand, some feel these books are so tainted and toxic they must be revised to prevent damage to the minds of the readers. Are writers only allowed to express what is politically correct? The insertion of political correctness destroyed standup comedy for nearly a decade—but standup comedy is making a resurgence now that they’ve dumped the woke. Are we trying to do to great literature what we have just did to comedy? I think curating a library is no problem—I would have less problem with a library saying they did not want to have Flannery O’Connor’s books on their shelves than a library who edited and changed her writing to be better aligned with their own world view.

(Also remember: worldviews change at lightning speed these days. Editing classic works of literature might be something that has to be done and redone every other year!)

Rewriting classic books should be a crime. If a community thinks that school kids cannot handle the language or story line of a book written in another era, they can opt to have the library not carry it. To rewrite someone else’s masterpiece is like putting a dress on Michelangelo’s statue of David in Florence because some people think men should be free to wear dresses.

Librarians are not editors. They’re public servants and they work for us, running the libraries that we pay for.

And a few stats: most of the books that Conservatives want removed from school libraries are challenged because of sexual content and/or the sexual messaging of the books. But liberals also want to mess with our libraries: they tend to want books with racially charged content (such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) either removed or sanitized. And this helps the lingo—Conservatives can be accused of “banning” books (not true) while Liberals do not want the books banned, just updated.

Well, if I could update the content of Gender Queer: A Memoir, maybe I could find it a place on the shelves of an elementary school library, but I wouldn’t change it… Not a word. That book was created by its author and, like it or hate it, it’s a creative work. I would never rewrite it, but I may want it pulled from the elementary school required reading list.

And just one last word. The ALA is the largest library organization on earth and it is currently headed by Emily Drabinski. Drabinski described herself as a “Marxist lesbian.” No surprise she views her mission as the leader of the largest group of librarians in the world as being on the frontline of radical transformational change of the nation and this involves radicalization of young people. Back when I was a kid, we used to think of librarians are fussy old spinsters. Today they’re Marxist lesbians. Maybe that’s the same thing.

Organizations are challenging whether we should be using our publicly funded libraries to overthrow the government and sexualize and indoctrinate our children—check out this site at Safe Libraries. Another site is called Safe Schools, Safe Libraries.

Books are wonderful, which is why we should care about them. Curating a library for a specific audience is not banning books. Rewriting classic books to suit contemporary sensibilities is the real crime.