I (Still) Hate Banned Books Week

Since I wrote this, the lie behind it has only gotten bigger.

EDITOR’S NOTE: To celebrate Banned Books Week 2023, I am reposting an article I originally published during Banned Books Week 2013. Library accountability has become much more popular over the past decade, but, back then, I felt a voice crying out in the wilderness. The post-Romney Republican Party was still trying to figure out how to win over Latinos by moderating on immigration. Nobody was interested in opening a new front in the culture war. Nevertheless, this has remained one of my favorites.

Below the article, I have added a short tenth-anniversary update.

If you see the relevance of this image, congratulations, fellow child of the ‘90s!

Originally published 30 September 2013:

Every year, the American Library Association, pious lover of books, freedom, and openness to sharing absolutely all ideas regardless of their content (unless you live in Cuba or your particular set of crazy ideas doesn’t follow rigid leftist doctrine), runs a weeklong event called “Banned Books Week,” along with some other sponsors. During this seven-day festival of self-righteousness, librarians across the country posture as opponents of censorship.

In reality, of course, they’re not fighting censorship at all. They can’t, because censorship doesn’t exist in this country. Any book can be published, any book can be sold. There are no “banned books.” The ALA is actually fighting parents, many of whom have the temerity to request changes to their school curricula or even, in the worst cases, ask their communities to make it slightly more difficult for children to access certain books that, in the parents’ opinion, could cause harm to those children. Access will not be denied, of course: again, censorship, the actual suppression of speech such that it cannot be heard, does not exist¹ in this country, and has been repeatedly ruled unconstitutional in a variety of contexts.

“Libraries Against Parenting”, however, lacks the same popular appeal as “Banned Books Week”, so America’s librarians construct an elaborate fantasy in which any attempt whatsoever to require or merely encourage a library to act in loco parentis (like any other responsible adult member of the community) is, through some arcane ritual of linguistic alchemy, a form of “censorship.” Indeed, the ALA is either unwilling or unable to draw any moral or practical distinction between a few powerless parents asking libraries to put books with significant adult content in the adult section and public burnings, official sanctions, and credible threats of violence against authors [scroll to “Aylisli, Akram”]. Indeed, the ALA’s “heroes” for this year do not appear to find any distinction between book challenges and literal Nazism. This is dogma substituting for reason.

The ALA and its cohort are also waging a propaganda war against taxpayers. The problem, you see, is not any actual censorship — since, again, the actual banning of books is legally and culturally unthinkable in this country. The problem is that there are some works of art — indeed, even, some ideas! — which the taxpaying public in our putative democracy is perfectly fine with permitting, but which they do not wish to subsidize. It is not unreasonable for them to oppose such subsidies. Libraries are publicly funded because they ultimately benefit the public, by providing us with an educated, humane, and happy citizenry. Works that do not tend to promote an educated, humane, and happy citizenry don’t need to be (in fact, should not be) carried by libraries. Libraries can and should discriminate against them.

This sounds much more controversial than it is. Your local public library has at least three copies of every Harry Potter book. (My local system has 21 copies of Chamber of Secrets.) Your local elementary school library has a copy of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day. I don’t care who you are or what state you’re from: those sentences are true. However, how many copies of the 1916 Chicago phone book does your public library have? (Not even Chicago’s libraries carry phone books that old.) How many copies of 50 Shades of Gray are stocked in your nearest K-6 grammar school? What about Enrico Rodrigo’s excellent The Physics of Stargates, a solid text for introducing college-level liberal arts majors to modern wormhole physics? How about the infamous Anarchist Cookbook? I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess zero. (Especially that last one, in a post-Columbine world.) The plain fact is that librarians, both school and public, have limited resources, so they use their substantial powers of intelligence and discretion to pursue donations and purchases that actually serve their readers — in other words, they massively discriminate, ignoring 99.99% of all books that have ever been published in favor of the 0.01% of books which, in their opinions as library professionals, serve the goals of the public or school library where they work.

If they did this with their own private money, there is nothing the public could do if it decided that, sometimes, the librarians picked the wrong books. But, of course, public and school libraries don’t rely exclusively on private funding; they rely, in very large part, on the income we give them through taxation. In a normal, healthy, functioning democracy, our involvement in keeping libraries alive would give us some say in what libraries do with the money we give them. “Banned Books Week” is largely designed to lock us out of the process, so that librarians can continue to discriminate against and in favor of whatever books suit their judgement, without taking ours into consideration.

But “Librarians Against Accountability Week” lacks persuasive power. Thus, when Arizona voters announced, through their elected officials, that they wanted their public school system to teach their children “to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races” (which, in turn, led to the suspension of a popular Mexican-American studies program which, according to the Superintendent of Schools, did exactly the opposite), the ALA jumped through some extraordinary mental hoops in order to construe it as — you guessed it — censorship, despite the fact that the law neither targeted individual books nor banned any of them from Tucson school libraries or curricula. (Some books were removed and stored or sold simply because the classes that used them no longer existed. Despite shoddy reporting, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Howard Zinn’s bibliography remain readily available throughout Tucson.) In the ALA’s strange world, it’s not enough for racial hatred to be available on bookshelves in stores, public libraries, and even school libraries; nay, unless actively teaching it, the ALA officially maintains, you’re attacking the “freedom to read.” Of course, the ALA’s opposition to “purging” and “limiting” certain books on the basis of “doctrinal disapproval” does not appear to extend to books that question ALA’s own doctrines. Those can be purged without ALA or Banned Books Week emitting a peep.

None of this is why I hate Banned Books Week.

The story of public servants scrabbling for money and power while imagining themselves noble warriors for liberty and goodness is probably as old as democratic government. As abuses of power go, the ALA’s annual public relations / fundraising scheme has relatively pure motives and is blessedly free of cynical self-awareness. The effect is very slight; the ALA’s disapprobation simply doesn’t have very much effect on the real world. Most schools and districts do listen to their stakeholders, and many have formal processes in place for reviewing book choices at the prompting of their communities.

More importantly, the intent is not entirely misguided. The vast majority of the books featured in “Banned” Books Week really oughtn’t be challenged; students are, generally speaking, being assigned appropriate books at appropriate grade levels. A brief review of the annual “Banned” Books report illustrates this. If you, as a parent, believe your twelfth-grader can’t, under a teacher’s guidance, read the sex scene in The Handmaid’s Tale without being seriously harmed, then you’ve made some mistakes as a parent. The ALA calls out these over-protective parents during “Banned” Books Week, and that’s not really a bad thing.

(SIDE NOTE: The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the worst books I’ve ever read. I would never use it in an AP course. But that’s because it is a clunking, didactic, trope-driven literary failure, not because of the sex scene, which is as far from erotica as Watchmen is from Christopher Reeves’ Superman movies.)

Occasionally, the ALA even raises awareness of genuine censorship overseas. Fighting actual censorship is a good thing, whether it’s the aforementioned Azerbaijani author Akram Ayisli, or Manji Irshad’s book about Islam and Liberty that was banned in Malaysia, or the continuing lawsuit in Belgium that aims to ban the classic Tintin in the Congo, or those Cuban dissidents imprisoned for trying to share ideas about… oh, wait, skip that last one! But these are never the marquee topics of Banned Books Week, which tries desperately to focus on instances of American “book bannings” (which do not exist).

So, yes, the ALA and its allies are making a huge effort to complain about the fact that some parents in some places don’t want their children to have instant, maximally convenient access to — or be forced to read as part of a curriculum — certain books. Yes, their pretension that they are in a fight against actual censorship is pretty much a lie — and a lucrative one, at that, given Banned Books Week’s success at raising money for them. But, in the grand scheme of things, the ALA’s mild hypocrisy and dishonest self-portrayal are pretty minor sins in a country where much bigger lies are being told every day.

Despite all that, I hate Banned Books Week. Not because of the magnitude of the lies, but because of the people who are telling them.

Librarians belong to one of the most noble professions. I write computer code for money; they are stewards of knowledge, enkindlers of humane passions, and guardians of the rational logos. A single library is more of a treasure trove than all the gold in Crystal Cove — a storehouse of truth, or at least the pursuit of truth. Librarians have a special duty, then, to tell the truth, even about themselves. They must be honest, sincere, and neutral guides whenever they are drawn into disputes in their professional capacity. Otherwise, they’re not librarians, but barbarians — not stewards of information, but vandals who control and manipulate it.

For seven days out of every year, that’s exactly what librarians across the nation become. I expect manipulation, politicking, power-seeking, and narcissistic fundraising scams from, say, politicians. I expect much more from my librarians. I held this post over until Sunday so as to avoid interrupting this year’s festivities, because nobody likes a party pooper. But today is the first day of my annual hoping that, by this time next year, librarians will have come to their senses, smacked “Banned” Books Week with the banhammer, and firmly resolved to work with parents and taxpayers to determine what books our public libraries should present (and how), rather than engaging in a long propagandistic power struggle that benefits no one but the ALA’s accounting department.

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A Tenth Anniversary Update - 4 October 2023:

Ten years ago, I argued that “Banned” Books Week was stupid because there were no banned books in the United States. “Any book can be published, any book can be sold.”

That was entirely true then. It is still mostly true today. There are no actual laws prohibiting the production or sale of any actual books. However, to an extent that was not conceivable to me in 2013, some books have either been censored off the shelves at major booksellers, or have been entirely withdrawn from sale because of private censorship. Our self-anointed guardians against censorship have been either asleep at the switch, or chosen complicity by silence. For example:

In 2023, we discovered that Roald Dahl’s publisher, Random House, now publishes bowdlerized versions of many of his books, withdrawing the original works from ordinary publication. Dahl is dead and did not consent to these revisions. Because the works remain under copyright, the original, unexpurgated texts are now unavailable outside used book stores and libraries that haven’t updated yet.²

The Banned Books Week website has nothing to say about this.

R.L. Stine isn’t even dead. Scholastic did the same thing to him anyway—and didn’t bother telling him.³

The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom website has a long history of complaining about parents’ mostly-failed attempts to censor Stine’s Goosebumps series. (The great and the good even made a self-congratulatory Arthur episode about it, which I used as the headline image for this article ten years ago!) However, when Stine was finally, actually, successfully censored at a global level, the OIF had, as of this writing, nothing to say.

Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters is the exact kind of work the freedom to read was established to protect. Agree or disagree with her conclusions (or even her methodology), Shrier’s book offers sincere, researched, widely-shared views on a crucial matter of public policy and health. This goes to the heart of freedom of discussion, which breathes life into the whole liberal order.

Naturally, then, her book’s publication was met by a hysterical censorship campaign in which: independent booksellers and Target pulled her book off the shelves (making it totally unavailable to many people); the American Bookseller Association penned a groveling apology for daring to checks notes ship this recently published and popular book to, uh, checks notes again people who sell books??; a top lawyer at the gorram American Civil Liberties Union called for the book to be banned;⁴ Kirkus Reviews refused to perform its standard review (as did every other major review outlet); and Amazon employees launched a campaign to have the books removed from the bookstore that controls roughly 40% of all U.S. print book sales (way more of the e-book market), which likely contributed to Amazon’s decision to deny ad placement for the book.

PEN America, the intellectual powerhouse of the so-called “Banned Books Week” campaign whose motto is, “The Freedom to Write,” has never breathed a word about the censorship of Shrier.

Ryan T. Anderson’s sober book-length analysis on trans matters, called When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, went through a similar censorship campaign, except this one succeeded at getting Amazon to pull the book. Oh, and, before you ask: yes, Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, is still available for sale at Amazon and many of these independent bookshops. So is The Communist Manifesto, the book that is possibly responsible (at least partly) for more deaths than any other single work in human history.

Getting removed from Amazon made Anderson’s book much harder to acquire, and much harder for the free market of ideas to function. After all, it is now clear that progressive books on trans matters are allowed to turn a profit for the publisher, but conservative books will be censored heavily enough to make profit very difficult. This obviously has a chilling effect on what books get written in the future, and thus what ideas our society is able to freely discuss!

The ALA trots out its 1953 “Freedom to Read Statement” every year for Banned Books Week. That statement’s very first declaration is, “It is in the public interest for publishers and librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority.” The ALA has never issued one solitary statement condemning the largely successful censorship campaign against Anderson, whose work was suppressed by publishers for expressing an unorthodox view that those in power considered dangerous.

Finally, of course, a few years back, the Seuss estate decided some of Dr. Seuss’s books were bad. Fair enough. They then made the further decision that nobody should ever be able to purchase those books again. What the hell? I have written elsewhere that the root cause of the Seuss problem is our abusive copyright regime, but that doesn’t exonerate either the Seuss estate or those “anti-censorship” campaigners who remained silent in the face of censorship.

I’ll save you the search: no, Dr. Seuss’s banned books don’t appear anywhere on this year’s list of “banned or challenged books.” In fact, none of the authors I’ve mentioned are there. The methodology used to define “banned books” is designed to exclude books “banned” by publishers, booksellers, or estates. The ALA and its ilk only pick fights with parents.

A decade ago, I still believed that the people in charge of “Banned Books Week” were just being a little cynical and needed to be reminded of their true calling.

For many individual human beings wearing Banned Books Week socks, and even for many local library systems, I still like to think that’s true. (Credit where it’s due: my clearly left-leaning local library carries multiple copies of Shrier’s and Anderson’s books and at least one of the banned Seusses. It’s also a great little library.) To be a librarian remains a most noble calling, and many of its practitioners discharge their duties worthily, even today.

However, at the highest level, I no longer think Banned Books Week is a well-intentioned mistake. I think it’s a scam. The foundation-funded alphabet-soup NGOs (ALA, PEN, ACLU, and so on) who produce Banned Books Week don’t give a damn about the “freedom to read.” That’s just chicken feed they give rubes to get them riled up against the only true enemies the foundations have ever had: conservative families. All this claptrap about “intellectual freedom” is a distraction, one that will be dropped at the first sign of “transphobia.” What they want is to teach your children how to masturbate and perform oral sex.⁵ Part of the reason I didn’t believe this ten years ago is because it wasn’t yet so obvious. Part of it, though, is because I didn’t have kids of my own yet; my first was conceived about a month after I wrote this article. For a decade, I’ve watched these people try and get their hooks in every which way they can. They want to be the ones defining your child’s beliefs and values—and they want you out of the way.

That’s why “Banned Books Week” visibly never really cared about activists getting jailed in Cuba or books being burned in Malaysia. It’s all about the children’s sections in American libraries and schools, because they’re the target. That’s why nine of the ten of the “most banned” books breathlessly recommended in every bluepilled publication in the country every year are always uniformly from one ideological direction, and aimed at that same audience.⁶ If this weren’t true, it would be so easy for them to prove it—but they never do.

The alphabet-soup apparatus doesn’t seem fixable. It’ll have to go.

In the meantime, I do indeed plan to #ReadBannedBooks. My daughter’s into Roald Dahl. We’ll start there.

I am sincerely glad to have the chance to repost “Why I Hate Banned Books Week” for a wider audience today. But if I have to do a Twentieth Anniversary post in 2033, I’ll scream. Please ensure that the ALA ceases to exist by then, or at least that they have ended their dishonest annual tradition.

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Next time: Having now scared off all my new progressive anti-Trump readers, I will get back to trying to scare off all my old conservative readers. That’s right: new filings are expected in the Minnesota Disqualification Suit today! I will be reading them at once (and then commenting on them as soon as I get the time).

I also have a very short piece on the upcoming Catholic synod, already written and ready to fire off. I guess the synod starts tomorrow? So maybe some #SynodContent before we get back to explaining what exactly an insurrection is and why I believe former President Trump “engaged” in one.

1. It must be admitted that, technically, under U.S. law, it is theoretically possible to suppress hardcore pornography, which is, according to some people, a form of expression, not a form of abuse. However, the standard of evidence for proving “hardcore pornography” is so high that the only porn that is actually suppressed in the U.S. is child pornography. Hardcore porn is freely and openly sold in stores, on cable, in hotel rooms, and is responsible for a sizable portion of all internet data traffic. Censorship does not exist in the United States.

2. My nine-year-old daughter just saw me writing this (with a bookstore webpage for The Witches open) and asked why on Earth I was writing about Roald Dahl. After I explained, she hit the roof.

Obviously, nine-year-olds usually end up sharing their parents’ opinions, because parents present the situation honestly—i.e., the way the parents see it—so we shouldn’t put much stock in the idea that political truth comes from the mouths of babes. Nonetheless, my daughter, counter-arguing that “as a younger person, I haven’t had time to become corrupted,” insisted that I mention in my blog that the people who are doing this to Roald Dahl are “giant piles of poop.”

We then had a short sidebar on effective persuasive communication.

3. Depending on the terms of his contract with Scholastic, it may be possible for him to sue Scholastic for copyright infringement. He has licensed them to publish his copyrighted works. Creating and then selling near-beer imitations of his work without a license is a violation of the Copyright Act. If his contract permits it, he should do it.

4. In fairness to Strangio, he later claimed that’s not what he meant. To be fair to me, he’s transparently full of crap.

5. I don’t think it’s appropriate to call this “grooming,” because of the sheer power of that word and its very particular definition. We may even hope, for the sake of their culpability, that many involved have deceived even themselves about their motives, and are not consciously going after kids. Nevertheless, it’s still very bad!

6. Don’t tell me it’s because of the methodology; all the evidence I have seen suggests that the methodology shaped by the predetermined outcome, not the other way around.