The Senate Judiciary Committee recently held a hearing into so-called "book bans." My message to Congress was simple: books aren’t being banned, and it’s good that they are.
For years now, the left has been having a field day crying foul over parents who are concerned about what they’re finding in school libraries. Democrat pollsters have convinced their clients that this is a winning issue, and President Joe Biden even featured it in his re-election launch video. But Republican Senator Kennedy and I demolished that narrative with one simple trick: we read the books out loud.
When Fox News played clips of Senator Kennedy, it had to bleep out so much of it that it sounded like an emergency broadcast message. I took no pleasure in (probably) being the first, and hopefully the last, to read words like "butt-plugs" and "strap-on dildos" into the Congressional Record. But if discussion of these items have no place in the U.S. Senate, then maybe they also have no place in public schools?
Amazingly, by the end of the hearing even the Democrat Senators seemed to agree. Senator Durbin, who called the hearing, insisted that no one supported having obscene or pornographic materials floating around in school libraries. So, it really should be case closed, then. Because that’s what this issue is truly all about.
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The Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene, Madison Marino, and I published a report closely examining so-called "book bans." The term itself is deeply misleading, as the media has accepted the expansive definition of "ban" offered by PEN America, a leftwing advocacy organization. According to PEN, if a book is removed, reviewed, and then put back on the shelves, it has been "banned." And if the school moves the book to a guidance counselor’s office, or places a parental permission requirement on it, it has been "banned." So, we set out to determine how many of PEN’s alleged 2,532 "banned" books were actually still available. The answer: about three fourths of them.
Don’t believe it when the media tells you that "book banning" has anything to do with race. Parents have certainly objected to books dealing with race. For example, PEN America listed the Black Lives Matter-inspired The Hate U Give as the fifth-most banned book. But we found it available in every single school library in question. Parents might object, but school districts aren’t obliging.
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And don’t believe it when the media tells you that "book banning" is all about LGBT issues. As the Washington Post documented, only seven percent of book challenges contained the term "LGBT" without also containing the term "sexual." (Although those challenges may have contained terms like pornographic or obscene.) All of the top 10 most removed books contained extremely sexually explicit passages, and more than half regarding heterosexual relations.
Why are we even having this debate, then? Well, part of the answer is that the Democrats thought they had a winning rhetorical issue. "Book banning" certainly polls badly. And it’s hard to argue against when the media won’t even allow you to say what’s actually in these books. So, you can understand the cynical calculus behind Democratic politicians lining up to effectively insist that anyone who objects to porn in school libraries is a bigot.
But there’s actually something deeper and more intentional to it. Senator Mike Lee played a clip of Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. Caldwell-Stone advocated for: "sustained messaging that reframes this issue, that takes it away from the idea that these are inappropriate for minors, or sexually inappropriate for minors, and promote them as diverse materials and programming that are about inclusion."
Why reframe obscene material as "diverse" or "inclusive"? Because of a political agenda. Emily Drabinski, the head of the American Library Association, is a self-proclaimed "Marxist" who recently declared that "public education needs to be a site of socialist organizing [and] I think libraries really do too. … We need to be on the agenda of socialist organizing."
A hundred years ago, Marxists pursued a strategy of leveraging sex education to break familial bonds and refashion society. It might sound too strange to say that something similar is going on today. And yet, America’s most prominent sex education organization is literally named "SEICUS: Sex Ed for Social Change."
Most parents would not embrace the notion that public employees should teach their children lessons about sex on behalf of political agendas. Indeed, most parents would not approve in general of public employees providing their children with sexually explicit material for any reason. And yet, Democrat politicians and the media have been running defense on behalf of porn in school libraries for their own partisan gain.
Maybe that will stop soon. But sadly, too many in public education are ideologically committed to the proposition that exposing kids to sexually explicit material is good because it’s "inclusive."
