This website was created in direct response to two recent, unrelated events: video of empty book shelves in a Florida school library, and threats delivered to a village library in Illinois.
Regarding the Florida incident, it appears the shelves were emptied in response to a recent state law, which reads in part:
Each book made available to students through a school district library media center or included in a recommended or assigned school or grade-level reading list must be selected by a school district employee who holds a valid educational media specialist certificate, regardless of whether the book is purchased, donated, or otherwise made available to students.
The video was shot by a substitute teacher, who was later fired. The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, called the video a “fake narrative,” and a photo was released of the same library from a different angle showing many shelves filled with books.
According to a spokesperson for Mr. DeSantis, “There has been no state instruction to empty libraries or cover up classroom books. However, we ARE taking a stand against pornography and sexual material in the classroom.”
And there’s the rub. This is all about pornography, or at least that’s the official line. Fair enough. Few if any reasonable people are going to argue in favor of the inclusion of pornographic material in grade school libraries. So let’s take a look at a few of the titles removed under the Florida law:
- Before She Was Harriet, by Lesa Cline-Ransome and James E. Ransome (a biography of Harriet Tubman)
- Barbed Wire Baseball: How One Man Brought Hope to the Japanese Internment Camps of WWII, by Marissa Moss and Yuko Marissa Shimizu
- My Two Dads and Me and My Two Moms and Me, by Michael Joosten and Izak Zenou (two books about children with same sex parents)
Now some folks may dislike the idea of the same sex parents, or admitting there were internment camps or an Underground Railroad, but unless the covers of these books are the mothers of all misdirects, they are neither pornographic nor sexual.
In the wake of the state response, a few other points should be noted:
- A photo of a library showing books on shelves does not directly counter the fact of missing books elsewhere in the same facility.
- The video has been corroborated by additional reports of books removed or shelves covered over with paper in direct response to the Florida law.
- The Florida law literally calls for all books in school libraries to be reviewed for appropriateness, of which one logical consequence would be at least temporary removal, whatever the eventual determination.
- Legislation such as this, making use of vague terms such as “appropriate,” tend to result in a chilling effect in which educators will avoid anything close to the fringe, and the fringe expands over time. Of course, this is likely a feature of the law, not a bug.
Moving to Illinois, it seems a town library in the Chicago area has received several threats in the wake of a “Drag Queen Bingo” event that had been planned for October 2022. A few weeks prior to the event, a bullet was delivered to the library in an envelope that included, among other things, a rebel flag sticker and a promise of “more to come.”
In March of 2023, a shell casing was left on a desk [PDF] at the same library. While it is certainly possible to interpret these two instances as (wink wink, nudge nudge) unrelated and non-threatening, given the preponderance of mass shootings in the United States, it’s a reasonable interpretation that the bullet and shell casing were meant as direct threat against the lives and health of those who work and visit the library.
At no point do I claim that there can or should be no discussion about what may be appropriate for children. Of course there should. And in a free country, we many not all come to the same conclusion. Some parents may be comfortable with their children being exposed to drag queens, Mark Twain, or Grand Theft Auto, while others are fine with one or none of those. (I do not in any way mean to equate the items on that list; I’m merely providing examples.) The point is that there is no single red line that may be crossed. Different parents may reasonably expect to have different opinions regarding what is acceptable.
However, in the case of local events, the answer is simply to keep your kids at home if you don’t want them to go. Threats—direct or implied—are childish, asinine, and fascist.
Regarding what your children are exposed to in school, the situation is certainly more complicated. On some level, any school system with two or more students is at best a messy, cobbled together mix of parental consent, social mores, and educational outreach.
Therefore, there may be no perfect solution, but to remove from children the opportunity to learn and be exposed to history and other cultures is to do them a grave disservice. Under no circumstance should censorship ever be the default position. Whatever the stated goals of governors and demagogues throughout history, it’s clear based on the “walks like a duck” test that the Florida law is less about protection of students’ fragile minds and more about protecting them from being exposed to topics with which their parents may feel uncomfortable. Give the kids some credit. If your own ideas are that good, they’ll win out in the end.
And so, that leads me to this website. We’ll see where it goes. I confess that I have an urge to look into creating a non-profit to advocate against censorship and in favor of rational, critical thinking. But I might just be yelling into a well. In any event, nothing will sway me from my opinion that we are better served by a marketplace of objective dialog than either enforced monoculture or chaos in the streets. If in some small way I can help hold strong the gates against the barbarians, this will be a success. I’ve been sitting on the sidelines long enough.