Just in time for Banned Books Week, PEN America has released a report on the state of censorship in school libraries today — or at least, that’s how it frames its findings. “More students [are] losing access to literature,” warns the nonprofit organization, which styles itself as standing “at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression.”
But PEN has come a long way since its leaders included the likes of Willa Cather and Robert Frost. Today, PEN is a left-wing advocacy group, for which censorship apparently means blocking over-the-top, sexually explicit materials from children in classrooms.
The report, which looked at July 2021 to June 2022, found “2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 unique book titles.” The five most popular of these titles are Gender Queer: A Memoir, All Boys Aren’t Blue, Lawn Boy, Out of Darkness, The Bluest Eye, and Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, all of which contain sexually explicit language.
PEN argues that in the case of Gender Queer and other books, “The term ‘obscenity’ is being stretched in unrecognizable ways because the concept itself is widely accepted as grounds for limiting access to content. But many of the materials now being removed under the guise of obscenity bear no relation to the sexually explicit, deliberately evocative content that the term has historically connoted.”
More school districts in more states may be banning more books, but this apparent rise in censorship also happens to coincide with a concerted effort to force gender ideology on students — and not just through literature.
Not surprisingly, the narrative that school censorship is getting out of hand is being uncritically repeated by the legacy media. If “Advocacy Groups Are Helping Drive a Rise in Book Bans,” as the New York Times puts it, then the flip-side of the story is that radicals are pushing extreme sexual content and gender ideology on ever-younger children, then complaining when parents get upset.
Of course, school book bans can be and often are bad. There’s no reason Harry Potter shouldn’t be on library shelves, for example. Other classics, such as Brave New World, Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings belong in classrooms as well, even though they have all been recently banned from school libraries.
But when teachers unions and advocacy organizations such as PEN cry censorship, what they really mean is they have a fundamentally different definition of what’s appropriate for children than most parents. Even PEN admits that, of the books currently banned in school libraries, “283 titles contain sexual content of varying kinds (25%), including novels with sexual encounters as well as informational books about puberty, sex, or relationships.”
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with teenagers learning about puberty, but it should be obvious that most of these books are not being banned because there’s too much science in them.
Conservatives, trying to protect their children, are facing the vitriol of teachers unions and supposed defenders of free speech. The moral panic over these book bans has become so frenetic that Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, retweeted a fake list of books banned in Florida last month.
No, conservative leaders such as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) aren’t trying to get The Lord of the Rings and To Kill a Mockingbird booted from schools. But they don’t want books such as Gender Queer — the author of which uses “e/em/eir” pronouns — influencing children, who are, of course, the beneficiaries of school libraries.
Since PEN dishonestly warns that more students are “losing access to literature,” it’s time to take a step back and consider what the word “literature” means. Progressive advocates aren’t worried that students are losing access to great works that will expand their minds. They’re really concerned that they might lose a bit of their power to force a very extreme and radical agenda upon other people’s children.
