Yikes if you believe that should be in public schools for 13 year olds to access without parental consent.
I'd also toss out 50 Shades and other "graphic" (literature in these cases) romance/novels.
In middle school/high school? No thanks. College, no problem.
Edit: If I interpreted you correctly, you said 50 Shades is there, so why can't this? I drew a hard line that neither should, while you deflected with other titles.
I didn’t say that, which just kinda makes me wonder what else you think I said.
There is a huge difference between a) what should(n’t) be in school libraries, b) what should(n’t) be in public libraries and c) what should(n’t) be for sale.
No one argues that Fifty Shades shouldn’t be in school libraries, it’s not last I checked. But I don’t think it needed to be added to a banned list to make that point either. Similarly, there’s no end of books that probably don’t need a lot of debate about being in a K-12 library - War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Lolita, to pick three for three different reasons. Meanwhile you have works like Nineteen-Eighty Four that also has some questions about whether it should be in a K-12 library. (In case you were wondering, the book has quite emphatic points to make not only on the extremities of authoritarianism but s*x, t*rture and straight-up m*rder happen in the book, in that order.)
If you think the book’s message is fundamentally harmful, it shouldn’t be on sale at all. No one should read it. Taking it out of public libraries and making it only available for sale isn’t censorship as much as it is censoring it for the less privileged in society. Those who can’t afford to read it, or would be otherwise disadvantaged by reading it.
But that is of course the point. Keeping things out of schools is mostly about protecting those who don’t have the resilience, learning and understanding. Keeping things out of public libraries - but still in publication - is very nastily akin to that “do the research” line you hear about. “Do the research, form your own opinions - but
don’t read that one, never that one, that’s wrong” isn’t as punchy a soundbite, is it?
It’s one of the reasons I find the whole “free speech” debate so frustrating because the supposed defenders of free speech, as far as I can tell, only want free speech if it agrees with them. I take mine from Voltaire for the most part - that I do not have to agree with what you say but I defend your right to say it. And this coming from someone much further left. (I’m not
quite far left because I don’t want the entire downfall of capitalism but I absolutely want it reined in.)
Let me ask you this: there is a book that has been reviewed in the last couple of years in a variety of districts for removal from school libraries for violence, vulgarity and much more. In fact I was shocked when I looked at the book and found it had tales of *ncest, m*rder, g*nocide, multiple events that are borderline p*do events, and much more besides. Would you ban it from schools?
Then if I told you it was the Christian Bible, would you still ban it from schools?
And to the person who wonders how we got from Elon Musk to school libraries to here? Musk is absolutely an advocate of the sorts of policies that curtail freedoms for some and not others. What he does, the standard he carries, emboldens his acolytes. The behaviours you see on X that you don’t agree with will be in your forum soon enough because it’s being legitimised at scale.
That is why it matters.
