Monday’s Musing 4/11/22- book banning coming for textbooks next?

I was driving home when there was a librarian on the radio, the head of the School Librarian Society, and she was talking about the rush to ban books. And its logical, in some people’s minds, legislation in some states.

Have y’all lost your minds? I mean, what the actual fuck?

This has been weighing heavy on my mind in the last few months. This absolutely is about censorship.

This is about a very vocal, very minority deciding what ALL the kids need to read.

Or not read, as the case may be.

For some of live an all censorship is bad.

Regardless of content.

They are saying that they can only be the parent.

Of ALL children.

And the child that needs to learn about kids that think like them, act like them, have questions like them are not to be thought of, or talked about.

It is in the conversation that these books spark that we are telling these children about the wider world. And there is more in the world than is dreamt of your philosophy, Horatio.

Yes, a bastardization of Hamlet by Shakespeare.

Uncomfortable as that may be for some parents.

Think about what this is doing to your children. Putting your head in the sand like an ostrich is not helping. Also not helping is stopping up your ears and saying na, na, I can’t hear you.

And administrations and politicians are pandering to this very vocal, very minority. Because it is easier to listen to the loud voices who are demanding that we return to when they had the power and, by God, won’t someone listen to the white man?!

Don’t tell me that I do not have a dog in this fight because I am not a parent. Some of you are thinking of it.

I just don’t understand, you are thinking.

Because I don’t have children.

No, I don’t. But we have had many conversations about how we would raise a child, if we had one. And censorship is not on the table. Not for my hypothetical child, and not for another other child.

My favorite quote from that interview was when the librarian said that it is the parent’s prerogative to decide what their child could read. It only slips into censorship when the parent says that ALL children cannot read this book.

You know what else shows nudity, adult situations?

Core curriculum books of nursing school, medical school, dictionaries, encyclopedias.

Are they to be next?

The information contained there may be disturbing for some readers.

Yep.

It should also begin a conversation about why you think it is disturbing and why your children should not be exposed to it.

Because it makes YOU feel squicky?

My parents never monitored what I read, in my memory. If I read something disturbing I could take it to them and this would start a conversation.

But no one ever took a book out of my hands because someone deemed it not for me.

I would like to see them try.