Harm Reduction for Library Annihilation
Alternatives to Book Banning
This post is for MAGA and MAGA-adjacent conservatives who agree with bookbanning. This is for Moms for Liberty enthusiasts and supporters and friends. If this is not you, move along. You may not understand where I’m going.
I am not conservative. I won’t ever claim to be, but I know church people. I know what they like and want. I go to church a few times a month. I pay tithes. I see what you want, but I’m here to tell you there is no path to a more conservative America that doesn’t end in the end of America altogether. But I’m here to talk about books, and specifically libraries. With the recent executive orders that want to put a stop to DEI and gender non-conforming literature we’re already seeing books pulled from shelves.
Books like this one.
Some of you will say, “these really aren’t the books that need to be banned.” Others will say that this isn’t what you meant, but there is no way to split the difference between a Ruby Bridges picture book and the 1619 Project. Both were written with a mind to teach future generations about the wrongs of the past so that they aren’t repeated in the future. When you open the door to discrimination it’s very hard to close it. The desire to remove transgender depictions in school libraries very easily results in libraries closing altogether. In a practical sense, it has to do with funding and with recent cuts to federal workers we’ve already seen libraries close.
There will always be things we don’t agree on, but there is middle ground. How can we meet in the middle.
Understand what policies already exist for parental control. There isn’t a school in the country that doesn’t allow a parent to limit what their child reads. Some may have sections for age range. Juvenile Fiction books usually don’t have any romance or kissing, but Teen and Young Adult sections do. And if you didn’t want your child to check out any books with romance or violence or queer themes then you can let the librarian know. As a parent, in this country you can limit what your own child reads, but you don’t have the power to limit what someone else’s child is allowed to read. I will say that my philosophy has always been that if a child can experience a trauma, they can read about another child who has gone through it and survived it. On average, girls who experience sex traffiking do so at age 13. Many children find out they’ve been sexually abused because of sex education classes. Knowledge isn’t the problem. Additionally, public libraries and school libraries serve all kids, not just the kids who go to church, but kids of different religions, queer kids and their parents, atheists. They all pay taxes and they all deserve access to books that represent them.
Instead of subtracting titles, focus on adding. We’ve established that there are books that you may not want your child reading, but how about focusing on the books you do want your kid to read. A home library is great, but we can’t all self fund hundreds of titles with our extra money. There’s camp and eggs to buy. I have books on my school shelves that focus on Christian themes as well as queer teen romances. Those kids who aren’t comfortable with one can find the other. Make a list of books with the themes you like and request them from the library. Your librarian will listen. While indie titles may not meet purchasing requirements there are Christian publishers that publish titles that do.
Get Your Influence On. Instead of focusing on who is buying what you can provide reading lists to parents and students. They can be church sponsored. They can be part of an empowerment group. Focus on what you like and not what you don’t like and make sure the lists are used for recommendations and not for limiting what someone else reads.
Commit to Accuracy. Too often there’s a desire to skew what’s read towards a world view that fits one person or one group. We share this world with so many different kinds of people, but public services aren’t the place for evangelism. Even if the church took a bigger role in public life, which church gets to win out? The Lutherans or the Baptists? The Catholics or the Mormons? Do I shelve books with teen brides instead of teen pregnancy? It gets very sticky. There will be books on the shelves about lynching and redlining and COINTELPRO, because they happened and the ideology that led to those tragedies is public record. If we start to pick and choose which parts of history we like and don’t like we’ll have nothing on the shelves at all.
What I am trying to impress upon you is that you don’t have to destroy an institution in order to get what you want. Sharing is caring. We all want libraries to be here in the future and the path of threatening to defund only ends with no library at all. Queer people exist, whether you like them or don’t like them, feminism is a theory, whether you agree with it or not and Black people were kept out of jobs and schools by law. The past can’t be changed, but we can make a better future if we’re willing to work together.
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Complying in Advance: The enemy inside
We know that a flurry or executive orders have come out of the white house since January 20th and each one will affect the American public in a different way. I want to talk about education because that’s where I work. The new Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling