Every school librarian I ever had fought against the administration constantly about restricting access to "banned books".
We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.
I'm not sure what you mean about hackers restricting the flow of information, please provide a citation that backs up your blanket generalization.
I wish I could remember the link, but there was some website where it would accept uploads of banned books and host them so people could freely read them.
It had its own list of banned books that it wouldn't accept, The Turner Diaries and stuff like that.
I thought it was clear that the point is that "banned book week" is not about exposing people to fringe materials. It's about exposing people to the things that the librarian/teacher approve of but the community doesn't/didn't agree.
The real banned books are the ones that don't even show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books is long.
> I thought it was clear that the point is that "banned book week" is not about exposing people to fringe materials. It's about exposing people to the things that the librarian/teacher approve of but the community doesn't/didn't agree.
Yes, but that was already a given, and is the entire topic of this thread. Librarians in many cases became involved in the struggle for access to information even if "the community" didn't agree. I was raised in an extremely backwards, religiously zealous, racist, totalitarian-supporting Deep South state and never once have I thought, "I better do what the community thinks".
> The real banned books are the ones that don't even show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books is long.
Pat yourself on the back, you've discovered that librarians have to make compromises in order to continually push the envelope and not undo all of the progress that has been made. This is called politics.
The whole idea that "banned book week" is a time when students learn to think for themselves is silly, then. It's merely a time when one authority figure who doesn't like another authority figure grabs the reigns. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
That a cool opinion, but my own experience completely invalidates it. I always looked forward to banned book week as a chance to expand my horizons, and generally sought out texts that I felt the State and its supporters would rather me not have.
Just because they're a-okay now doesn't mean they weren't once controversial. It doesn't take a genius to deduce that something like To Kill a Mockingbird was probably wildly controversial before integration.
A lot of those books received a complaint by some parents or were maybe even possibly removed from a school library in one of the thousands of schools in the US. That's what they mean by "banned." It's just a way to market approved books to kids who have to read them anyway as if they were edgy.
In TKAM's particular case, a lot of the complaints came from across the spectrum because of the use of racial slurs, so it was often not even controversial for the reason you might think. Frankly the book is not even good outside of its propaganda value for fighting racism. At any rate, even then it wasn't meaningfully a "banned book", even in the south.
Sometimes "banned" is a complete misnomer, as when back in 2017 it was simply removed from the required reading list in one Mississippi school district because people complained about reading racial slurs out loud. But the reporting, as you can see from Google, almost all says "banned."
If you want to ban a book that deals with racism in a meaningful way because you are actually for the racism, this is the argument you would make in public.
Reading racial slurs and understanding how the character felt and feeling bad about it is the entire point. If your only exposure is casual racism on the worst parts of the internet then you just normalize that way of thinking.
> The Mukilteo School Board voted unanimously to remove the book from the required reading list on Monday evening, The Everett Herald reported.
> Michael Simmons, the board's president and an African American, told Newsweek that he and other board members made their decision after "seriously considering" the information provided
You can find story after story like this. I don’t think people like Michael Simmons are secretly for racism. I think your mental model may need adjustment.
The biggest thing is probably that in 2025 there are a lot of people who are genuinely not comfortable with anyone reading certain racial slurs, even when though they’re quoting. A lot of style guides and editorial policies also reflect this. The second most common complaint is probably that it is an example of “white savior” literature.
You and I can agree this is silly if you like, but the model of TKAM censorship as usually told is just false in every direction - almost never “banned” and almost never complained about for the reasons people assume.
I think both texts should be available to those who request them, but this cannot happen in a vacuum. We have to teach important context to our children early on, expose them to systems of ethics and overall ensure that they go into it understanding why Marquis de Sade was an absolute psychopath and why his writings must be read through the proper lens.
And Lolita is a tragedy, a story about flawed characters. Supporting access to the novel and supporting child abuse are two wildly orthogonal stances.
The problem is that teaching marquis de Sade to young boys will make them coomer horny terrorists (it’s literally extreme graphic sex/erotica meant to arouse the reader) to the girls in their class. School is not the place for coomer fiction, or pedo fiction.
Teaching Lolita is child abuse because for anyone who actually went through that experience, they have to not only relive it, but see a quasi justification for it through the fact that this book is considered “great”.
It’s just like that movie hard candy. It’s all pedophilic and shouldn’t be taught.
No one has to or should teach either of these books to children.
As I have already stated elsewhere in this thread, this is in argument about restriction, not compulsion. You can not make something compulsory while also not restricting access to it.
> We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.
These titles are invariably widely accessible and banned from public schools because they contain graphic displays of sexuality that parents don’t want their children to be exposed to. The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter).
They’re never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has actually been banned by a national government on these displays.
I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school.
> The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter)
I wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter at my home, but my librarian allowed me to anyway. I wasn't allowed to read books with sexual content, but my librarian allowed me to anyway. I was raised by massively abusive religious extremists. I didn't give a fuck about their attempts to control my mind then, and as an adult now I don't give a fuck about other idiots' attempts to control their kids minds now.
My guardians did every single thing they could think of to stunt my growth and turn me into a good little Catholic extremist. You simply won't understand unless you have been through such a horrible experience, as a curious mind with a voracious appetite for knowledge.
"I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school."
What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf? Makes no sense, doubt it's true, and obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level, let alone content.
It's not a difficult read. It's the historical context that's hard to get. The major political players of a century ago are mostly gone now.
In the early 20th century, there were still a lot of kings, emperors, and princes hanging onto power. The era of monarchy was on the way out, but it wasn't over yet. WWI started after an archduke was killed by an inept but lucky assassin. The ancient noble families still mattered.
The Marxists were quite active. They were the anti-monarchists. Today, Marxists are nearly extinct. There are still some Communist states around, but no Marxist mass movements.
The Catholic Church was still a major political power. That's gone.
Hitler was a competent craftsman and had done construction work. This was an era which required a huge number of people doing manual labor in big groups to get things done. That's when unions arise, by the way. "Working class" was very real, and that's where Hitler started.
The term "macho" wasn't available yet, so he wrote: "In times when not the mind but the fist decides, the purely intellectual emphasis of our education in the upper classes makes them incapable of defending themselves, let alone enforcing their will. Not infrequently the first reason for personal cowardice lies in physical weaknesses."
There's a long rant about Jews, which seems to come from clerk jobs in the WWI German army being dominated by Jews, described as physically weak and overly intellectual. Today, that might be a rant about AI. There's a similar grumble about parliamentarians, elected legislators and their staffs, who talk too much and don't exercise enough. The ideal is a muscular, disciplined society run by strong working people. He writes approvingly of how the US exercises quality control on immigrants, rejecting the sick and weak ones.
Now, this is where a librarian can help. Someone reading this needs background reading on Europe from 1900 to 1925. Searching with Google for "The World in 1900" turns up a terrible essay on Medium that looks like LLM-generated clickbait. A good librarian will offer better choices.
Kids who get all that background will question the way things are today, of course. Which scares some people.
Anyway, there is absolutely no point to having such a text in an elementary school.
It should be required reading in high school so everyone can property understand the attitude that led to WW2. The only English translation worth its salt is the Dalton translation.
Do you always immediately disregard what people say in favor of your own beliefs?
> obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level
I had a collegiate reading level in first grade... I taught myself to read at age 3 in order to escape my situation. I should not have to suffer because other people did not invest the same amount of time and energy into their literacy.
> What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf?
I learned about Hitler and why he was a massive piece of shit, but also formed my viewpoint while considering all available information and opinions, instead of just internalizing what other people told me.
> Do you always immediately disregard what people say in favor of your own beliefs?
It's the internet, it's easy for people to make claims, and we have to use our own faculties to try to guess at the accuracy of these claims. These might not even be outright lies, but they could be exaggerations, partial truths, or simply misremembering (most people can't clearly remember things that happened to them when they were 6 years old).
You claimed both that the books available to you at your elementary school weren't advanced enough for your 6 year old self, and that your elementary school made Mein Kampf available to you. I'm not going to make a judgement on the veracity of your claims, but I will say that looking at both of your claims together, I'm entirely unable to tell what level of books your elementary school actually made available to students.
> You claimed both that the books available to you at your elementary school weren't advanced enough for your 6 year old self
I did not.
I said "I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7", and I also said "the books available to us in our school library just weren't cutting it". This does not imply that at 6/7 the books weren't cutting it. This conversation was about the role of the library throughout my schooling, and as I got older, I wanted more than the library could offer.
> I will say that looking at both of your claims together, I'm entirely unable to tell what level of books your elementary school actually made available to students.
Look again, with more precise reading comprehension.
You didn't address the actual issue. Looking at your claim:
"I was a voracious reader, but I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7 and the books available to us in our school library just weren't cutting it. I also pined for more adult-oriented themes and plots."
and your claim:
"I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school."
Even if we put aside the question about the veracity of your claims, we're still left with no clue about what was actually available at your elementary school. Apparently your school didn't have enough adult-oriented books...yet it also gave the kids access to Mein Kampf.
You're completely confusing reading level, historical significance with thematic content. "Mein Kampf" is not what I was looking for in reading material.
> Even if we put aside the question about the veracity of your claims
I don't care if you spend the rest of your life questioning my own experience; I don't question it, because I lived it, and after this conversation we'll never speak to each other again and I will continue to live my life.
> Apparently your school didn't have enough adult-oriented books...yet it also gave the kids access to Mein Kampf.
Can you understand the difference between Mein Kampf and other books and why Mein Kampf might not scratch that itch? After I read it, what, do I just read it again and again? No, I want more books. I read 2-4 books a week. I suffered extreme childhood abuse and reading was my escape.
You're not making any real points, just looking for a little gotcha moment so you can pat yourself on the back, looking for inconsistencies so desperately that you're willing to intentionally ignore the obvious in search of something else.
This isn't how you have a conversation with others.
Sorry that you had a bad childhood, but the answer to you, personally, having a bad childhood is not “the state should subvert the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship.” Just consider things under Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance: would you want a hypothetical extremist Catholic state to be able to subvert your relationship with your own (hypothetical) children?
The context of this thread is access to information, so that was the implied context of my comment. But to be clear: I agree that the state is right to intervene in the parent/child relationship in cases of physical abuse.
But then the State is implicitly deciding morality by deciding what is and isn't abuse. It's engaging in censorship, and is subject to corruption, as was and is my government in the Deep South. It's actively hostile towards information.
Literally just last month, we as a city came together and narrowly avoided the city passing a sneak ballot that was going to remove a lot of funding from our public libraries and redirect it towards police retirement funds. They even tried to repress our vote by making it a parish-wide vote instead of a city-wide vote, inviting in people who were ignorant of the consequences of the ballot but easily swayed by local identity politics.
Libraries are in danger, and it's precisely because they provide things that our local governments, and the current rogue federal government which they massively support, and their generationally brainwashed constituents, don't want people like me and other pacifists and archivists to access and share.
Ah, I see you are in EBR parish. Congratulations from NOLA on voting down the proposal. We did our part with the constitutional amendments but I won't be in this state for much longer. I thought that EBR parish and BR city were coterminous however?
Hey, thanks, everyone was pretty nervous but we came together :)
There is Zachary, St. George, Baker, Central and Baton Rouge. This is one of the games these cities sometimes play in order to sway local elections. I too will be leaving the state again soon once things line up. I hope you find a community that you feel connected to.
Probably eastern seaboard - I have spent over a decade in New Orleans and while I love it I don’t think it really loves me back and I haven’t really developed deep long lasting ties beyond the family I already had here.
Are you willing to take the inversion of your position: that you should have no ability to control what information the state exposes your children to?
What about media with sexual content? Or content that promotes creationism or the idea that there are two biological sexes, which were created by God?
My position is balance between the family and the state for the maximal benefit of the child.
Also the balance should be towards access to information. There is no symmetry between exposure to harmful ideas and restricting good ones. With your example of two biological sexes created by God it is pretty easy to explain that the reality is more nuanced. If parents restrict access to information and the state doesn't intervene, the harm is bigger.
In other words, good things are good and bad things are bad.
It's astonishing how many people (or bots) in 2025 talk as if the only allowed positions are "the state is good" or "the state is bad" and "parents are good" or "parents are bad", like they have no ability to recognize when individual separate actions are good or bad.
To what degree should the state be able to intervene if parents are preventing their children from access to the truth? Should homeschooling be allowed? Should children be taken from their parents? Should parents who don’t agree with certain content be compelled to fund distribution of that content via public libraries?
> the state should subvert the primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child relationship
No, the State needs to get the fuck out of my business. That's the point.
> would you want a hypothetical extremist Catholic state to be able to subvert your relationship with your own (hypothetical) children?
See the above. Providing protections for open access to information is translatable across both situations you've described. Access is access. Censorship is censorship.
This isn't about the "nuclear family". It's about me, an individual, and my inalienable rights for self-determination, regardless of what others around me want.
Make no mistake, I am not using my anecdotal experience as the basis for my beliefs. I am using it as supplementary evidence for why this is all so important. My heart goes out to every child who has been or is currently in the situation I faced growing up. I don't want them to be like me, holding a gun in their mouth with the finger on the trigger at the ripe age of 9, wishing to escape a seemingly unending violent war for control of my thoughts. The represented majority will never understand the struggle of the unrepresented minority.
A librarian (who is employed by and thus an agent of the state) giving children access to books with sexual content against the will of parents is definitely subverting the parent/child relationship.
I didn't have a parent-child relationship. I didn't live with my mother or father, they were mostly absent in my life after the age of four and I was homeless by 16, after seeking emancipation for many years earlier and my parents denying me.
And fuck "the will" of the people who raised me, they were extremely abusive and traumatized me in every way imaginable, including through sexual repression and agency to chose my own destiny and seek my own sources of truth, knowledge and creativity. They sought to enact a chilling effect by surveilling me at every level of my life, including through my school systems. They repressed nearly every creative outlet I engaged in, including programming or exploring computer literacy, fearing it would turn me homosexual or turn me into a "hacker".
When he wasn't punching me in the face me or throwing furniture at me, or beating me with a belt for hours until I stopped crying, because "men don't cry", my grandfather used to shake and choke me violently and tell me I was a demon and would never love anyone or be loved by anyone.
They were evil people and I do not support any institution or government which wants to perpetuate the experience I had for other children. I seek to enable children to have access to knowledge and tools they need to determine their own destiny, and I firmly believe that full access to information and supporting institutions will naturally lead to a more empathetic society than will restriction of information.
I’m sorry for your experience but your extreme case does not invalidate the right of normal parents to exercise guidance over their children and to decide when and to what types of books, movies, games, etc. they are exposed.
It does. Because a child is a sentient being. Not an accessory for a parent. If you respect the autonomy of someone who is sentient, even when they're dependent on someone else, it's important they're given the ability to forge their own life.
And no, it's not an "extreme case" — it's a common one.
Wildeman et al. estimated the lifetime child maltreatment prevalence for US children as 12.5% by age 18 years, but considered only child maltreatment reports substantiated by CPS.12 Substantiated reports are a small subset of all reports. In 2014, only 21.9% of investigated reports were substantiated.10 (Technically, “investigated” indicates “investigated or assessed” and “substantiated” indicates “substantiated or indicated” here and after.)
1 in 5 is hardly uncommon. Note, these are the substantiated reports i.e. an investigation was done and it was found, "yes, the child is being abused."
But even if it was 1 in 10, or 1 in 100, or 1 in 1,000 then we still can't design the system without this in mind, because any system needs to have a safety margin for failure, and that includes caring for children.
FWIW, the most egregious issues you’ve mentioned about your upbringing are physical and mental abuse and there are already mechanisms for the state to intervene in those cases and nobody in this thread is arguing against those. Now it so happens that your abusers also limited your access to information, but it’s not actually clear there’s anything wrong with that, which is why we’re arguing about it, but it’s certainly the case that the fact that you were physically and mentally abused as a kid is orthogonal to whether or not the state should intervene in matters of mere access to information.
It's one thing for a librarian to call a teen over and say "hey, you should look at this book. It's full of ***." But if a teen wants to check out a book that has sexual content in it, then the librarian shouldn't prevent them. I think it would be prudent for the librarian to have a short conversation with the kid if they suspect the kid might be getting in over their head, but the kid can check out whatever they want.
I think checking out any* book, without a parent's explicit consent, is potentially subverting the parent/child relationship. Families are unique - there's no clear agreed upon standard of which books are "good" and which books are "bad." And without such a standard, it is, in my opinion, the library's responsiblilty to make literature and information as accessible as possible with few, if any restrictions. It's not the library's responsibility to choose which books are somehow "appropriate," that's the parents' job. And if kids are sneaking out to library behind their parents' back, idk, that seems pretty wholesome. Seems a lot better than sneaking cigarettes or booze or whatever.
I think the reasonable stance is for the state, in its various forms, to only expose kids to a (small c) conservative subset of what is widely agreed upon as factual and morally acceptable and to leave everything beyond that to parents. Kids aren’t under the purview of their parents forever; they’ll soon get out into the world and come to their own conclusions.
> definitely subverting the parent/child relationship.
That's the job of schools. Okay, it's not all about parents. We stopped allowing parents to do everything because, as it turns out, most of them are fucking stupid.
So we have public school, where real things are taught. And now, most people aren't illiterate. So, yay us!
But this notion that everything should always bend over backwards to cater to what parents want... uh no. This is some 2000s bullshit. This is not the way it worked before. If parents don't want their kids learning about X, Y, Z then their options are either getting over it or pulling their kids out of school to home school. Bending the public school to whatever their dumbass whim is, isn't an option.
They're not going to understand unless they lived here long-term. My friends in St. Martinville told me stories about Jeff Landry's (adoptive) family growing up choosing a different pharmacist because the one they went to not being cool with Vatican II was still too liberal for them.
Hopefully you can see the irony of, on the one hand, arguing that the state should have the right to intervene in the parent/child relationship wrt what information a child has access to and, on the other hand, complaining that the state is requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in schools. The power you’re arguing for is the very same thing you’re complaining about.
There is no irony here, you're not understanding the context. It's never been against the law for a teacher to show them here in school. But now they're forced to, even if they personally disagree with displaying and perpetuating religion in their public school classrooms, when separation of Church and State is such a core component of our Constitution. A huge amount of our state was against this violation of free speech, but our governor signed it into law anyway.
The library is still a resource for those who wish to learn more about religion, and I certainly used it while learning about various religions that I was not allowed to research at home.
Here's the problem with your rather simple-minded analysis.
Teachers and education administrations can be really fucking stupid too. I trust the parents way more.
> Teachers and education administrations can be really fucking stupid too.
Yeah, sure, they can be. The difference is that this is their JOB and they're EDUCATED.
If you trust parents "way more" than actual educators, then great! Pull your kids out of school and teach them yourself. That's always been an option. But don't go around proclaiming public school should be specifically engineered to make YOU comfortable.
EDUCATED or indoctrinated?
And you only have to look at the abysmal track record of the "Dept of Education" to see how badly things can be run.
And yes I agree..my opinion is not that important, just like yours.
Yes, that's what my guardians told me, too. I contend otherwise. Now, who is right? On what foundation do you rest your claim that I lack the protections of an individual as a child?
>They’re never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has actually been banned by a national government on these display
That’s not my lived experience. Even if my experience wasn’t common, books banned by the local or state government or by other governments around the world certainly make it into those displays.
> Even if my experience wasn’t common, books banned by the local or state government or by other governments around the world certainly make it into those displays.
All of these books have always been widely accessible in the western world, and I suppose that’s my chief objection; these books have been banned, but they have never been seriously challenged in the west. They are safe to publish and distribute here, which is what makes the whole thing so performative.
I threw out Mein Kampf as the only example I could think of where a book had faced an actual ban; it was illegal to sell in the Netherlands until about ten years ago. But even my regional library carries it. I haven’t been able to find any instances of a book being banned in the USA besides a dozen or so that were banned from being mailed or transported across state lines in accordance with the Comstock Act. I would imagine the list is more extensive than these dozen or so books, and while most were pornographic, a few were culturally notable, such as the Canterbury Tales.
The idea that librarians are leading a resistance movement against the looming threat of Christian ultranationalism is a rhetorical cudgel used to undermine parental rights regarding children’s education. Virtually all of the books that have ostensibly been “banned” in America have been challenged for containing material inappropriate for children. A minority of the materials are objected to on purely religious grounds; that is, the material is not necessarily obscene or inappropriate, but contradicts the religious worldview of the challenging parents. While I personally feel the latter material should be accessible to students, the right to make that determination lies firmly with a student’s parents. There is maybe an argument to be made that the challenges not based on issues of obscenity violate the spirit of freedom of information (since the challenges result in all students losing access to the books, rather than just individual students), but it is hard to make this argument when so much of the “book ban” discussion is centered around works which most people would view as inappropriate for children.
1984 is a good example; while it is a culturally significant work, it contains two or three descriptions of sexual intercourse. The sorts of people who browse a forum like this might find that quaint, but most people do not want their children being exposed to this kind of thing.
> because they contain graphic displays of sexuality
This is literally always the excuse used when censoring content from people.
At the end of the day, we need to acknowledge A LOT of the bans were because of racism, homophobia, and other prejudices, and that these "safety" arguments are just made to conceal that.
My mom when I was growing up found any expression of same sex relationships to be outright pornographic.
I find it is best to be deeply deeply skeptical of anybody defending book censorship because frankly the most common pro-censorship movements in the present US use words like "sexualization" to mean things like "gay couples and trans people exist".
Normal people wouldn't agree with that definition, but they'll nod along with "kids shouldn't have access to sexual material", so that's the code word that pro-censorship camps used.
They also are banning books that are critical of authoritarian governments, because they don’t want their children to resent the one they’ve chosen to install here.
It was a plain question and not immediately obvious from the first few seconds of the video nor the title of the video what the answer was.
The video itself had no relevance to the discussion. The appropriate response was “The Perks of Being a Wallflower in Oxford, Pennsylvania,” along with a non-video citation showing that the book was pulled from circulation. Even if it was, it would be a non-issue. No ordinary person understands the removal of obscenity from a children’s library to be a “book ban.” The people who advance this narrative know this and lie about it anyway.
> the removal of obscenity from a children’s library
Uh, that's literally what a book ban is? But given that you aren't even willing to do the bare minimum work for this conversation and yet demand things from others I am not really sure whether it's worth even having it.
Every single one of the books you listed were suggested to me by a teacher. It often felt like some of my teachers latched onto my strong ethical stances and continual disregard for the brand of institutional authoritarianism common in the Deep South, and felt compelled to nurture it.
Of course, it goes both ways. Plenty of teachers fixated on the idea of breaking me and making me fall in line. By middle school I had over 50 write-ups, a few suspensions, and had been subject to corporal punishment (literal State violence) mainly for "willful disobedience", a derogatory term which always confused me because I felt it positively described exactly what I was doing. In middle school, that number exploded as some authoritarian teachers became fixated on forcing me to adhere to school uniforms or demanding that I stood and participated in the cult-like Pledge of Allegiance, attempting to embarrass me in front of the class or to get my guardians to whip and punish me at home.
Public school was a battleground for the future of our society. It felt like 99% of people at the time simply didn't understand that. The few teachers who "saw" me and did what they could to help me navigate my abusive and restrictive home life became the most important people in the world to me, and I owe everything to them.
Show me one that was banned at the federal or state level from being either owned, read, possessed, transmitted, and / or sold. This is what an ordinary person understands when you say that a book has been banned.
I know you don’t have any examples of this occurring in the United States or you would have offered up specific examples.
> Wikipedia has a complete collection of titles that have been banned.
1. Keep moving the goal posts. But all of those books were banned by either a state or the federal government at one point. Keep moving the goal posts. I can kick harder.
Of the 19 books listed here, The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption (1650) is the only one that fits, and it was banned 375 years ago. Of the remaining 18 books:
7 were banned from US mailing and transport across state lines under the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act of 1873. This notably includes Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Note that the laws which permitted these bans were overturned in 1959.
1 (Uncle Tom's Cabin) was banned by the Confederate States of America.
1 (Elmer Gantry) was banned in around half-a-dozen US cities (I do not care to investigate what these bans entailed). It looks like this one may have also fell under the Anti-Obscenity Act.
1 (The Grapes of Wrath) was ostensibly banned in "many places in the US" and the state of California (the citation for this one has no link).
1 (Forever Amber) is listed as being banned in fourteen states in the US, but the first citation listed seems to imply that it was banned under the Anti-Obscenity Act. The second citation is an independent article which does not even specify what states the book was banned in, nor what these bans entailed.
1 (Memoirs of Hecate County) is listed as having been banned in New York by the Supreme Court, but again, the citation does not specify what this ban entailed. It also strongly implies that the boot would have fallen under obscenity laws.
1 (Howl) was seized by the San Francisco customs authority as obscenity, but these charges were later dismissed.
1 (Naked Lunch) was banned in Massachusetts for obscenity.
1 (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) was "banned" from Tucson Arizona public schools, but the citation listed does not mention what this ban entailed, when it occurred, or even any proof that it occurred. The table itself mentions under the "Year Unbanned" column that the work was never illegal.
1 (The Pentagon Papers) was an attempt by US President Richard Nixon to suspend the publication of classified information. This restraint was lifted in a 1971 court case, and the papers were subsequently declassified in 2011.
1 (The Federal Mafia) was subject to a court injunction, forbidding author Irwin Schiff from profiting off the work after a court found it contained fraudulent information. This book is not banned from publication. "The court rejected Schiff's contention on appeal that the First Amendment protects sales of the book, as the court found that the information it contains is fraudulent, as it advertised that it would teach buyers how to legally cease paying federal income taxes."
1 (Operation Dark Heart) was seized by the Department of Defense "citing concerns that it contained classified information which could damage national security."
So the prime examples here are a book from 375 years ago (126 years before the Declaration of Independence was signed), a book banned by the Confederate States of America, a book intended to aid and abet the reader in the commission of a federal crime, and a couple of books which were sequestered due to national security concerns. The rest were "banned" for graphic displays of sexuality.
> I can kick harder.
I'll be waiting patiently for you to cite any other examples.
> Keep moving the goal posts = I provide proof, but then those aren't real bans.
You didn't provide any proof. This is a list of 19 books, almost all of them were banned for violating obscenity laws. Those that were banned for completely arbitrary reasons were banned by entities other than the United States (or by entities which preceded the existence of the United States). The three others were banned because their content amounted to criminal aiding or abetting or because they contained classified information.
> There are MULTIPLE thought ending logical fallacies in what you're saying.
If there had been, you would have pointed them out.
Yeah but do they include the spicy ones like Mein Kampf or just the ones that agree with their politics. It's not really a "banned book week" unless you're pissing everybody off.
The point they’re trying to make is the librarian is already the censor by the fact that they decide what books to buy.
The librarian gets pissed if someone attempts to “do their job” or override them, either by banning a book they want or forcing them to carry a book they do not want.
I find it hard to believe that someone doesn’t have some books they think the library shouldn’t carry, even if it’s just The Art of the Deal.
This was simply not the case at my middle school, and since my aunt was the librarian, I had a lot of insight into the administrative war going on behind the scenes. She was constantly being denied books that she wanted to introduce into our library.
The tone was set by the parents and administration, which comes from a heavy Christian brand of authoritarianism which has had the Deep South in a vice grip since the beginning.
The librarians did the best they could under the circumstances, and the only way we can consider them censors is if we overgeneralize and oversimplify the situation to the point where words start to lose their semantic value and anything can be anything else if you squint hard enough.
Providing a wide range of books based on pedagogical goals and training in library sciences or education is quite a bit different than showing up at a school board meeting to get a book removed because you read a one page excerpt that involved something in the valence of sex.
And it's a bullshit argument meant to invalidate people working against authoritarian measures. If everything (even selecting/recommending books for others to read is censorship than the term becomes meaningless, which I guess is the intent of the argument).
> Why is everyone responding to this thread going right to Mein Kampf?
Because they're riding a political hobby horse, insisting that the only valid defense of 1A (free speech) is to demand a figurative repeal of 3A. i.e. to require librarians to quarter the enemy's troops in their house. Because apparently the only valid measure of how free your speech is, is how much you tolerate some of the most censorious regimes in history.
Mein Kampf is just the most stark example of a book that is forbidden, but very significant to read if you want to understand WWII history. Uncle Tom's Cabin is another example of a book you wont see but is another piece of literature you should read if you want to understand the ideology of a given time period. You don't have to agree with a book to read it.
Another commenter pointed out the anarchist's cookbook, which is another great book to read.
Incidentally Mein Kampf often is available in libraries in Germany (in a commented version, here for example https://www.provinzialbibliothek-amberg.de/discovery/fulldis...), and was never banned in the sense that people understand banned. You could always own and sell old versions however, printing and distributing new uncommented versions could be deemed Volksverhetzung.
It's also a crappy text and definitely not necessary to understand WWII, there are better texts.
I’ve only read excerpts from it, and frankly, you don’t need to read it to understand WWII history. The important bits are well covered in any decent book on the subject and you won’t get any deeper insight by reading the source material.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Read the Dalton translation. Reading excerpts is borderline useless because so much builds upon earlier chapters.
>> As far as I know, it's never been banned in the US
The question is not if it is banned.
The question is if it is general circulation in public libraries.
This is motte and bailey. If a school library decides not to include a book in their library, that's curation, if it is a book you don't like. If it is a book you do like, it is censorship.
If you walk into your public library and browse the shelves, is the Anarchist Cookbook there? Mein Kampf? If they're not, does that mean they are banned?
I go to my public library quite often, and the books I am interested in are most often not on the shelves there, and the books that are on the shelves there have a political slant towards a politics that I detest. Librarians are in fact dangerous.
Now, that doesn't mean the books I want to read are banned, I have to put a hold on them from the stacks at central and they will ship them over, but they will never be on display at my local library.
They're not banned. But the books on display at my local branch library are curated by dangerous librarians I want nothing to do with.
At my local public library, I could request books to be bought and put on the shelves. I was allowed to host open mic nights in middle school where I and other friends would read poetry and whatever else, free of censorship. Civil engagement through the library was easier than a lot of other public institutions, because while librarians curate, they also have the job of catering to their audience, and respecting requests.
The library became a sanctuary for me after school as it meant I could avoid abuse back home and have a less surveilled access to information such as books, wikis, news, protest music, games, etc. which I was able to later take back home or to other places and consume without fear of reprimand. It was also a third place, where I could meet people, gather people and engage with my community.
> They're not banned. But the books on display at my local branch library are curated by dangerous librarians I want nothing to do with.
Did you persistently try to civically engage with your local library over time and form a personal, positive relationship with the librarians? If so, and if denied, did you seek restitution in city hall or by contacting local congressmen? Or are you just complaining?
A public library is a third space where ideas can be accessed and exchanged, and a focal point where the community can civically engage. In the past, that has mostly meant books, which have been a great way of archiving things, but many public libraries also have rooms for listening to music, watching films, or at least renting them to take home.
Many public libraries also welcome and encourage open mics if they have space to host them without affecting others. In my case, it was a small library in a small town, so I hosted the open mic after hours with the grace of the librarians who worked there, who were more than happy to encourage literacy through poetry.
Yes, and I'm trying to enlighten you on the historical purpose of the institution so that you have a better understanding of what a library is, instead of just relying on a personal feeling or opinion.
I would much rather have a person who has gone to school to study childhood education and library science choosing books for the library, than randos trying to force their religion on everybody else's kids.
For your public library, if they get requests for books, they get the books. Lots of people want to read fantasy romance, so those are the books they buy. Hardly anybody requests the anarchist's cookbook, so they rely on interlibrary loan to get it when someone wants it. They buy the books that are popular. This isn't rocket science.
Just about any book you want is going to be available. This is what libraries do.
>> Just about any book you want is going to be available. This is what libraries do
There's a difference between the books that are available and the books that are on display.
I can make a request and put a hold and get a book from the stacks at the central library. That's not something the typical browser of books on a library shelf is going to do. I do it now, I never did growing up. What was on the shelves was the Overton window for me growing up. I break windows now, now I can consider any viewpoints I choose. Go get me the book from the stacks, librarian.
What librarians do today is to promote propaganda for a certain cause. It's just so self destructive of them to do that, but that's what they do.
> Another commenter pointed out the anarchist's cookbook, which is another great book to read.
Again why is it a good example, it's not banned in any meaningful sense of the word. I can get onto Amazon and buy it right now.
Calling it a good book to read is quite a stretch as well. It's a poorly written assembly of instructions for bomb and drug making (written by a 19 year old). Many of the instructions being outright dangerous, so much so that it has been suggested that the book was actually a plant by the CIA, FBI... (not that this is a very credible conspiracy theory). If you want to learn about bomb making better just pick up a chemistry textbook.
I'm pretty sure nobody commenting here actually wants Mein Kampf in particular. It's just a well-known example of a book that most people would agree to restrict. (The Anarchist Cookbook would probably be better if we need to pick a single work.)
... and since it's well known, its presence can get improperly used as a proxy for "this library is uncensored", when in fact the less-known books get restricted anyway.
The Anarchist Cookbook is a great example. I had to acquire that from the internet.
The people responding here mainly just come across as either ignorant or intentionally obtuse, thinking that if they can prove that in some cases the school administration overruled our teachers and librarians on the most egregious texts (as they constantly did), then the entire idea of "banned book week" is performative and not useful
No one here seems to have actually made a real point, just looking for "gotchas".
> It's just a well-known example of a book that most people would agree to restrict.
That's just completely wrong. In America it's a book most libraries would keep around as a visible indicator that they're not censoring books, and a book the letter-writing busybodies who want to censor books would not prioritize because there's no sex in it.
Mein Kampf has been available at every school I've been at. It's not part of the curriculum but why would it be? Libraries usually have it because they have robust collections on authoritarianism for obvious reasons.
The Anarchist Cookbook not so much. But neither are terrorist training manuals or other guides for making improvised weapons.
> It's just a well-known example of a book that most people would agree to restrict.
I don't think most reasonable people would agree to restrict such an impactful piece of history. It's shocking to me that people think something they disagree with should be entirely censored.
My guess is there are forums somewhere where people complain a lot about librarians not giving access to Nazi material and how it's a crime against free speech absolutism.
We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.
I'm not sure what you mean about hackers restricting the flow of information, please provide a citation that backs up your blanket generalization.