Pages
Tuesday, November 29, 2022
'Banned' Books
If you’ve been to a mainstream bookstore or library in the past few months, you’ve probably encountered a “Banned Books” display. These high-visibility collections serve as totems of progressives’ defiance in their latest imagined controversy: the belief that conservatives are banning books related to LGBT issues from public school libraries. “Banned Books” displays usually feature some traditional texts that may have been pulled from schools at some point in their publication history (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, etc.). But the recent wave of sexually-explicit LGBT titles are always positioned so prominently that a person can only assume that the displays are in reaction to right-wing prudes trying to force their retrograde views on an increasingly progressive populace.