Bill Schubart: Book bans, censorship, what’s next?

I oppose book bans. Having said that, I don’t believe freedom is an absolute. History has taught us that we need commonly agreed upon limits to freedom imposed by a democratically elected government or personally within an individual’s own moral fabric. Limitations on freedoms will vary from government to government as we see in the political spectrum from anarchy to fascism. Variations will also occur among individuals. This is fine as long as I don’t impose my own limits on my neighbor.

Whether external or internal, we need some limits to freedom or we experience chaos. The degree to which freedoms are limited will always be a subject for debate in our three branches of government — the executive, legislative and judiciary — and hopefully the deliberations of a free and open press corps. Together, we must find consensus on the guardrails that protect artistic and intellectual expression while ensuring safety in our communities.

According to PEN America , the organization recorded “4,349 instances of book bans across 23 states and 52 public school districts” from July to December of 2023. Many of these titles are about racial diversity, racism, inclusion, LGBTQ gender identity, or sex and sex education.

A frequently banned book is George Orwell’s “1984.” His “Animal Farm” has also been banned, J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” More recent titles include Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.”

The first five titles were required reading when I went to Exeter. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” didn’t need to be banned because no one could finish it, including me. When I first read “Lolita,” I, myself, wondered if it shouldn’t be banned as it’s about an older man’s sexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl. On reflection, I realized that like most great novels there was more to it than the seedy plotline.

Florida leads the pack in book banning , followed by Texas, Missouri, Utah and Pennsylvania. Vermont has not yet banned any books to my knowledge, although librarians do get requests to remove titles from their shelves.

We can all agree that some books should indeed be labeled as appropriate for different age groups. But I also believe it’s the sole purview of a community librarian to determine for their institution what books should be available to specific age groups.

Having said that, parents must exercise their own choice as to what books their children borrow, as they know best the capacity of their own child to absorb and contextualize a title. But they should not be allowed to control what books are available to others.

I recently served on a panel in Swanton on book banning with four professional librarians, and they described the following process that librarians follow when confronted with a request to ban a book. They first ask if the complainant has read the book. Most, it turns out, have not. The librarian then asks them to first read the book and then file the challenge and their request will be considered, calling to mind the adage, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Efforts by some citizens to attack or erode any of our established freedoms, banning books or any other means troubles me deeply. As an author with nine books in the market, book-banning hits me personally. What’s happening to American culture and why? Has this culture of censorship and mind control always existed in our country? What’s the fear that drives these efforts to ban ideas and experiences expressed in prose, fiction, poetry and other artforms?

We’ve recently experienced successful attacks on reproductive rights, gender choice, and even family planning. In 2022, the battle against reproductive freedoms for women and men was set back by the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade which had been governing law for just under half a century. Planned Parenthood is under attack for providing reproductive health care to women. Others want to ban medical help and support for transgender youth, IVF, and even contraception.

In 1956 when television first came into our home, married couples were shown retiring to one bedroom but to twin beds. You did not see a man and a woman in the same bed. Nor did husband and wife kiss on the lips but “pecked” each other on the cheeks. The Catholic Legion of Decency rated, if not regulated, what we saw on TV and in movies until finally ceasing operations in 1980.

Nowadays, porn permeates our marketing, culture, networks, and even language. And the warning “You must be 18 years old to enter” is like saying, “Don’t eat these cookies.” Lonely, insular, clinical and narcissistic, porn has nothing to do with either affection or love. It’s an artificial blunt instrument  ̶  fetishistic and exploitive. It inures us to beauty and eroticism, the naturally occurring graces of sexual arousal.

But the personal and societal costs of, and money to be made from, pornography are hardly the type of discussion lawmakers are anxious to have, especially in this divisive time when even teaching about safe and appropriate sex in our schools is under attack by the religious right and political right. When Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked to describe his test for obscenity in 1964, he responded: “I know it when I see it.” But do we? Are we willing to face the real costs to ourselves and our children?

Sexuality is for all species a natural part of life on earth. But many religions have demonized it, usually to the benefit of their male adherents. I was raised a Catholic and the shibboleths around any form of sexual practice other than between a married man and woman were expressly sinful. I and many of my friends grew up believing that sex was dirty and necessary only for the continuation of the species.

As their own bodies mature and they begin to hear stories on the playground about sex, children’s natural curiosity is piqued. It’s critical to teach safe sexual practice, hygiene, and ethics (“no” means “no”) at the appropriate age levels in our homes and schools. Sexually transmitted infections are on the rise, with 2.5 million cases reported last year according to the CDC .

As parents and responsible adults, we have a choice: We can let children learn from other children or from Pornhub about sex. Or we can have candid conversations about it at home and normalize sex education in our homes, schools and libraries.

Meanwhile, the religious right is trying to impose its own conception (no pun intended) of morality on all of us, eroding the Constitution’s Establishment Clause mandating separation of church and state. We’ve heard a sitting president’s plan to ban Muslim immigration. We’re being told that “foreigners,” the same group that made America an economic leader in the free world, are now invading our shores and ruining our country — the “great replacement” paranoia. Would this be true if these “invaders” were all white Christians? I doubt it.

Why all these new constraints on our freedoms? It’s important not to just consider books. The genesis of most content is a book, but “books” become audio books, ebooks and even movies, documentaries and theater. Books are the focus of efforts to control what we see and think, but we must think more broadly about censorship in general.

I believe that censorship should be exercised only at the parental and library level where responsible adults have a shared community ethos around what media is appropriate at what age level. Having said that, media that incites violence, hate, sexual abuse or personal trauma should not be censored, but its distribution should be subject to age-appropriate oversight.

Perhaps the most cited example of defending the right of free speech, even as the speech is deemed by a great majority as dangerous and offensive is the ACLU’s defense of the right of Nazis to demonstrate in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois in 1978.

The current epidemic of book-banning and censorship is a blatant attempt by the few to govern the many and must be opposed at every level. Pen America, The Authors Guild, the ACLU, The American Library Association, the Association of American Publishers, the First Amendment Center, Freedom to Read Foundation and many other organizations are fending off these attempts by the few to control the realm of knowledge accessible to all. We must all stand up for the freedom to read and learn and oppose book banning.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Bill Schubart: Book bans, censorship, what’s next? .