For a few years now, libraries have been under siege by right-wing book-banning enthusiasts who find fodder for the culture wars in a handful of books containing a few passages they believe are shocking, inappropriate or harmful. Rather, they believe they can shock their constituents by citing a few passages they label as harmful — especially to children.
So it has always been. Book-banning is as American as apple pie, despite our founding documents about personal liberties and our mythology about freedom. Still, 21st-century book bans and library attacks have a few modern quirks that reveal the performative nature of the reactionary political enterprise.
There was, for example, the Nebraska state legislator who decided earlier this month to read aloud from Alice Sebold’s memoir, “Lucky,” in which she vividly recounted being raped as a college student. Republican Steve Halloran wasn’t content with just reading the explicit account of the assault to emphasize his complaint that the book was “obscene.” He went on to insert the last name of Democratic legislators, a brother and sister with whom he frequently disagrees, in the graphic passage he read.
As lawmakers on both sides of the aisle castigated him for that gross breach of decency, he apologized for smearing his colleagues, Democrats Machaela and John Cavanaugh. But he was no closer to understanding how ludicrous his complaint about obscenity was. Sebold was raped during her freshman year at Syracuse University. That’s what’s obscene.
In the United States, more than 400,000 women were sexually assaulted in 2022, the last year for which reliable statistics are available. If teens want to read Sebold’s account, they should be allowed to. If anything, reading a graphic account would make adolescents more aware of the danger of sexual assault and might keep them safer.
(If Halloran were a reader, he’d know that there is an altogether different reason for pulling “Lucky” from library shelves. Sebold misidentified her rapist on the stand, and the book recounts that unfortunate man’s arrest and conviction. Anthony Broadwater was exonerated in 2021.)
In Prattville, Alabama, meanwhile, a librarian was fired earlier this month for … well, it’s not clear why he was terminated. In a brilliant bit of reporting, award-winning newspaper columnist Kyle Whitmire recounts the shifting rationales that Ray Boles, chairman of the Autauga-Prattville Library Board, gives for firing library director Andrew Foster.
By the time Boles finishes a series of contradictory statements, it seems clear that Foster was fired because he had the temerity to request “clarification” after Boles ordered him to move more than a hundred books to adults-only shelves, many of them with nonexplicit LGBTQ+ content. Books with sexually explicit passages are among those most frequently targeted by reactionary book-banning mobs. So are books with LGBTQ+-related content, even if they are not graphic, and books related to the nation’s history of racial oppression.
I should also note that two of the most frequently banned books, George Orwell’s “1984” and Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” are novels about dystopian societies in which books are banned. Irony, anyone?
That’s just one bit of irony. In addition, there’s this: Here in the early 21st century, when adolescents and even primary school-age kids are drowning in technology — phones, tablets, laptops — and suffering from shorter and shorter attention spans, are parents really that worried about what books they are reading? Are they reading books much at all?
As the mother of a 15-year-old, I am struggling to picture her wandering into a library and pulling “Lucky” off the shelf. Even with the controversy it presents over unjust incarceration, I’d be thrilled if my daughter wanted to read it. The unfortunate truth is that she never ventures into a library without my prompting. How many teens do?
On the other hand, I can’t keep up with all the sexually explicit lyrics she’s listening to on streaming music services and the youth-centered TV shows based around sex, drugs, suicide, sexual abuse and heaven knows what else. Streaming services are well beyond the reach of old-fashioned broadcast censors, and I can’t find enough parental controls to keep all of that out of reach.
If she were merely reading books with sexually explicit passages, that would be a profound relief. At least she’d be reading.
Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.
