GOP returns to the book banning bandwagon

The best thing about politicians who want to ban books is that they don’t read.

Unfortunately, that is also the worst thing about politicians who want to ban books.

Last year, Republicans who control the Arizona Legislature jumped on the book banning bandwagon, passing a bill banning schools from teaching or directing students to any material that is “sexually explicit,” which the bill defined as “masturbation, sexual intercourse or physical contact with a person’s clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks or if such person is female, breast.”

Imagine the classics of literature, past and present, that such a regulation excludes. (I’d list some, but given the fact that book banners don’t read I don’t want to give them a heads-up.)

That particular bill was pushed by Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman (then a representative) who, to my mind, should be banned from holding public office for being among those who falsely declared themselves presidential electors in order to overturn Arizona’s 2020 election results.

See Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution — another document that book banners don’t appear to have read.

This year, Republicans in the Legislature are backing a piece of legislation, Senate Bill 1700, that would ban books that are “lewd” or “sexual” or “promote gender fluidity or gender pronouns or groom children into normalizing pedophilia.”

According to an article in The Arizona Mirror, the bill’s Republican sponsor, Sen. Justine Wadsack, told the Senate Education Committee the bill “is not about a disagreement as to whether the book is likable or not, it’s about if it’s describing sexual acts, masturbation or private parts.”

How does a person say she’s not a reader without saying she’s not a reader?

Last year the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal civil rights complaint against a Texas school district that installed a similar ban.

The language used by book banners is passed from one group to the next. Nothing original.

The ACLU lawsuit said bans like the one in Texas (also true of the one proposed here) create “a pervasively hostile atmosphere for LGBTQ+ students.”

These are young people who already face a much higher risk of being bullied, or worse.

It’s a good thing that politicians who most want to ban books are those who’ve read the fewest.

If they did, they’d understand that the most interesting and, yes, subversive books are not sex obsessed.

(Unlike certain lawmakers.)

Those books challenge our beliefs, our prejudices, our assumptions, our clichés.

This is a good thing.

The best books help us to better understand ourselves. Perhaps that is why Americans who have read a book or two understand that banning books is un-American.

And it’s probably why surveys consistently show that most Americans are against book banning.

For good reason. Minority rule is a form of tyranny. Dishonest. Corrupt.

A very well-known poet, playwright and novelist once wrote, “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

As you might suspect, the book in which that line appears is often banned.