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Comment by milesrout | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is banning books. Removing inappropriate material from school libraries isn't book banning. Have you seen some of the books that are being removed? That books with graphic depictions of aren't appropriate for children is a view perfectly compatible with strong support for freedom of expression.

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Okay, but counterpoint: why don't these school libraries also remove for example the Bible, a work known for extremely graphic content, eroticism, calls to kill based on one's tribe and doing stuff like working on the Sabbath. It's also a book explicitly meant for indoctrinating children into a given religion, or actually one of two religions!

These principles of what is good and age-appropriate for children doesn't seem to be applied consistently.

Counterpoint, they do. What public elementary school has copies of the bible? Schools are terrified of anything re ligious.

Well apparently at least public school libraries in Utah's Davis County[0]. To their credit, they did actually ban it due to vulgarity and violence, so at least they were principled in that sense, but then the book was brought back due to backlash.

[0]: <https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/21/us/utah-davis-school-dist...>

Because it is an historically important work that is necessary to have some understanding of to understand large parts of history. Its purpose also is not indoctrination or titillation.

Because the bible teaches hypocrisy, a very important skill that will help create future leaders.

They’re literally banning The Handmaid’s Tale. Not good https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/margaret-a...

Quoting the article:

> It’s shunning time in Madison County, Virginia, where the school board recently banished my novel The Handmaid’s Tale from the shelves of the high-school library.

Note: a school library. A student can go to a regular library and check out this book, if they are really interested.

If you want to see what real book banning looks like, read the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...

This involves removing books from public libraries nationwide (not just school libraries of one county), banning of sale, and sometimes criminalizing and prosecuting private possession of the book.

The US is fortunately quite far from such a sorry state.

Redefining the definition of book banning is not a good look and not a way to win this argument. It's a hole you really don't want to dig.

The First Amendment specifically speaks about government not limiting free expression. An indeed, school boards are a branch of the government, not a private organization. Their actions may be seen as a real infraction on the First Amendment.

Thank you for the correction.

If the state doesn't limit freedom of expression by choosing what material to teach in schools (which it does) then it doesn't limit it by choosing what material to host in school libraries (which it does).

If you want to say removing these books from school libraries is an illegitimate constraint on freedom of expression, then so is the school curriculum. So is public education generally.

While removing a book from a school library by the school board may be a sensible act, and does not violate the letter of the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law..."), it definitely has something to do with the spirit of it, that it, the interaction of government and free speech. It's very certainly something to keep an eye on.

Book banning means banning books. It doesn't mean removing books from school libraries. That isn't what it has ever meant. Who is doing the redefining?

> Who is doing the redefining?

The people who are saying that excluding books from libraries isn't banning. It's straightforward. Discussing this reminds me of arguing with my narcissist father - he slips through conflict by redefining terms to fit his inability to take accountability and recognize that his actions have consequences.

It really is a bad look to argue like this for a group of people who are trying to accomplish a goal.

This only affects school libraries. As long as the book is available in public libraries, and is legal to sell, buy, and possess, it's not banned. It's just considered inappropriate for minors. It's more like giving a movie an R rating than like banning.

I'm aware of that. Clarifying it only doubles down on digging the argument-by-definitions hole. I'm starting to get a sense that that's the only argument here.

You can't complain about an "argument by definitions" when your entire argument rests on applying a label like "book banning" that has significant cultural weight. Book banning sounds bad, it sounds authoritarian, and that is basically your entire argument. So yes in that scenario it is pretty fatal to your argument if you are completely misapplying it to a situation that cannot actually be described as involving book banning at all (because no books have, in fact, been banned).

So what's happening here is that there is a group who is banning books and then doing language policing because it has bad optics. What everyone else is hearing is, "Conditional banning isn't banning" which isn't a coherent argument.

It's pretty clear that if the books they are banning from these places were unconditionally banned they wouldn't go to bat for them. Rather the sentiment would be "that's good actually." It doesn't take a genius to recognize that the playbook is to make incremental advances and argue over definitions in order to achieve this goal.

> "Conditional banning isn't banning" which isn't a coherent argument.

It absolutely is a coherent argument and you know that.

"Unconditional availability" inherently excludes "banning" and also "conditional banning" but the latter is a mere subset of "banning". Denying the distinction of the sub- and its superset is extremely intellectually dishonest when that's what the entire argument hinges on.

When I dump hundreds of tons of a book into a river a day and the government requires me to stop doing that, it's not banning the book from the people living downstreams, even despite the availability of the book being reduced for them.

> Have you seen some of the books that are being removed?

Yes, and most of them do not fit your description in the slightest.

There’s a coordinated effort to ban books. Harry Potter has been banned. Parents are provided with the template letters to send and are trained to raise objections to books that don’t fit their religious ideology. I’d provide you with links but you could just google it yourself same as I could. Search for “coordinated effort ban books”

But the Bible's ok...

When our book says "There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses," it's ok. When yours say it, it's not. Simple.

1. https://biblehub.com/ezekiel/23-20.htm

Some of these translations, I feel, slightly miss the point.

Or just went totally off the rails in a couple of cases.

Left political circles did remove books as well. At the time it was mostly argued that the authors are racists or had some form of flaw.

The justification was exactly the same at the time. "It isn't censorship, it is just not recommended anymore". Given, that was/is true for many literary expositions as well.

Inappropriate by whom?

Do you have a list of those books so I can check if I see the same kind of inappropriateness?

Inappropriate according to the school. Schools determine all sorts of things along those lines. They choose what to teach in the first place. Is that in violation of freedom of speech too? School libraries aren't unlimited. They can't contain every possible book. And you wouldn't want them to contain, for example, Playboy magazine or other actual pornographical publications. Schools are obviously allowed to determine what is and isn't appropriate; this is much better, having it decided locally, rather than what, deciding at a national level what is and isn't okay.

They could decide "On the Origin of Species" is inappropriate, while the Bible which is full of violence isn't a problem.

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