Would you agree for the school to have the book "The Passing of the Great Race", a famously racist and white supremacist book in your school library?
Personally I think using banned for "actively prevented from accessing in ways other books are not" makes plenty of sense even if you can effectively circumvent those attempts somehow.
The strict meaning that people seem to want to apply in here does not seem particularly useful to me. Almost no books have ever been banned by that standard, but there is a clearly organized movement in the US to remove all reference to queerness from public life. Flexible on nomenclature here but that context is very important.
I think if librarians were buying "straight" books with the same explicit and adult content and putting them in elementary, middle, and high schools, the same parents would be complaining about those too.
> Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920s America. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald made a lightly disguised reference to Grant in The Great Gatsby. In the book, the character Tom Buchanan reads a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard", a combination of Grant and his colleague Lothrop Stoddard. ...
> ... "Everybody ought to read it", the character said. "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
False.
I have absolutely no problem saying that bigots who insist that no books containing LGBT characters appear in libraries are bad people while also thinking that The Turner Diaries shouldn't be in public schools.
Is this a common stance? I thought it was more like, no books glorifying LGBT lifestyle or teaching it as if it’s not controversial and it’s just a fact of life (as proponents sincerely believe, of course, not saying no one is thinks it is a fact of life, that’s just the part that is controversial). I understand disagreeing with that, but it isn’t the same as opponents pushing for zero gay/etc characters period, right?
I haven’t been following this topic too closely though so I might be missing what people are screeching about on the right today.
What is an LGBT lifestyle?
My life before and after discovering the nature of my queerness is remarkably similar, though with a fair few more relationships and a lot less anguish afterwards.
The implication of "lifestyle" usually being "ability to exist in a society without any major obstacles due to being LGBT", "ability to receive true healthcare related to being LGBT", "ability to be legally recognized and accommodated as a result of it" or "ability to express your queerness in public without being seen as the villain".
Imagine somebody getting upset for glorifying a straight lifestyle. Funny stuff.
She has a bisexual daughter who has attempted suicide twice. She has told her daughter that she’d be better off dead than bi.
Also I’m very sorry if there are books that contain gay characters where there aren’t constant asides reminding the reader that these people are going to hell. The “gay lifestyle” is just gay people existing.
The work is never done, after removing the books with practical tutorials, blue prints and historical revisionism you always continue to have a candidate at the top of the list. The work that remains now are all fictional books that portray an uncomfortable reality.
After those are all gone the new reality will again have a most terrible book. The work is never done.
Remember that the parents are deciding for other parents what appears in libraries.
This thread is full of people falling over themselves trying to convince you that a book ban isn't actually a book ban, and whatever it happens to be isn't that big of a deal.
If the banning of books from libraries isn't a big deal - why is it being done in the first place? Is it just virtue signaling, or does it have a specific objective? If it has a specific objective, isn't that objective worth interrogating instead of brushing off as not a big deal because the book is still available through other means?
The narrative is "look at these liberals forcing sex on children." Parents go to school board meetings and read passages ripped from context as lurid eroticism to rile up their neighbors. If normies go along with this "think of the children" stuff then it becomes a foothold to the next steps. We've seen this trans people, where bigots have successfully converted "this is about girl's sports" into policies banning healthcare and safe bathroom use.
And it's very much not the writers of books with LGBT content.
I can understand why the real culprits might want to deflect attention from their moral failings onto others, and why pointing out the facts might make them very, very angry.
But it's going to have to be done at some point.
My second point was that since all these "banned" books are still available for sale; getting on a banned book list is just a tactic to sell more books. This list even has affiliate links to the books. Which make the whole page click bait.
You can call it a different word if you want I guess. But I'm absolutely baffled that people are spending their time worrying about the word "banned" here. This shit is awful.
It's always strange to me when the concern is "sexually explicit material" and not "violently explicit material".