Summary
Rightwing groups across the US are driving a wave of legislation to restrict books in school and public libraries, targeting content deemed “sexually explicit” or “obscene,” often affecting LGBTQ+ and race-related titles.
Texas leads with 31 bills and 538 book bans in the 2023–24 school year.
Proposed laws, like Texas Senate Bill 13, shift book selection power from librarians to parent-led advisory boards.
Critics, including librarians and legal scholars, warn these efforts amount to censorship, risk violating First Amendment rights, and reduce access in underserved communities.
Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said nothing. I am one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the ‘guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.
-Faber (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451)
Why do they care so much about libraries. it’s not like they or their kids read. How do you get illiterate people excited to ban books. It’s a god damn conspiracy!
Libraries are stores of knowledge. Can’t have that. Educated people aren’t as easy to manipulate.
so they are banning the Bible because of the obscene material in it?;
Lol no
Are these the ones with blowjobs and things?
Is it not considered pornographic, and if not where do we draw the line, is anything with LGBT in the title fair game?
Surely the free speech absolutists will be staunchly opposed. Why, if they weren’t, one could think it was never about free speech and always just about hate…
The “free speech absolutists” just wanted to call black people the N-word, they don’t actually care about the rest.
Obscene books like the Bible?
“Bu-but the right wingers promised me that I could say the hard-R N-word yet again, and if people were to call me ‘racist’ for it they’d be jailed for defamation, and they’d also jail feminist video game critics for censoring games!”
I heard there’s one book in there that talks about a pair of sisters who get their father drunk so they can take turns raping him. Are they banning that one?
wow, the bible is fucked up.
You have to go pretty far into the Bible to even get to the first non-incestuous relationship.
So more wasting tax money for posturing and campaigning and not solving any actual problems
I’d call it “wasting tax money perpetuating culture wars as a distraction from the class war; while also making the population dumber, and less inclined to resist feudalism.”
Conservatives simply hate free speech.
No no, they love free speech when it allows them to use hate speech against others. They only hate free speech when others opinions disagrees with their own. That is the difference between left and right, left understand that free speech means we have to protect against hate speech, the right rails against censorship regarding hate speech as a vehicle against “oppression” so they can be the ones that can attack those that disagree with them with hate speech.
The Constitution according to Republicans:
We The People…words words GET TO HAVE AS MANY GUNS AS WE WANT words words…The End.
Please support your local library. Even if you just get a card and keep it active, it helps with stats that they use to get more funding.
probably direct support with your time and funding is a good idea, if you can. it certainly looks like federal grants are going away ☹️
By “obscene” they mean a guy flirts with a guy. Meanwhile a full on sex scene isn’t “obscene” so long as it’s heterosexual
They need to just get on with it, we all know what they want to do
Shit or get off the pot
I’m over 50 and they tried to ban Diary of Anne Frank when I was a kid. Sometimes they even succeeded.
Fucking idiots. Name one reason why kids shouldn’t read that book. They never could. Not a real reason anyway.
Over and over they try to ban books. The only thing that really changes is that they add books to the list.
They don’t like Diary of Anne Frank over guilt by association. They realize there are too many similarities between the way they “think” and nazism. Never fun to have a moment of reflection and realize you’re a horrible human being so they lash out at it, incapable of deeper introspection or betterment.
I was groomed by nazis, then was a conservative for a short while. The latter group tries to claim the historical nazis did their evil deeds for the sake of evil, with no moral justifications, because their little fabricated crime statistics would look bad. The former group exploits this spread of naive theories about evil.
guns
