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Those Book-Banning Lunatics Learned Nothing from Black Sabbath and The Da Vinci Code
The lessons are right there
From the time we’re little children, people tell us things we shouldn’t do: don’t touch a hot stove, don’t lick a frozen lamppost, don’t put the cat in the dryer. As we get older, we get a new set of warnings, like don’t wear white after Labor Day, don’t pet a stray raccoon, and don’t mix Tanqueray and wine (unless you want to be called Johnny 99). The vast majority of the time, we listen to none of these warnings, and often go out of our way to do just the opposite.
This fact of human nature seems to have been lost on the merry pranksters in school boards and legislatures across the country who foolishly believe that banning, removing, and otherwise censoring the books in our school libraries will keep kids from reading them. They think that a pronouncement from on high will be obeyed without question or protest, when they can’t even get the same kids to make their beds in the morning. Silly, stupid censors.
Their efforts are doomed to failure, but before getting into why, let me make one thing clear from the start so the comment section doesn’t explode over something I’m not even talking about here. There have been, and will continue to be, repeated battles over what books children are required to read in school. This is a debate with valid arguments on both sides over issues like the age-appropriateness of a book and should be hashed out with calm and common sense with the input of both parents and educators (not politicians). Unless you are some kind of sadist, you would not require a six-year-old to watch a double feature of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction; we have age restrictions on everything from films to the minimum age for operating a vehicle for a reason.
With that age-appropriateness question out of the way, pulling books out of school libraries that are not required reading simply because they offend some people is the type of censorship that would have Joseph Goebbels dancing with glee (if the Nazi book-burner could dance with glee while burning in Hell). It is also completely futile, as history has repeatedly proven.
Let me give you two examples. Back in the glorious 1980s, the deceptively named Parents Music Resource…
