Like a bunch of other states run by people who hate the people they serve (except for the people who harbor the same hatred), Tennessee has decided it should get into the book-banning business — years after literal Nazis made this sort of thing politically untenable. Or so we thought.
Now, before the pedants step in to criticize the headline, I understand the law doesn’t actually authorize book bans. But it achieves the same end result by creating a long (but vague) list of content that supposedly isn’t appropriate for schoolchildren, no matter what their ages. And then it goes further by requiring schools to maintain and post lists of all books in their libraries, as well as humor “challenges” raised by activist groups that just want to see the immediate removal of content they don’t like.
Unsurprisingly, the books “challenged” the most are ones that contain anything remotely LGBTQ-related, as well as anything that might portray minorities in a positive light and/or white Americans in a negative light, even if the books factually depict historical events.
It’s this blend of vagueness and bigotry that resulted in a Tennessee school completely shuttering its library right as it was reopening for the school year in order to avoid potentially violating the law. And it’s the same law that has resulted in a single school district removing more than 400 books from its school libraries — an effort that has affected authors ranging from Dr. Seuss to Steven King.
At a school board meeting in Wilson County on Thursday, Director of Schools Jeff Luttrell included in his report a full list of 390 books that have been banned by the county. The titles include “The Green Mile” by Steven King, “Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold, “Wacky Wednesday” by Dr. Seuss, “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline, “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead and more.
390 books is a lot of books. But that’s actually an under-count. Additional reporting says the number of books removed exceeds 400.
Wilson County Schools has removed about 425 book titles from its shelves to comply with new state law that went into effect July 1 prohibiting books and materials with references to sex and violence in public school libraries, according to a new report.
And there may be more to add to that list in the near future, according to the district’s public information officer, Bart Barker.
“This is an ongoing process,” Barker said as librarians continue to meet regularly “to get a collective opinion,” about book titles that should be pulled from schools based on the law.
This is supposedly the full list [PDF] of books removed by Wilson County Schools. A brief scan of the list will make it clear a lot of what’s being removed contains subject matter people with [vomit] “conservative values” which to see erased from public discourse. And the rest of it just appears to be content that fits within the extremely vague, overly-broad list of things the state feels even high school students shouldn’t be allowed to access, even if they do so on a daily basis away from schools.
It’s stupid and abhorrent. And it’s also a very popular thing to do. Full-time censors working for the government have aligned themselves with censorial hobbyists who spend their copious amounts of free time raising book challenges, yelling about stuff at school board meetings, and otherwise doing everything they can to force the government to force other people to comply with their narrow-minded worldview. At this point, we’re only a can of gas and a handful of matches away from government-ordained book burnings. It’s not going to take too many more elections to push this nation over the edge, set it adrift from its free speech moorings, and place us under the heels of people who pretend to be public servants while doing everything they can to keep the public as subservient as possible.
