Kirk Cameron’s recently published children’s book, Pride Comes Before the Fall, is a charming story about the dangers inherent in being overly prideful rather than humble. While some detractors have labeled this book by the former child TV star as “anti-gay” because of its message about pride, Cameron prefers to call it “pro-humility.”
If you live in the state of New Hampshire, however, don’t go to your local public library to get a copy of this book because you won’t find it unless you live in one particular town.* You’ll have a much easier time finding Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir, which is available at more than half of New Hampshire’s 232 libraries, or Juno Dawson’s “how to” guide, This Book Is Gay, held by fifty-two.
Library users have a better than even chance of finding critical race theory guru Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be an Antiracist available in any given public library in New Hampshire. But if you want to read Why I Stand, the autobiography of Isaac Washington, the NBA player who refused to kneel when his teammates chose to do so, you’ll have a hard time getting your hands on it; only two libraries in the entire state include it in their collections.
A similar situation is evident when evaluating library holdings related to the controversial issue of climate change. Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, a book by Australian geologist and former University of Melbourne professor Ian Plimer (accused of being a “climate change denier”), is nowhere to be found in New Hampshire’s public library system. Meanwhile, The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg, an obviously ghostwritten treatise, is owned by seventy-three libraries statewide.
These are just a few of the head-shaking facts I found when searching the New Hampshire State Library’s interlibrary loan (ILL) database, the purpose of which is to facilitate the sharing of resources among the state’s public libraries. While my information is limited to one small purplish state, it reflects a troubling situation that is likely a problem throughout the country: public library collections are favoring woke material over conservative books, and this begs the question, “Who is really banning whom?”
The main definition provided for the verb “ban” on Dictionary.com is “to prohibit, forbid, or bar.” All these words suggest an action that will prevent something from happening, perhaps even involving a rule or law. The epithet “book banner” should similarly, therefore, describe someone who will prevent the reading of a particular book or books. Increasingly nowadays, “book banner” is a term used to describe parents who object to certain books being shelved in the children’s room of their local public library. Such parents, however, are not actually prohibiting anyone from reading anything. They just want some books on sensitive subjects regarding sex and gender moved to other areas in the library so that children are not exposed to this material without parental consent. Most of these parents recognize the right of adults to have access to these titles, including parents who might choose to have their children read them. The reality is that the term “book banner” is being used as a scare tactic by woke librarians and library organizations to mislead the public into believing that some parents are ushering in a neo-Nazi society that will ultimately lead to the throwing of books into raging bonfires. Nothing could be further from the truth!
In order for a book to be truly banned, it must be impossible to read; you cannot get it anywhere, not in your local library, not at another library, not at your local bookstore, not even on Amazon. Such banning requires government suppression such as that which did actually occur during the Nazi era in Germany. What parents are doing in libraries is not banning books.
The only way to completely avoid what is erroneously being called book banning today is to buy every single book that is currently being published. That is obviously impossible considering that the average public library, especially in small-town New Hampshire, has limited shelf space with room for only a few tens of thousands of books. Obtaining most books not held by your local library, however, is actually quite easy thanks to interlibrary loan (ILL). The existence of ILL should negate the book-banning argument because this service, which allows patrons to get just about any book they might want, is supposed to prevent the prohibition that characterizes a ban.
There’s an insidious problem with the ILL system, however, because it does not allow patrons to get certain books, and those prohibited books are often conservative titles, as reflected by the examples I have offered above. Conversely, it is very easy to get what many would describe as woke titles. Analyzing the results of my various ILL database searches suggests a troubling answer to the question, “Who’s banning whom?”
The bottom line is that it is much easier to obtain left-leaning woke material via ILL and much harder to get more conservative titles. The situation reflected in the ILL database of a purplish state like New Hampshire speaks volumes about the lack of balance between different ideologies—an imbalance that likely exists in other states. The lack of conservative titles available through ILL is a direct result of the purchasing decisions made by individual public libraries, decisions that inordinately favor woke titles. It is a situation that is also reflected in new book displays at public libraries, which are far more likely to highlight left-leaning titles than conservatively themed ones.
A few years ago, I requested that my local public library purchase a new book—Michael Knowles, Amazon’s #1 bestseller Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds. This book is about the weaponization of political correctness, and it is written by a well-known conservative writer, so not surprisingly, my request was denied. The library justified this denial by claiming that there were no positive reviews of this book. While I was easily able to find a lot of positive feedback online about this title, librarians, following the mandates of the American Library Association, only consider reviews in left-leaning publications like Library Journal and The New York Times.
When a book requested by a tax-paying citizen is not selected for a public library collection, this situation could be considered a “book ban” using the same twisted meaning that the woke left is pushing. In an article entitled “Is It ‘Banning’ To Reject the Book in the First Place,” Neal McCloskey asserts:
“…it is just as much ‘banning’ for public institutions to reject books in the first place as to remove them later on. The ultimate result is the same: not making a book available for the public to borrow. Of course, this is not really banning, which would be to prohibit people from reading a book at all—making it illegal to purchase or possess—not refusing to let people borrow it for free. But if people want to misapply the term, they should misapply it equally.”
While the existence of the ILL system, which facilitates rather than prohibits the obtaining of books, should negate the “book banner” argument, at the same time an analysis of selected library holdings reveals that the left is actually “banning” books (using their own distorted definition) rather than the conservatives that they hypocritically criticize. So let’s get the woke librarians and opponents of true intellectual freedom to stop using the term “book ban” unless it truly applies to the situation. This emotionally charged term has been misused long enough. It’s time for logic and common sense to ban the egregious misuse of the pejorative epithet “book banner” and to stop demonizing concerned parents by labeling them with this derogatory term.
This article originally appeared on New Hampshire State Representative Arlene Quaratiello’s Substack newsletter “No Shushing Now: Exposing Today’s Woke Libraries.” Subscribe for free at arlenequaratiello.substack.com.
