Parental rights? Banning books strips their power

As you might have heard, Wilson County school officials banned almost 400 books from their school libraries. I don’t blame them.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s an appallingly bad decision, embarrassing not just for Wilson County, but for the entire state by extension. It champions ignorance. Book banners are never the good guys. Check your history.

But I don’t fault the Wilson County officials because they were simply trying to comply with a new law passed this year by state legislators. Republican state legislators, that is. I do blame them.

Due diligence for writing this column required that I review the titles under attack, and I confess most of them didn’t register with me. Not surprising, since my reading list doesn’t have a lot of overlap with topics that appeal to the school-age cohort. And many of the books probably didn’t exist when I was part of that cohort.

“Wacky Wednesday,” for instance, a banned book by Dr. Seuss, came out when I was a senior in college.

But the list did include some titles I’m familiar with without having read, like “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Interesting that a book about an authoritarian, misogynistic society might be deemed unsuitable.

It also had a few I’ve read, like the Millennium trilogy (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” etc.) by Stieg Larsson, “Skeleton Crew” by Stephen King (one of seven King books banned) and “Nickel Boys,” a fictionalized account of a notorious reform school in Florida by Colson Whitehead that won a Pulitzer Prize.

And, wouldn’t you know it, it includes my favorite book, “Slaughterhouse Five,” by Kurt Vonnegut. No newcomer to banned lists is Vonnegut, whose unorthodox style and iconoclastic views made him a target for the socially and politically rigid. I’m surprised they didn’t throw in “Breakfast of Champions,” another favorite, for good measure.

I commend all these books to your attention, by the way.

I will not try to make the case here that all books are suitable for all ages. It has been my unfortunate experience to read some books that, for lack of literary merit, are unsuitable for any age. But they shouldn’t be banned.

Just avoided.

Bear in mind all these books had been in Wilson County school libraries.

Trained educators, in their considered opinions, had deemed them worthy of inclusion, for one reason or another. And I tend to trust educators, like the English teacher who reckoned that I could safely read “The Catcher in the Rye” without warping my 11th-grade mind.

“The Catcher in the Rye” is not on the banned Wilson list, as yet. But it has been on many such lists, and I will not be surprised to see it challenged at some point.

A stated purpose of the book-banning law, which mandates that school boards set up a procedure for sniffing out suspect reading matter, is to shield young students from obscenity. But it shares legislative DNA with another law – a Tennessee Code cousin, let’s call it – that bans the teaching of uncomfortable aspects of history as critical race theory. Why remind children that great-great-etc.-Grandpa might have fought to defend slavery?

Right-wingers can be remarkably sensitive when it comes to painful truths.

A more reasonable approach would have been to leave the books on the shelves but make them accessible only for students whose parents opt them in for full-spectrum education. That would have the benefit of promoting parental rights, which conservatives profess to prize, without interfering with other parents’ rights to choose for their children. Or put the onus on the other side: Require that parents opt in to a ban. I like that even better.

Jeff Luttrell, the Wilson County director of schools, said the banned books “would be stored away and kept for future use, should the law be challenged in the future,” WSMV-TV reported.

I guess we should be thankful that legislators haven’t required that they be burned. Yet.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at [email protected]