Last summer, Republican state legislators in Missouri passed a law banning so-called "sexually explicit material" from libraries, resulting in nearly 300 books being pulled from shelves between August and November 2022. Banned titles include Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Alan Moore's Watchmen comics and Maus by Art Spiegelman. This year, Missouri's Secretary of State (and candidate for governor) Jay Ashcroft is taking things a step further. Two weeks ago, Ashcroft enacted a new rule that will revoke state funding from public libraries if they're deemed to be providing minors with materials considered "pornographic" or "obscene." The rule is set to go into effect on May 30. Ashcroft's edict is layered on top of the law that went into effect last year, which states that librarians and school officials could face up to a year in jail or a $2000 fine for a violation. |
The quick and dirty version is that book bans in the United States are nothing new, but the tactics of people who would seek to ban them are evolving. In the 80s and 90s, these battles usually happened at the level of a local school board meeting. Now, we have a state government employee (Ashcroft) who is essentially threatening other state and local government employees (teachers and public library staff) with jail time, financial penalties and possibly the loss of their jobs (who is going to work at the defunded libraries?) in the name of ridding the public sphere of what he considers obscene. |
When a book ban is successful, it's not about the child of one overzealous parent or one very religious member of the community. It restricts access to literature and ultimately restricts the imaginations of everyone who could have had access to that book. That's one less opportunity for someone to expand their horizons, one less opportunity to consider another viewpoint, one less opportunity to imagine a different (dare I say... better?) world. It also signals to the people who might be represented by characters in those books that their existence or experiences are "objectionable" and not meant to be known by the public. |
