Each of these claims is absurd as Barton Swaim points out in a recent Wall Street Journal column, but let's just focus on his allegation that the Right wants to ban books.
Swaim tells us that,
The American Library Association recently claimed in a report that 2,571 books were “challenged” in American libraries last year. These challenges the ALA calls “attempted book bans,” nearly all of which involve a request by a patron that a public library or school library remove a book from its shelves because it is obscene or otherwise offensive.The amusing irony in Mr. Biden's demagoguery is that "cancel culture" and genuine book-banning have for decades been a standard modus operandi of the Left.
I’m not sure such requests are improper—young-adult fiction has become sexually avant-garde and shockingly coarse over the past two decades. Anyway, to ask that a taxpayer-supported library not facilitate children’s access to a sexually explicit book isn’t to “ban” it. An interested patron may buy it and read it in public if he wishes.
Further, as Micah Mattix noted in his Substack of April 26, there are 117,341 libraries in the U.S., 76,807 of which are public elementary- and secondary-school libraries. “Some books are challenged multiple times,” Mr. Mattix explains. “Others are challenged once. How many unique books and resources were challenged last year? 2,571. How many challenges were filed in total? 1,269.”
If, as seems likely, some libraries reported several challenges, that means less than 1% of all libraries received even a single challenge. Other organizations, particularly PEN America, assert that local and state governments are eagerly “banning” books, typically those of female, black, gay and transgender authors.
All such statements engage in the verbal legerdemain of defining as a “ban” any request that children at a public institution not have access to books about sex.
It wasn't all that long ago that the Left was demanding that classics like Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird be banned because they were deemed racially insensitive. It also wasn't very long ago that liberal secularists wanted to banish books on intelligent design from school libraries because these books challenged Darwinian orthodoxies, and these same folks have been tireless in their efforts to get Bibles tossed from every public school classroom that might still harbor one.
Swaim mentions some more recent examples of the hundreds he could draw from (See here for instance):
This strange urge to tremble at the presence of imaginary beasts is accompanied by an astonishing lack of self-awareness. The closest thing to real book bans in the U.S. today is perpetrated by precisely the sort of people who bewail book bans.Mr. Biden is aware of none of this, but the people who write his speeches for him certainly should be. If they are aware and fulminate against MAGA book-banners anyway, then they're dishonest hypocrites. If they're not aware then they're incompetent.
Major publishers have canceled books by authors ranging from J.K. Rowling to Sen. Josh Hawley because they ran afoul of progressive sensibilities.
Amazon refuses to sell Ryan Anderson’s book “When Harry Became Sally” (2018), a measured and serious critique of the transgender movement.
In 2021 the American Booksellers Association sent out paperback copies of Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage,” on the same subject. Activists targeted the ABA, and the trade group issued an obsequious apology for the alleged offense.
ALA and PEN America say nothing about these attempts literally to ban books.
Either way, the nation needs better leaders than the unfortunate crew we have now.
