Better Dead Than Read: Moms for Liberty and Book Banning in America
Rebecca Blackwell/AP News
When overenthusiastic patriots get into online scraps and start comparing countries like PTA moms comparing kids, the mark they often point to at the top of America’s report card is free expression. Since its founding, the United States has maintained a vigorous discourse around the topic of free expression, with many decades of oft-controversial First Amendment jurisprudence under its belt. A 2015 Pew Research study found that Americans are the most supportive in the world of free expression (in theory); however, the United States receives a perennially middling score in each year’s World Press Freedom Index—this year, it ranked 45th. In the past three years, a symptom of this duality has risen to the forefront in American schools and libraries: book banning. Though the phrase conjures images of fascist dictatorships and bonfires in town squares, the banning of books happens occasionally in your backyard. Or, rather, it used to happen occasionally. Over the past few years, it has picked up at an alarming rate, with a surprising culprit—your average red-blooded, God-fearing, communism-hating American soccer mom.
Banned in the USA: An Overview of American Censorship
The banning of books is, to be certain, nothing new in the United States, though its original perpetrators were much less likely to cut the crust off your PB&J for you. Take, for example, the long and troubled history of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a famous abolitionist work often credited for stirring Northern sentiments against slavery. After its publication in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was widely banned in the South, with booksellers being intimidated out of even carrying the book. Although this flagrant censorship was tamped down after the Civil War, the novel continued to be sporadically banned well into the twentieth century. In 1873, the Comstock Act made it illegal not only to send “obscene material” through the mail, but also to possess or sell books, pamphlets, or writings that were flagged under its extremely broad obscenity guidelines. The Act was widely used to censor books (including, famously, James Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses) until the 1950s, when the Supreme Court began to develop its own First Amendment guidelines defining and regulating obscenity. Since the mid-twentieth century, book banning has continued at the local government level, though never at an extensive scale—until now.
Since 2020, incidents of book banning in the United States have risen dramatically. Between 2020 and 2022, the number of banned titles rose 1100 percent; In 2022, 2571 titles were targeted for censorship, the most recorded by the American Library Association in its twenty years of tracking. Of these bans, 58 percent targeted schools and 41 percent targeted public libraries, pushed through by boards elected by your unassuming PTA bake sale regulars. These figures represent a frightening trend. Books are being pulled rapidly from the shelves in counties across the country, with the largest number of bans occurring in Texas and Florida. Although bans by nature are restricted to the local level, the increasing number of counties involved and titles targeted across the nation means that a crisis is developing for proponents of free expression. One of its driving forces is unmistakable—the rise of coordinated book-banning efforts by organizations.
A Minivan Militia: The Rise of Organized Book Banning
At its most basic level, the banning of books occurs at the school board or city council level, with petitions to remove certain books for “inappropriate” content being approved by minor elected officials and leading to books being pulled from school curricula and public library shelves. However, recent incidents of book banning are not sporadic or isolated reactionary events; instead, organized efforts to facilitate censorship have led to this dramatic spike. PEN America, a national free expression advocacy organization, has identified 50+ groups coordinating efforts to push book bans in local schools and libraries. These groups frequently organize efforts by sharing tactics and lists of books to target. The sharing of these lists is effective; of the titles targeted in 2022, 90 percent were part of efforts to censor multiple titles, and 40 percent involved 100 or more titles. Most organized book-banning groups appear to have formed in 2021 or later; this explains to a large degree the uptick in bans since 2020. Organized efforts get the job done.
Organized censorship groups often operate behind unassuming faces. The current face of book banning in America is not that of a slick-talking fascist demagogue—instead, it wears the fresh visage of the white suburban PTA mom. Consider one of the foremost national book banning organizations: Moms for Liberty, a conservative and Christian-oriented organization which has 200+ local chapters nationwide. According to their official website, Moms for Liberty is an organization “dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” Apparently, this means nationally coordinating efforts to ban books from schools. Moms for Liberty has been linked to many of the efforts to ban lists of books. On their website, they provide instructions for petitioning for school records, filing motions with school boards, and proposing a fill-in-the-blank “Parents Bill of Rights” that includes a provision guaranteeing parents the right to object to classroom materials and curricula on a moral, sexual, or religious basis. Some of Moms for Liberty’s most widely targeted books are Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir and George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue.
Fahrenheit 2021: A New Culture of Censorship
So, what is it, exactly, that is spurring this nationwide army of soccer moms into action? Although it’s difficult to say with certainty, one broad explanation seems obvious: this is the inevitable outcome of the culture wars. With growing frequency and intensity over the past five years, right-wing media organizations have frantically peddled attention-grabbing headlines about critical race theory, LGBTQ+ “grooming,” and the erasure of conservative Christian values from American society—with all of these focused on America’s elementary and high schools. Many of the conservative parents, grandparents, and… parent-adjacent citizens… who participate in organized book banning at the school board and city council level are people who receive most of their news intake from networks like FOX News. It is important to remember that the members of Moms for Liberty are not mustachio-twirling mastermind villains—they have been purposefully frightened and misled in order to boost ratings and secure votes. Now, we are seeing the media’s smoke-and-mirror show yield devastating results. Books objected to by organizations are not chosen randomly; of the titles challenged in 2022, 41 percent included LGBTQ+ themes and 40 percent featured themes of race or protagonists of color. Moms for Liberty specifically targets these two major categories by equating LGBTQ+ themes as “sexually explicit” and claiming books that feature conversations about race “[teach] students that that [sic] some races are forever victims.” The effect is the broad censorship of authors who do not conform to a conservative, Christian narrative.
This is an attack on the First Amendment rights of the authors whose books are being targeted, but, more importantly, it is an attack on the rights of students and the general public. Removing books whose points of view do not conform to the prevailing opinions of the area removes from students and library-goers the ability to be exposed to and understand those points of view, and to form their own. A robust and intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually challenging curriculum is crucial to the formation of citizens who are critical thinkers and full participants in society. As Justice Abe Fortas explained in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), the landmark Supreme Court case that established the First Amendment rights of students in school, “That [schools] are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.”
Moms for Liberty and other censorship organizations argue that their parental rights to manage the way their children are educated should take precedence over the goals of educators. Certainly, parents have and deserve broad rights in the rearing of their children. However, the latitude parents are afforded does not and should not extend to dictating the ideas and authors that other parents’ children (and, in the case of public libraries, grown adults) are exposed to. America’s schools must not be allowed to become indoctrination centers where a white, cishet, conservative Christian point of view is the only one presented or supported. America’s libraries must not become filtered and ideologically sparse curated collections of one-track ideas, where alternative political and social views are thrown out as radical manifestos. The United States was founded on Millian principles of free ideological discourse as the cornerstone of society. Its legal history reflects a robust commitment to the value of free expression. No force in the world parallels the singular power of the idea, and in a free society, ideas must be able to spread, flourish, and clash. If you shackle the minds of the children, you shackle America’s future.
Taking It to the Schools: What’s to Be Done?
In local school and library boards, there is always the natural push and pull associated with democratic institutions. However, the emergence of national-level organizations has facilitated book banning on a much larger scale than was previously possible. Although many of these bans could be reversed by legal action, the issue is widespread and diffuse, and suits are costly and time-consuming. In order to combat this issue, widespread organization is needed on the opposing side; anti-censorship organizations must fight back on the local school board and city council level. While contributing to national organizations like the ACLU for legal challenges to book bans and PEN America for coordinated anti-censorship efforts are meaningful steps, the real fight lies in paralleling the tactics of book-banning organizations like Moms for Liberty: voting in school board elections, showing up to school board, city council, and county board of supervisors meetings, and reporting censorship attempts in your area. The battle censorship organizations have started must be fought at the ground level. There is a chapter of Moms for Liberty right here in Yolo County; like efforts toward censorship, the struggle for free expression starts in your backyard. Freedom of speech still deserves an honored place in our society. Buckle it into its car seat, give it some apple slices, and make sure it stays in school.