Motives in Book Banning
Today RadioWest dropped an episode I was interviewed for. I’ve been asked to do a lot of media (well a lot to me) lately because pro-censorship forces have been so prominent. This interview ended up focusing on a pro-censorship extremist group here in Utah: Utah Parents United (UPU). I thought I’d expand a bit on one element of what I did talk about and another key issue we didn’t get to sadly. Ultimately, it comes down to motive. The UPU president, Nicole Mason, was quite careful to present an image of UPU as a group of moderates who only cared about one thing, enforcing Utah’s criminal code. This is wrong for two reasons.
First, as I discussed in my interview (and I guess I should admit I haven’t listened because I hate hearing my voice), none of these books violate the law. The law UPU draws upon is Utah’s harmful to minors law. This is a version of obscenity law, obscenity for minors, and is governed by First Amendment doctrine. As such the statute requires three things to be shown: the the book “(1) taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest in sex of minors; (2) is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable material for minors; and (3) taken as a whole, does not have serious value for minors.” I have placed emphasis on two uses of a phrase that makes a foundational point about obscenity law: the work must always be judged as a whole with its dominant theme the focus. UPU fails to acknowledge this and relies only upon isolated excepts of books to make complaints. In her interview (I was provided with this prior to my interview so I could be asked about it), Mason asserted that Toni Morrison’s classic The Bluest Eye is illegal because of a violent rape of a child. But the law does not, and cannot, criminalize the simple isolated passage of a book. Instead the dominant theme must be prurient, patently offensive, and lack serious value. While Mason may be shocked by this passage, the book’s dominant theme is not a celebration of sexual assault and the long engagement with the book makes clear its value. This is repeated again and again in pro-censorship arguments, that some passage, image, or even single word is so offensive that it must be criminal. Luckily the First Amendment forbids that judgment.
The second point, and one that I didn’t get to in my interview, is that the pro-censorship challengers themselves don’t even live up to their claims about “state code” requiring censorship. In November 2021, Brooke Stephens challenged nine books that were in her child’s school in Davis County. (Note I do not usually name challengers but Stephens is a leader of the UPU’s Laverna in the Library Facebook group and publicly identifies herself with this activism.) You can see her challenges here and an excel sheet of them here that allows clicking on the link (which takes you to the Laverna group or sometimes pro-censorship groups in other states.) One thing to note is that Stephens did not read any of these books by her own admission - more than once in comments in her FB group I’ve seen her and others celebrating this refusal. Some of these fit UPU’s unfounded assertion of Utah code, but at least three have no real relation to their skewed vision of law. This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki is a lovely graphic novel about being on the cusp of young adulthood and how kids often want to be older while also struggling with what that means. The book has mentions, largely in observations of older teens, of teenage sex, condoms, swear words, abortion, and suicide. None of this rises even close to the level of obscenity by their own standards. The other two lack even this level of controversy but were challenged for one reason: LGTBQ kids must be erased in schools.
One was Drama by Raina Telgemeier, a book that is challenged often as I’ve written about here and here. Above is one of the three panels used to support her challenge. Stephens didn’t even use the more famous image of two boys kissing, probably because she again refused to read the book and thus didn’t know about it. So the challenge is based only on the very presence of a gay kid. That is it. There is no pretending that this even comes close to the warped view of obscenity law UPU endorses. The other was Melissa (formerly titled George) by Alex Gino. Stephens did not even bother to come up with her own reasons, she simply linked to a Florida Citizen’s Alliance “review” of the book that flags it as indoctrination and being age inappropriate for LGBTQ content because the book is about a fourth grade trans girl. There is nothing else provided. Stephens can’t pretend these books come even close to her unfounded assertions about Utah law but any representation of queer kids must be purged because she fears it will corrupt her kid(s) and turn them gay or trans. But what will really happen is her kids will be more empathetic to queer kids. Who knows, that might offend the censor’s sensibilities too.
Nor is this an isolated case. The Laverna page has celebrated a list of 100 “obscene” books put out by an unknown group of people in the Murray School District. This is publicly available here and if it is gone here is an archived copy. Most of this is typical UPU absurdity of taking paragraphs or isolated quotes out of context and screaming about obscenity and porn but some reveal other clear reasons. For example, The Breakaways is attacked because it is “intentionally deceptive. Looks like it is an innocent book about soccer and friends. Turns out to be transgender indoctrination. No child would know that looking at the cover.” Why is it transgender indoctrination? Because it has a trans kid who comes out and is supported by his friends. A bunch of entries have no explanation. For example, Confronting LGBTQ+ Discrimination is listed with no reason leaving the reader to assume that anything about queer folk is unacceptable. And that is the point of these activists.
This is why I reject the framing these activists put upon their pro-censorship activity. Schools, in particular, will already bend over backwards to assist parents in preventing their kid access to library books so that they don’t learn dangerous ideas like queer people exist, racial equality is an aspiration not a reality, or that people have sex. But that isn’t enough because this isn’t about Stephens and other activists “protecting” their own children; it is about preventing other children from having access. This is why other parents are mobilizing against groups like UPU because they don’t want the help of conservative activists in parenting their child.
