Hypocrisy and Book Banners

One of the classic lies of book challengers is that they aren’t engaged in censorship. This is why they hate the term censorship or book banning. In a wonderful article, Dr. Emily Knox showed one core example of this and it fits with my research going back to the 1970s and ‘80s. The logic goes like this: censorship is only the complete elimination of the book (or item) from the public sphere and book challengers only want it removed (or restricted) within the library. So in this sense a book challenger can never be engaged in censorship because the book will be available “somewhere” else always. This is wrong for many reasons but not least because censorship is about hiding information. What a book challenger seeks to do is to use the government to make information harder to locate because of some idiosyncratic dislike for the material. But the narrative is further destroyed by the organized book banners seeking criminal obscenity charges, which I’ve discussed a few times here and here. The goal is to purge all that this small minority of extremists deem objectionable from the public sphere. They are censors and I wish they would just embrace an honest message.

Here in Utah the leader in book banning is the Utah Parents United (UPU) with one of their activities being a public Facebook page to share info about how much they hate all kinds of content and identities. Brooke Stephens has been identified as the curriculum director of the UPU and is the moderator of their Facebook page. Above is one of the classic examples of this we aren’t censors type of logic. She is responding to a story about a Virginia judging issuing a temporary restraining order in a bizarre case - I am still trying to get the underlying legal documents on this one. Stephens presents this as nothing more than demanding that retailers, not libraries, should have to get parental permission to sell a book like Gender Queer, which is not remotely obscene or harmful to minors - unless being queer is harmful which the UPU and its followers believe is the case. In this framing the censors want to pretend that all they want is parental involvement and are not trying to punish anyone. Turns out this is a lie.

How do we know it is a lie? Well Stephens has filed a criminal report with the Davis County Sheriff’s Department seeking to have unspecified school employees criminally charged for providing harmful materials to minors. All in all, she claims that 47 titles are legally obscene, the report has them all listed. Reading the criminal report is interesting because the investigator is more than a little confused by this. In their experience in working sex crimes they note that “there is no precedence of a criminal investigation … based on a published literature being checked out by a minor at a library” (21). And they are correct because none of these books are legally obscene. Sadly their investigation was not exactly thorough or in line with the relevant statutes. The simplest issue is that they didn’t actually read any of the books. They obtained copies from the school, which is noted as perfectly cooperative, but only confirmed the excerpts that Stephens provided. Even this is found to support no charges in a whole bunch of the books because the complaints are laughable. The underlying problem though is obscenity law doesn’t judge a book based on a few paragraphs, pages, or chapters; it requires consideration of the work as a whole. So the investigator concluded that some of the allegations were supported in the sense that some material one might find objectionable are in some of the books. This is not obscenity but the officer choose to punt on the difficult issues.

So instead of finding the complaint unsupported by the law and closing it, they forwarded it to the county attorney’s office for consideration. They did note some problems for any potential prosecution though sadly the fact that the criminal complaint did not actually adhere to requirements of obscenity law is not one of them. They noted it was difficult to figure out who would be a defendant in a prosecution or their level of intent since the policies and content of the library are following standard practice. But the decision was to punt this issue to the county attorney and they are sitting on it still (as of 25 May 2022). One hopes the County Attorney’s office acts ethically and rejects this as obviously insufficient but I’ve been worried that it is only a matter for time for some rightwing prosecutor bringing charges knowing they can’t win legally but seeking to curry favor with the extremists pushing to purge libraries.

So back to the title and hypocrisy in all of this. Book banners, like Stephens and the UPU, often claim they aren’t trying to ban anything and are only trying to enforce parental rights in the library. But this is a lie. First, school libraries allow them to restrict their children’s access in various ways; they want to control the reading of all other children. Second, they claim that this is not true because other parents could still purchase and give their child any book they wanted. Stephens’s criminal complaint destroys this claim because is a book was legitimately obscene, it would be illegal to provide in all contexts to a minor. This means that librarians and booksellers would be criminally charged. Moreover, I can find no exemption in Utah obscenity law allowing parents to provide obscene material to their children. And this makes sense as the motive of obscenity law is to identify material that has no legitimate purpose. This is why the constitutional standard is high because few works would ever deserve that treatment. So even a parent who purchased Gender Queer, under Stephens and the UPU’s standards, would be subject to criminal complaint.

So what this leaves us with is the UPU wants to return to the days of vice societies. In the early 20th Century many major cities had private societies that sought to leverage both economic and governmental power to purge what they didn’t like. (The most famous, and two good books, were in New York and Boston.) Obscenity law was a central component because it allowed these zealots to threaten all kinds of legal action to force sellers to remove what the group didn’t like. This was one reason why obscenity law changed and started to demand the much higher burdens that modern censors like the UPU cannot and do not try to meet. Personally, I don’t want to return to the days where a small minority exert control on library and book shelves.