Stand up for whole books, judged in their entirety.

It’s an old adage that if you use rare and extreme examples to govern policy for the vast majority in the middle, you’ll end up with a mess.

This is what we see now with the book challenges in Central Bucks. Two books have been removed from the school libraries that contained them (1 in a HS library, 1 in a MS library, 0 in elementary), and passages from those books are being widely circulated as justification for Central Bucks’s library policy. 

Perhaps you have seen some of the images from the one book, a graphic novel about growing up knowing that your identity did not fall under either the male or female category. Gender Queer is unique, challenging, and contains explicit images. The committee that voted to remove it believed, as many do, that the story as a whole was valuable to the high school students who were ready to read it. But the committee was constrained by policy and their testimonials were suppressed by the district, stripped from the committee’s report.

Then there is This Book Is Gay. A number of speakers at public comment have noted that one of the apps the book mentions was used by a predator to groom a child. They say this as if to say, “Ah ha! See! The book would corrupt children.” As if knowing about the app would have empowered the predator, not the child. Surely if a child knew that’s what the app was for, they could have notified adults of the predator’s intent. Ignorance is never power. Knowledge is power. Books are power.

The parents who felt these books were not appropriate for their children could have restricted them. None of them did so. Not one.

Instead, a campaign against the books and those who stand for intellectual freedom began, calling people filthy names, fomenting fear and division in our community.

To suggest that excerpts from these books are “evidence” that our libraries are full of inappropriate material is hogwash.

We all know there is no groundswell effort to corrupt children. This is untrue, and those who began it knew it to be untrue. But it’s a lie so terrifying that it doesn’t need to be true to gain traction. It scares good people into believing terrible things about the dedicated people who educate our children.

The majority of us appreciate the full panoply of students’ needs and trust parents to use their judgment to guide their own children’s reading. It’s the outside agitators trying to crush parents’ and students’ rights and freedoms even while they say they are for “liberty.”

To disregard the book as a whole (as if an image or a passage can ever represent an entire story) is a grave mistake because it paves the way to censorship in our community.

Consider all the other challenged books at risk for removal. Read the full list here. The list includes award winners, great reads, high interest literature and information, many titles that kids love: Looking for Alaska, Milk and Honey, Normal People, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Melissa, The Bluest Eye.

These books, given a single scene or isolated image out of context, could be removed from our school libraries too.

This is why reading books, whole books, is critical to protecting intellectual freedom.

As we’ve previously shared, we had a book group discussion with folks across the political spectrum on the book All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson. We were surprised by how much we enjoyed it. In their “memoir manifesto”, the author addresses many difficult issues in their story growing up queer in a loving, reverent family. One particularly moving and nuanced scene was when George writes to their cousin, now dead, about having been sexually abused by him. The anguish, compassion, confusion, regret, anger, guilt—they leapt off the page. Any young adult who had endured such an experience could find solace and companionship. Any young adult who had been spared such an experience could find empathy and understanding. We agreed: this is a valuable book that should stay in our libraries.

Yet under the current iteration of policy 109.2, it would likely be removed.

Outside agitators want to create fear and loathing. They want to use two challenging books to hand-craft libraries according to their own values in public schools who have the collective obligation to help ALL children succeed.

Reading a book about yourself is like looking in the mirror. Reading a book about someone different from you is like looking out a window. We need both mirrors and windows in our library, for ALL our kids.

To restrict viewpoints to those we endorse, to judge all differing viewpoints as inappropriate, is to undermine students’ education, literacy, empathy, and their full development as human beings. 

Stand up for education. Stand up for ALL the students. Stand up for parents’ rights to guide their own child’s reading journey. Ignore the fear mongering.

Stand up for whole books, judged in their entirety.

Stand against policy 109.2.