Books featuring child sex shouldn’t be in school libraries. That’s not a ‘book ban’

There’s no such thing as a “banned book” in the United States.

Now, this would surely come as a great surprise to consumers of mainstream media, where audiences are fed a relentless partisan diet of unnerving stories and “studies” warning about the impending end of free speech.

PEN America, the leading “book ban” fearmongers, for example, recently released a report – preposterously titled, “Banned In USA” – alleging that a “crisis” has descended upon the nation. Authoritarian bans, the group cautions, are “speeding up” and threatening your kid’s future.

“There were over 4,000 instances of book bans in the first half of this school year—more than all of last school year as a whole,” notes the PEN study. “This is a marked increase in comparison to the last spring semester, in which PEN America recorded 1,841 book bans.”

Anyone who’s ever perused a “banned book” table at the local bookstore already knows this is all just a racket. “Banned books” is merely a euphemism for a library that is curated in a way that upsets left-wing activists.

It should be stressed, as well, that the preponderance of PEN’s 4,000 alleged “bans” were aimed at only a handful of titles. It is undoubtedly true that on occasion some priggish, overzealous moralist will target a perfectly innocuous title. But that is not typically the case. The most-targeted books in PEN’s report include fictitious anti-American pseudo-histories like the 1619 Project, tracts that claim white children are immutably racist, and books that normalize and (often) celebrate pre-teen sex and gender dysphoria. Other titles on PEN’s “banned book” list feature rape and violence.

I will spare you the specifics, but please imagine the worst.

Still, the PEN report refers to democratically enacted curriculums as “educational gag orders” and places cynical quotation marks around the notion of “parental rights.” By any objective standard, PEN is fighting against the will of parents who are utilizing a democratic system to wrest education control from unhinged woke proselytizers.

What else can they do?

For decades, left-wing unions have run virtually every major school district in the nation. Parents are compelled to send their precious children to state-run schools, and then aren’t given any say on what they are taught. Culture warriors have monopolized control of libraries and use them to indoctrinate kids with the latest post-modern cultural, historical, and moral twaddle.

The army of “library science” degree-holders who lord it over public school libraries do not stock shelves with tomes celebrating the importance of traditional marriage or the upside of the Second Amendment or the superiority of free markets and Western civilization. The educational left does not need to “ban books” because they simply refuse to stock them in the first place.

When the government restricts free association in the marketplace, or giant tech companies collude with the state to censor ideas and undermine open discourse, we surely have reason to worry about free speech. The “book ban” canard, on the other hand, merely allows the left to feign indignation over the alleged censoriousness and “authoritarianism” of conservatives.

After all, none of the titles on PEN’s list are difficult to obtain, much less forbidden. Most of them are best sellers. Parents don’t even need to leave their homes to purchase them. If, for some reason, you really want your middle schooler to read “Lawn Boy” – a top PEN “banned book” that describes 10-year-old boys performing oral sex – you can just hop online, find one of numerous retail sites and order it in mere minutes.

You know why? Because there are no banned books.