Banning books from school libraries is not acceptable!

Recently, groups or parents have begun demanding that certain books be removed from school libraries.

WHO THE HELL DO THEY THINK THEY ARE?

If they don’t want their kids reading certain books, they should just tell them not to check them out.

But what gives them the right to dictate what books MY KIDS can and cannot check out from the school library?

Don’t let them take out their failures as parents on our kids.

Don’t let them start banning books from our school libraries!

The whole point of a library is to provide access to full range of views on many topics, and some people with find some of these topics offensive. Libraries follow guidelines when deciding what books to carry, and these guidelines have many different criteria. For example, the American Library Association has extensive guidelines, and you can read them here.

Just because a book offends someone is no reason to have it removed. Indeed, they are often books that carry the most important messages. Many of the advances and changes in society throughout history were brought about by books considered offensive.

For example, after writing that Venus orbited the sun rather than the Earth, Galileo was tried for heresy and confined to house arrest for the rest of his life, and publication of any of his works was forbidden!

Nobody is suggesting that school libraries carry Playboy or other pornographic materials. However, books should not be banned solely because they contain isolated sexually explicit passages. The books must be judged on their complete contents and the contexts in which the passages were meant. Even the Bible has some language that many would consider sexually explicit.If we start letting politicians decide what books libraries can and cannot carry, we are starting down a very slippery slope indeed.

The First Amendment is there to protect our rights to free speech and freedom of the press, and Congress has long-recognized that libraries are a great conduit for ensuring the people have access to a full range of ideas expressed under the First Amendment.