Book banning: A peek at real tyranny
The right wing contingent in this country loves to go on about liberty vs. tyranny a lot without actually being honest about either.
Gun laws to define reasonable limits as to how powerful gun a private citizen should be allowed to own are tyranny by the left to subvert the Second Amendment but allowing police to assault and arrest peaceful protestors with impunity somehow don’t violate the First Amendment.
Universal healthcare somehow would take away your liberties and personal choice (even though private insurance often limits where you can go and who you can see for care—aside from just flat-out denying you care) even though it would give more people access to healthcare at less expense for more health problems.
Keeping prayer out of public school classrooms and assemblies is somehow tyranny against Christians, even though that separation of church and state applies to all religions—and we know the right would scream if anyone suggested Muslim prayer in the classroom.
But the right loves banning books when they aren’t burning them, and that’s one of the key places recently where we see how much they really love tyranny
Various states, Utah and Florida just a couple of them, have made laws that allow for books to be removed from a library if a single person in the area objects to the content. As a result, More than 60% of the thousands of book challenges filed during the 2021-22 school year were filed by just 11 people.
And, of course, the targets were mostly books that involved LGBTQ characters of any kind or non-white characters dealing with racial issues.
Mind you, these are not people demanding that their children be able to opt out of reading certain books. They are demanding that access to those books be denied to everyone, simply because they don’t want to see non-white or gay/queer/trans representation anywhere—ever.
That’s tyranny. A minority telling that majority what they can do for no good reason other than to control access to information and freedom of thought.
It’s disturbing enough that they see books that don’t center white and straight people as problematic. But why do they get to tell everyone else what to do? You don’t see the left trying to ban the much larger number of books featuring white and heterosexual characters.
That’s the difference. Can the left sometimes do rotten things? Sure, but they sure do it less often than the right by a long shot. More importantly, the right is about limiting choices to a few select things that benefit the corporatist culture, the oligarchy, the religious right, the patriarchy, and white people. The left is generally about giving space for a much wider range of voices and choices.
The fact that the right is allowed to get away with things like this—putting the power to deny choice (and liberty) into the hands of a few—is horrendous. But it’s what they stand for. All the while that they talk about how “big government” is tyranny or the “gay agenda” is tyranny what they are really saying is: “We’re mad that the tyranny of white uber-conservative people with wealth is being challenged and we will crush you before we will allow a more accepting and loving and progressive society.”
If you want to see the writing I’ve been doing most of my career and still do, focused more on racial issues and the joys/travails of middle age, visit Black Girl in Maine Media at https://blackgirlinmaine.com