Among the “24 Resolutions for 2024” from the National Education Association (NEA) is encouragement to “read a banned book.” The NEA, which claims to “believe in opportunity for all students and in the power of public education to transform lives and create a more just and inclusive society,” will suggest ostensibly “banned” reading material to anyone who texts “BANNED” to the number provided.
Of course, the specter of conservatives “censoring” harmless stories like Dr. Seuss’ Hop on Pop and literary classics like To Kill a Mockingbird are attempts to make the NEA seem mainstream and those that challenge its ideas about appropriate reading material in schools seem extreme. The idea that a bunch of reactionaries are attempting to ban normal and normative reading material is the lens through which NEA activists want the public to view parents of all political persuasions who attempt to remove what they consider inappropriate reading material from their children’s school curricula or libraries.
But there are two realities that expose this disingenuous marketing ploy about “banned books” as an ideologically manipulative lie.
First, none of these books are in fact banned. All of them are available for purchase as well as in libraries. Banning a book would entail preventing people from accessing it. The books in question—from the harmless preschool classic Hop on Pop to the pornographic propaganda It’s Perfectly Normal—remain (for good or for ill) demonstrably accessible.
Second, efforts to excise sexually explicit reading material that promotes fringe ideas about biological sex in public schools are bipartisan and popular. Most parents, across political parties, do not want their children introduced to gender ideology in elementary school; nor do they want them introduced to gender ideology at any age from the NEA’s ideological perspective, in which feelings take precedence over facts. Moreover, most parents across political parties consider pornographic words and images inappropriate for unfettered consumption by young children in an ostensibly child-centered space like a school library.
Meanwhile, for the minority of parents that feel differently, there’s always Amazon. Or the public library. Because, the NEA’s politically expedient lies notwithstanding, in 2024 America there are no truly banned books.