The Archdiocese of Southwark has cancelled a talk in a school it controls apparently because the proposed speaker is gay. They also fired some of the school’s governing board who objected to the policy. BookRiot has the story.

Rare is the school anywhere in which the teachers will strike in protest at censorship. It’s just too common. What is it about our times? We are in the middle of a frenzy of book banning. “PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression, tallied 1,586 book bans in schools over the past nine months, targeting 1,145 books” The Washington Post tells us. The Library Association reports last year three times as many attempts to remove books and other materials from library shelves as in 2020. To hear the constant drumbeat of news about book banning you’d think everyone was utterly dissatisfied with their children’s schools — but an NPR-Ipsos poll announced a few days ago shows that 88% of parents think schools are doing just fine. The protests, mostly from the right, are made to seem more vociferous by being repeatedly reported on. (We are still innocents in techniques for dealing with social media. One day we’ll work out how to cope with filtering the nonsense.)
Now don’t you have to think your kids are pretty dumb if you can get yourself into a tizzy about their being preferentially directed towards a particular sexual orientation by hearing a gay man speak? I don’t need to speculate about the Archdiocesan council: these guys must rarely come out of the ivory tower, and Catholic education does tend to be rather “conservative”.* But lots of ordinary folks are allowing their knickers to get into a twist about something that’s not really anything. I suspect that many school board protesters are not really aiming to protect their children; they are quite simply trying to harass people who think differently from them. This is the same impulse that detects election fraud whenever someone with different political views from yours casts a vote.
In something of a counter-move New York Public Library is allowing free access to anyone over 13 to all books which have been banned. Perhaps it needs to be said that democracy mandates that it is absolutely justifiable for a majority of the people in a particular jurisdiction to decide to do this or that, however much a minority may object. If there’s really a majority supporting the opposite point of view, they need to get out there and vote. Not sure lawsuits suffice, but I’m no lawyer: CNN tells us “Seven residents in Llano County, Texas, are suing county officials, claiming their First and 14th Amendment rights were violated when books deemed inappropriate by some people in the community and Republican lawmakers were removed from public libraries or access was restricted.” (Link via The Passive Voice.) Well, they obviously got a lawyer to take the case, but . . .
I know there are lots of things we’d all prefer didn’t get too much of an airing, but surely we have to let divergent opinion be heard. A world in which we only hear what we already want to hear will stunt the intellect. No harm, I guess, in a group of academics deploring Oxford University Press’s decision to publish a book by Holly Lawford-Smith on Gender Critical Feminism, even if they are objecting before the book’s published, and thus they have not been able to read it. Opinion can and should be free, and OUP has published books the objectors approve of, so (in some sense) almost has an obligation to publish differing research. A second group made up largely of employees calls however for cancellation of the publication of the book — and this, to my mind, is a step too far. You can’t honestly argue against a particular viewpoint if you don’t allow that viewpoint to be expressed.
The basic problem might seem to be that it’s now so simple to express an opinion and instantly have an audience of thousands hear your rant. Not sure what we can do about this — just learn to accept it, and not overreact is no doubt the only option. In the meantime one source of comfort in this might be the reflection that these book banners are showing a vast respect for the power of the written word. And banning ideas is a pretty difficult thing to achieve. If my own youthful experience is anything to go by, I’d have to reflect that being told not to do something was always a strong motivator to make me want to go to considerable lengths to do that very thing, if only to find out what the fuss was all about. Banning a book may turn out to be a secret marketing weapon!
In indexing this post I find I wrote under this exact heading last year.
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* I am put in mind of a striking event when, as a recent graduate, I was a supply teacher (substitute teacher) at a Catholic secondary school in Middlesex. One boy had done something wrong, so the entire school was gathered in a ring in the playground while the culprit and the biggest boy in the school were put in the middle. We then all watched the big guy beat the bejeezus out of the criminal. But don’t worry — it was all fair and humane — they were given boxing gloves!