Yet another battle in the political and cultural arena has become a battle over language. The left is demonizing efforts to restrict inappropriate books in schools in Texas and other states by referring to them as 'book bans.' Such a phrase conjures up scary images of Nazis, book-burning, people being arrested or having their homes searched for illegal books. What is actually happening is nothing like that. "If you just say we're only going to allow high schoolers to see this graphic book, it's not something elementary school kids should see...to the left, that's a book ban, and they count it as a book ban," says Raheem Williams, policy analyst with the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE).
Williams exposes this effort in a new column for the Federalist, where he points out it's not just left-wing activists accusing conservatives of book bans, but many media outlets are echoing the claim. "The media goes around running stories saying this book has been banned, this book has been banned," he tells KTRH. "And it's like no, it's just restricted to an age-appropriate audience."
At the same time the left and sympathetic media outlets are whining about so-called book bans, some public libraries that hosted drag queen story time turned away Christian actor Kirk Cameron when he tried to promote his faith-based children's books. "They don't care when Christian authors or conservative authors are shut out of schools and public libraries," says Williams. "There's no fuss over at CNN or MSNBC about that."
The bottom line, according to Williams, is that placing age restrictions on publicly-funded materials in a specific setting is not a 'book ban.' "It's perfectly fine for parents to say hey, I don't want my children to see this, and I don't want my tax dollars going to disseminating pornographic materials to children," he says.