Read Banned Books - Tumblr Posts

Florida and Texas, trying to out-fascist each other again.

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

i am not a fan of book banning for almost any reason (and even then it should be centered more around letting people use their discretion to say “um maybe kids shouldn’t be reading erotica” than “this topic is ugly and opens the door to too many questions so we just shouldn’t talk about it”) but so much of book banning revolves around this very idea, that if a book so much as mentions a difficult topic, we shouldn’t talk about it, rather than the way the topic itself is handled

"this work is problematic because of how it handles [subject]": reasonable premise for media criticism

"this work is problematic because it depicts [subject]": do not pass go do not collect $200 this is, as a general rule, a functionally reactionary and conservative argument