Summary
Rightwing groups across the US are driving a wave of legislation to restrict books in school and public libraries, targeting content deemed “sexually explicit” or “obscene,” often affecting LGBTQ+ and race-related titles.
Texas leads with 31 bills and 538 book bans in the 2023–24 school year.
Proposed laws, like Texas Senate Bill 13, shift book selection power from librarians to parent-led advisory boards.
Critics, including librarians and legal scholars, warn these efforts amount to censorship, risk violating First Amendment rights, and reduce access in underserved communities.
Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said nothing. I am one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the ‘guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself.
-Faber (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451)
Why do they care so much about libraries. it’s not like they or their kids read. How do you get illiterate people excited to ban books. It’s a god damn conspiracy!
Libraries are stores of knowledge. Can’t have that. Educated people aren’t as easy to manipulate.
Right wings lie bout wanting freedom of speech. They just want to sprout racist stuff and other phobic stuff. They treat LGBT like it’s a fetish.
It is a fetish for most of them.
so they are banning the Bible because of the obscene material in it?;
Lol no
Why are links from The Guardian posted so often here?
Are these the ones with blowjobs and things?
Is it not considered pornographic, and if not where do we draw the line, is anything with LGBT in the title fair game?
That country is so fucking stupid its unbelievable
Surely the free speech absolutists will be staunchly opposed. Why, if they weren’t, one could think it was never about free speech and always just about hate…
The “free speech absolutists” just wanted to call black people the N-word, they don’t actually care about the rest.
The “free speech absolutists” just wanted to call black people the N-word,
They are able to say it already (and they still do amongst themselves).
What they wanted is to be able to say it in public without consequences.
And I hope they try
“Bu-but the right wingers promised me that I could say the hard-R N-word yet again, and if people were to call me ‘racist’ for it they’d be jailed for defamation, and they’d also jail feminist video game critics for censoring games!”
Obscene books like the Bible?
I heard there’s one book in there that talks about a pair of sisters who get their father drunk so they can take turns raping him. Are they banning that one?
wow, the bible is fucked up.
You have to go pretty far into the Bible to even get to the first non-incestuous relationship.
Doesn’t it start with one?
For clarity, I’m referring to Cain (?) knobbing his mother.
only one thing for it. Put as much indecent material in the library as possible. Also I used to work at a library and every now and then this like 80 year old dude would come in and say “show me where your dirty books are!” that guy was awesome.
Please support your local library. Even if you just get a card and keep it active, it helps with stats that they use to get more funding.
probably direct support with your time and funding is a good idea, if you can. it certainly looks like federal grants are going away ☹️
So more wasting tax money for posturing and campaigning and not solving any actual problems
I’d call it “wasting tax money perpetuating culture wars as a distraction from the class war; while also making the population dumber, and less inclined to resist feudalism.”
How do they know something is obscene? None of them know how to read.
I’ve yet to discover a conservative “Christian” that possesses even a passing familiarity with their own self proclaimed testaments.
Like seriously, you claim to take your belief seriously, it’s 1 fucking book! It’s not a page turner I grant them, but it’s ONE book.
Unfortunately there’s a website that tells them specific books and passages to challenge.
