Ban books and they’ll return more powerful

There’s a line in “Star Wars” that resonates with many people even after 45 years. When Obi-Wan Kenobi faces off in a light saber battle against Darth Vader, he warns: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

It’s a powerful line that sets up the subsequent films in the franchise, but it’s something that could also apply to the books we read. The effort to ban books from library shelves, schools and other places has found a renewed strength in 2022 as self-righteous arbiters who think they know what is right and pure for the rest of society to read.

Gay characters? Oh, no. We can’t have them.

That book has a character who is Black? Latino? Gasp. Where are my pearls so I can clutch them?

A story where Christian faith is questioned and put to the test? Must have been written by heathens who pre-ordered their ticket to hell.

It sounds like I’m describing some policies laid out in Russia or China, where human rights are curtailed. Sadly, this is happening in hometown America, where we love our freedom of speech (cited in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment) and will blow off anyone’s buns who try to infringe on our rights (guaranteed in the Second Amendment) — and it’s getting worse.

Pen America released its report “Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bands Threaten Freedom and Students’ First Amendment Rights” in April, and it showed over 2,500 instances of books being banned in schools, with Texas accounting for 30% of those instances. However, it happens in Wisconsin, too, with around 50 cases being cited in schools alone.

Recent reports show book bans aren’t in any danger of stopping. The American Library Association is reporting 681 documented attempts to ban or restrict books in schools, colleges and public libraries just in the first eight months of 2022. Note that it’s documented attempts. How many books are being pulled in shadow and secrecy because one or two people find them offensive, oftentimes claiming offense without actually reading said books?

Going back to the Pen America report, it cited that 41% of the banned titles involve LGBTQ themes or characters. Another 40% feature protagonists who are not lily white in skin color, and more than 20% of the titles address racism. At least 40% of the bans are due to political pressure designed to restrict teaching or learning.

Those are the combined cases, but then there are some individual stories that should curl your hair. Take a skip across Lake Michigan to the state that bears its name. Jamestown Township voted in August to defund its only library because it had books with LGBTQ themes, cutting its budget by 84%, about $245,000. That sounds like a death knell, but then a GoFundMe campaign raised the money lost, including a $50,000 donation from famed author Nora Roberts.

The Associated Press reported that the public library in Ridgeland, Mississippi, got $110,000 of its funding yanked after the town’s mayor said that LGBTQ books in the facility offended him as a Christian. That’s when the fur flew, literally, as furries — writers, artists and role players who dress up in costumes depicting wolves, cats and other animals — jumped in and held fundraisers to help the library recoup some of what was lost.

The list goes on, including two school board members in Virginia who suggested taking the books they were banning and holding a public burning of those books “so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

Yes, this is happening in America, land of the free. Instead of using common sense and not entering a cave where a wild bear may be sleeping, folks are suggesting we should kill the bear and display its pelt like a trophy in order to protect the public good.

Once upon a time, it was easy to ban books with efforts to bring them back facing an uphill battle. However, that was before knowledge became digitized. Now, the Brooklyn Public Library has announced a campaign called “Books Unbanned” that allows young people across the country to apply for a free library card that allows them access to the library’s eBook catalog. Other libraries and bookstores are putting “banned books” on display for all to see as Banned Books Week is underway this week.

At some point, you would think people wanting to yank books off of shelves to give up the ghost, considering the techniques can be traced back to colonial days, but it just proves that those people do not have the benefit of book knowledge if they don’t realize that stories are everywhere, in dozens of formats. When you pluck one off the shelves, just like weeds, others come to take their place.

At the same time, making a spectacle of pulling books, threatening to roast them like marshmallows or announcing that library funding will be yanked has only served to galvanize people in communities who are willing to put out the cash to counter the bigots and racists in public office. Not only that, people like to shake up the status quo, and when a book is banned, people will go out and buy the book just to see what the fuss is about.

So go ahead. Ban the books. They’ll just come back more powerful than you can possibly imagine.