this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Libraries

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (2 children)

There are a lot of books at the library I have no interest in reading but I don’t think they should be banned if others in the community are interested in them. Library budgets are low and I can’t imagine librarians are spending money on books that nobody checks out.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This has nothing to do with cost. It's just conservatives trying to oppress minorities. Same as always.

It isn't new, but it gets more aggressive as the decades pass, it seems.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

My point was that if nobody was interested in reading these books then libraries would not be buying them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

The irony of a group called “Mom for liberty” asking to censor libraries…

And why is sex such a bad thing? Why should we ban sex acts from being depicted? The debate is so steeped in religious ideals that some assumptions are just taken for granted.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Through the first eight months of 2023, the ALA tracked 695 challenges to library materials and services, compared to 681 during the same time period last year, and a 20% jump in the number of “unique titles” involved to 1,915.

Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer topped the list, followed by George Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue and the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

At Chapin high school in South Carolina, some students alleged a teacher made them feel “ashamed to be Caucasian” for assigning Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, an open letter to his son about police violence against Black people that won the National Book Award in 2015.

In Fort Royal, Virginia, the county board of supervisors is planning to drastically cut funding for the Samuels public library in response to conservative complaints about books with gay, lesbian and transgender characters.

The governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, signed into law a bill which calls for books depicting sex acts to be removed from school libraries.

Missouri officials announced the state would be leaving the ALA at a time when recent laws limited access for young people to books considered inappropriate for their age.


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