From the Editor: Book Bans Stopped, for Now
Book banners aren't going away. Realizing that, and not getting distracted by their unserious complaints and arguments, is key to addressing the serious educational challenges we face.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Virginia’s book banners were dealt a defeat this week when the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) issued its report, “School Library Book Removals in Virginia.”
The bottom line finding? Using §22.1-16.8 of the Code of Virginia as a legal basis for removing books from school libraries is a fundamental misunderstanding of the code.
That conclusion may have surprised the small cohort of people in Spotsylvania, Hanover, Goochland, Rockingham, and Madison counties — where 75% of all book bans occurred in Virginia between 2020 and 2025 — who felt they had a winning hand.
It surely didn’t surprise the vast majority of people who have followed this latest book-banning craze. As the Advance and other responsible media outlets have been reporting since at least 2023, §22.1-16.8 of the Code of Virginia does not permit removal of instructional materials from school libraries.
Enjoy the short-term victory; but realize that the book banners will be back.
Acid Reflux
Book-banning has a long history in America. The challenge is understanding why it keeps returning.
Perhaps a medical example will help illustrate the problem.
By their very nature, book bans are meant to inflict damage on their hosts — in this case, schools and libraries. Damage to hosts is generally caused in one of two ways: either by acute conditions or chronic conditions.
Acute conditions, like a viral or bacterial infection, come on suddenly and once defeated generally no longer harm the host. Were book banning acute, the JLARC report would be the end of the discussion.
Over the past half-century, however, book banning has proven itself more a chronic condition, like acid reflux, which returns over and again to do its damage.
Solutions to address it improve, but the condition itself adapts and adjusts and re-emerges, often in a worse way.
Last week’s JLARC report, therefore, is only another in a long line of antacids treating a symptom — book banning. The source of the chronic condition still exists.
An Unserious Response to a Serious Challenge
Book bans will keep flaring up because those who push them are focused on two broad movements:
School Choice: A widespread, multipartisan effort that includes policy changes like rewriting the current laws for funding public education so that the state can tie educational funding to individual students or create educational choice programs through vouchers.
Shifting Public Learning from Education to Indoctrination: This is a movement committed to transitioning public education to a system aligned to a narrow, often evangelical, worldview whose point is to indoctrinate as opposed to educate.
It’s only in the latter category that book banners find natural allies.
The former has been a cornerstone of the education reform movement since the 1980s. And its movers are not limited to the right.
Surveys of the inner-city poor, who typically vote Democratic, typically show these people support school choice. In addition, school choice has found a home among a number of progressive institutions and thinkers. (For just some examples of progressives supporting school choice and vouchers, see Chad Altman, Bruno Manno, and Rachel Canter.)
In the school-choice world, book banners are hangers-on — and often unwelcome ones — using school choice and vouchers when it suits their needs, but staying far away from the more-serious conversations that underlie the movement.
That’s because even were the U.S. educational system to move to a robust school-choice model, the book banners would not be satisfied.
The reason? Public dollars are still flowing to institutions that give airtime to ideas and theories book banners viciously oppose.
It’s only in the realm of converting public schools from centers for education to centers for indoctrination that book banners find their allies. And nowhere have we witnessed a more flagrant effort to replace education with the equivalent of religious indoctrination than in Oklahoma.
There, teachers are being forced to incorporate the Bible into lessons (a bridge too far even for some religious conservatives), and the state is working to funnel public dollars to explicitly religious schools — a move that recently failed at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Advocates of this approach, along with book banners, also have a natural ally in Donald Trump, who complains vociferously about “radical leftist” indoctrination, and responds by forcing radical right-wing indoctrination and — not surprisingly — banning books.
‘Unserious’
Book banning is, in a word, “unserious.” And those who support it are unserious, too. They exist not to solve problems, but to force narrow, poorly-thought-out agendas.
The only thing that will quell book banners is the total subjugation of public life to the narrow, fear-filled world from which they spring.
Neither JLARC nor any other law will put a stop to extremists whose only solution to vexing problems is banning and burning books.
It’s important, therefore, to remember that battles with book banners are sideshows. They’re a chronic problem in a free society. Every moment they detract from the serious issues we face is a victory for the book banners.
Serious adults know that dealing with chronic conditions is a part of life. Popping a few antacids won’t make the problem go away, but it suppresses the chronic condition so it can’t do more damage and allows us to get on with the work at hand.
So let the vast majority of us take our medicine and get on with the important work that needs to be done in education.
Otherwise, the book banners win.
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"I'm a soldier of freedom in the army of the man
Ah we are the chosen, we're the partisan alright
Well the cause it is noble and the cause it is just...."
Ride Across the River, Dire Straits.
Ah, yes. THEY are bad. WE are good.
"If God before us, who can be against us?"
If only it were true.
For someone who demands conversation as the only solution, the writer sure does denigrate those who disagree with him. They are unserious? Therefore not worthy of consideration from good folk?
Hear me out.
1st, although, in general, I am against book banning, I can see value in not giving sexually explicit or gratuitously violent material to primary school children. And I also respect other people's religion enough to consider it their right to raise their children as they see fit. To an extent.
Determining that extent, and how we go about that, are both worthy of serious debate. Automatically dismissing those with whom we may disagree as "unserious" hardly seems a foundation for healthy debate or developing consensus.
And just for the sake of argument, what about those times when we are the censors?
Does that ever happen? Or are we "the chosen", who are always right?
Now please understand, that though I would love to have seen Tenochtitlan preserved in all of its glory, that does not mean that I support human sacrifice. But I rue the loss of the Aztec capital, as well as the gold idols of the Mayas. Destroyed in the name of the righteous. (And also for mind boggling profit, but I'm sure that was just a fortuitous coincidence, right?)
And as someone with a socialist bent, I certainly am not a fan of the slave labor used to build the pyramids (or Washington DC, Richmond, or Fredericksburg for that matter).
But that does not mean I am happy that the Library in Alexandria in Egypt was destroyed. You can value and appreciate art without agreeing with the culture of the artist. I know I try to.
A bad idea should be argued and discredited, but not suppressed. That's not freedom of thought, merely replacing one boss for another.
And yet, a few years ago, many around here cheered when a governor, originally from New York, woke up one morning and arbitrarily decided that the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a legal and lawful organization, could no longer have their chosen emblem on their license plate.
How is that different? What gave him the right?
These same folks totally understood when a Mayor in Richmond ordered a statue not only removed from honor, which he could do. But also they understood when he decided to have it destroyed, though others offered to give it a home. Or when a Charlottesville City Council ordered another one melted rather than saved.
Censorship is serious in a truly free society. In all it's forms. Not just the ones that suit us personally. If we don't defend rights for everyone, then we defend them for no one.
At least with the "book bans" it's not like a determined child cannot do as Stephen King suggested and immediately go to the public library and get the same book. Whereas, once art is destroyed, it's gone forever.
So maybe before we get all high and mighty about how those on the right use such tactics, we might want to look at the actions of those on the left. And take these actions seriously, regardless of who comes up with them.
I wonder if the following words might be applied to those who destroyed those things?
If we substituted the word "censorship" for the specific type of censorship mentioned. Would the writer feel the same way?
I don't know. Food for thought.
Censorship is, in a word, “unserious.” And those who support it are unserious, too. They exist not to solve problems, but to force narrow, poorly-thought-out agendas.
The only thing that will quell censors is the total subjugation of public life to the narrow, fear-filled world from which they spring.
Is it different, if WE do it?
Hmmm.....