November 28, 2023

Holidays bring family together and whenever the conversation starts with, “I don’t want to start an argument but…” an argument is likely to ensue. Because my sister and I have nearly diametrically opposed political views, mine conservative and hers liberal, I guess she felt comfortable in asking my opinion in the defense of what she must see as right-wing, conservative-driven efforts to ban certain books from school libraries. She claimed that this wave of book-banning and censorship was a renewed force of current origin, at least in its intensity and numbers. She declared that nothing good ever came from censorship.

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My sister is a well-educated, well read, (albeit of the New York Times variety) and strongly outspoken woman of the world. Later in her career, she devoted herself to humanitarian causes, often times putting herself in harms way having served in as many as ten war zones over the course of her career in caring for those stricken by conflict and violence. Accordingly, I have a lot of respect and even admiration for her. However, the mystery of how she and I, only four years apart and raised together in a traditional two-parent, lower-middle-class God-loving American family ended up so politically and philosophically different is the head-scratcher.

Book-banning/censorship alone is not sufficiently or fairly examined and understood as a solitary issue. It seems logical that the recent and sudden increase in controversial books in schools didn’t just happen in a vacuum. For some time now, we have been inundated with stories of drag-queen story times in elementary schools, parent-less school “counseling” regarding gender-roles/identity, Unisex bathrooms, secretive and again, parent-free counseling and even potential medical procedures for minors without the input or consent of families. Many examples of radical teachers pushing all varieties of social/sexual agendas have been publicly widespread and if you doubt it, it’s a Google search away.

Quite naturally, what would logically follow would be books in support of such afore mentioned perverse proclivities, (in my opinion) and sexually-charged agendas. It seems likely that the 2021 Loudoun County school district outrage that resulted in a female student being sexually assaulted by a male student “identifying” as a female and the school, trying to cover it up, transferred the assailant to another school where he assaulted again, was the tipping point that made parents nationwide aware, encouraging them to start to question things in their own districts and discover some of the attempted social/sexual psychological engineering that was going on all over the country. Add to this the wave of biological males ruining the competitive nature of female sports by incorrectly declaring their identity and competing against girls and you can understand the outrage of the parents of those hard-working, competitive girls on sports teams that are being forced to compete unfairly and even share their locker rooms with biological boys. The very fact that this is even up for debate signals just how far off course we have drifted as a civil society.

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It seems likely that the increase in the numbers of books that parents across America are trying to get rid of corresponds to recent efforts to divide parents from their children in school.  This results in closer scrutiny, with books that might not have been identified in the past as being problematic now receiving the heightened attention that better informed and more active parents now embrace.

The coarsening of America is not censored from our schools, indeed in some measure it is encouraged. The fact that we are even having an earnest debate about the appropriateness of a book that graphically depicts anal intercourse, oral sex, and any other forms of sexual activity to primary school students, many of whom cannot perform writing, reading, and mathematic basics to any reasonable degree of proficiency, really is telling as to how far we have slipped towards the total breakdown of a human, functioning society.

In closing, I think the short answer to my sister’s inquiry is the fact that recent events have awakened parents and their sudden scrutiny is unearthing books, teachers, practices, policies, and programs that do not match the values of those families and, once seeing this with their own eyes, they’re fighting back and all of that noise is making its way to the ears of all American’s, including hers.

The hypocrisy of liberals who celebrate abortion while abhorring the death penalty, (kill the innocent and spare the guilty), hate guns/cops but love criminals, (make people defenseless, defund police) and encourage the availability of obscene books to young kids while simultaneously embracing the concept of “hate speech,” (debase our children and muzzle your detractors), to these people the word logic can in no way enter a emotionally-driven mind that somehow balances all of that wrong-think.

In that world of ideas based upon emotion and largely devoid of logic, history and experience, these folks are in ideological-lockstep and the fact that this seldom if ever varies, tells you all that you need to know about the herd mentality that make up the vast majority of the liberal movement and makes it easy to predict their goals and agendas as monolithic emotional tripe devoid of logic and godless in nature. Emotional drivel, wrapped in sheep’s clothing.

Image: Carmichaellibrary