Chat & Chew! Beyond Book Banning: the Movement to Control America
Chat & Chew! Beyond Book Banning: the Movement to Control America
Featuring Emily Drabinski of the American Library Association and Nadine Farid Johnson of PEN America
You’ve probably heard the news out of Texas, Missouri, Michigan, Idaho and more— sudden and inexplicable protests against books and demands that they be removed from libraries. And you’ve also probably noticed that the books getting banned seem to have things in common with one another, like the prominence of LGBTQ+ characters, or themes that explore racial justice—or the lack thereof—in America. Could this seemingly “spontaneous” movement represent something more?
Hightower welcomes Emily Drabinski, incoming president of the American Library Association, and Nadine Farid Johnson, managing director of PEN America Washington and and Free Expression Programs, to discuss… and talk about actions you can take to protect your local library.
Links we discussed:
Unite Against Book Bans: https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/
American Library Association: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks
PEN America’s Banned Books resources: https://pen.org/issue/book-bans/
Queer Northshore in St Tammany Parish, LA
Freedom from Religion Foundation’s full list of sexual references in the Bible
Author George M Johnson’s mother testifies before a local board on their behalf
We’re working on a full transcript of the show! We’ll update this page when we have it ready.
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Chat & Chew! Beyond Book Banning: the Movement to Control America
BETWEEN THE COVERS
This obsession with what's between or beneath the covers is unhealthy and unholy. Don't like what I or my friends and their kids read? Then don't open the book--we're not forcing you to read it.
Don't like what I'm under the covers with? (I'm gay.) Then stay out of my bedroom--I'm not forcing you to do as I do. Don't like who I'm under the covers as? (I'm trans.) Then don't touch; for that matter, don't assume you have the right to examine me at all. I for sure don't want to be that near you.
These ultra-right busybodies seem to be covering for some deeply seated terror that the other side is much, much better. A whiff of something leftist is enough to convert someone to socialism. The mere mention of same sex and all those dissatisfied heterosexuals immediately change orientation.
And trans is the most disturbing. It calls up the nagging fear of being insufficiently feminine, pretty. Even worse, the terrible male insecurity around being seen as unmanly, sissy, not hard enough. That there might be more than binary, something beyond an easy either/or, is a slippery slope. Where one's foundational identity crumbles at the very idea of indefinite.
Well, no. All it means is that I have had to carefully consider who I am. That in no way changes anyone else's identity. Nor do I want to--with the possible exception that I wish these right wing folks were self-loving enough not to feel they they have to alter everyone else to feel secure in themselves.
Thanks, Jim, from a retired career librarian. Friends seem fazed after asking what I do in retirement and I reply "Oh, I read books, and I read books...". You've got me thinking I should read more books featuring LGBTQ+ characters (a world I'm just enough acquainted with to know I support them).