The Left-Wing Book Banning Lie

The Nazis burned books.

You might have heard those words uttered at a school board meeting recently. Or perhaps they were in a newspaper op-ed or social media post concerning the sexually explicit content parents are finding in government-run schools.

The point seems to be as follows: The Nazis burned books; some parents are uncomfortable with schools giving their children books that depict children having sex; ergo those parents are like Nazis.

This rhetoric is false and despicable. The people who use it should be dismissed as utterly unserious hysterics, yet on many school committees such phrases pass for thoughtful dialogue.

Such incendiary rhetoric is used to draw a false equivalence between totalitarian book burning and parents asserting their constitutional right to control the health and education of their children.

There is no equivalence.

On the one hand, you have a central government carrying out an evil conspiracy to delete a culture and control the flow of ideas.

On the other hand, you have parents expressing love for their children, trying to protect their children.

The distinction that appears to be lost on those who invoke Nazi book burning in order to score political points is the distinction between “banning” a book and declining to proactively put that book in children’s hands.

Currently, Maine’s schools are using taxpayer resources to proactively put into children’s hands books that contain explicit sexual depictions, including at least one book that contains cartoon images of children having sex.

Liberal activists seem very, very keen on keeping those books in front of children for reasons I do not entirely understand.

But many parents feel differently. Many parents would like public schools to refrain from putting pornographic material in their children’s schools. Other parents would merely like an “opt out” system that allows their children to be protected from explicit material at schools. For this meager request, they are compared to Nazis.

Bear in mind, not one Maine parent has called for laws prohibiting the sale of these books.

Take for example the Mt. Ararat school system in Topsham. A liberal activist at a school board meeting this week invoked the “Nazi book burning” line.

Less than two miles from where she made that claim, Sherman’s Maine Coast Book Shop has a table with supposedly “banned” books on sale. To my knowledge, no jackbooted thugs have descended upon Sherman’s. Anyone in Topsham who wanted to see cartoon images of children having sex could drive over to Sherman’s and purchase a copy of Gender Queer toot suite. The same probably applies to every book store in the state of Maine, not to mention online retailers.

But the book is banned?

The plain truth is those who invoke the “Nazis burned books” line are using a viciously false comparison to malign the character and intentions of those with whom they disagree about school policy. The only people who would invoke such a comparison are either stupid or dishonest — or both. That they would do so bears more on their character than any of the parents at the school meeting expressing a more traditional or conservative view of the role of pornography in schools. It is incumbent upon those who would purport to be leaders in our communities to regard these people with an appropriate level of skepticism, considering they clearly have diminished capacity for thought.

For parents interested in protecting their children from the left-wing political experiments that have come to dominate our government-run schools, all that is required is a little courage, and the clarity to see through the false and nasty allegations lobbed against them by porn-loving progressives.