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Comment by aszantu | Hacker News Reader

tapped out at "Motivated by bigotry", good luck with whatever you're fighting for

From "Of Mice and Men" to "Maus" to "any book even slightly uncritical of LGTB youth" every book ban has been motivated by bigotry.

They may cloak their bigotry in morality or patriotism or whatever but it's still bigotry.

People are often surprised to learn one of those famous Nazi book burning photos was of the collection at the era's equivalent of a queer center. That fact is rarely conveyed along with the narratives about censorship that go with it.

It's an example of how even being factual can be misleading. It's a fact that they were Nazis doing censorship, but the facts that are omitted reveal a lot about who's sharing it: either they don't know, or they don't want you to know.

I wonder if they included that pretty much irrelevant book banning bit at the beginning to prove their point about people being unable to concentrate long enough to actually read anything? Nah, probably not.

If you had read further, it was mainly about a bunch of other stuff. I can't really remember what though, so I'm proving their point too.

Not banning books?

Which, at least in modern history, has always been fueled by bigotry? I'm not sure that was a super opinionated take considering the subject, and I'm not sure I can think of another motivating factor unless you are scared of knowledge in general. The Church attacking Galileo was bigotry. It is kind of a thing.

Do you feel there are other good-faith reasons that justify these efforts?

Are you just frustrated at hearing that word?

Galileo was like an employee who publicly and loudly called the CEO of the most powerful NGO in his country and that his company got rules and procedures from, in the parlance of our times, a fucking idiot. Bigotry wasn’t the issue.

There's a difference between banning things (including books) for use in schools and the federal government declaring certain books illegal. We are dealing mostly with the former here. California doesn't want its schools reading Huck Finn and To Kill a Mocking Bird, Florida doesn't want its schools reading Gender Queer. Anyway, that's all mostly a red herring. There's nothing stopping kids in either state from going to a public library to check them out and read them.

They're coming for the libraries, too.

> There's a difference between banning things (including books) for use in schools and the federal government declaring certain books illegal.

Perhaps. But there is a law in Florida making it a felony for the teacher to have that book in the classroom.

That does seem heavy handed. But think of it this way - how would you feel if your elementary schooler's teacher had a prominent copy of "Mein Kampf" in their classroom and told any kids who enquired about it to read it when they were older because it is one of their favorite books? I personally wouldn't have a problem with it since I know that simply reading a book does not a Nazi make. But some parents might understandably object to that and agitate for laws of the land to ban that. And if you are highly religious as Florida (apparently) is, books like "Gender Queer" teach principles that are diametrically opposed to your religious beliefs (namely that the nuclear family is God's approved way of rearing a family, gender is not a social construct but an immutable piece of identity ingrained into your soul, etc.)

> how would you feel if your elementary schooler's teacher had a prominent copy of "Mein Kampf" in their classroom and told any kids who enquired about it to read it when they were older because it is one of their favorite books? I personally wouldn't have a problem with it since I know that simply reading a book does not a Nazi make.

There's a difference between espousing a principle of "the more you read, the better your education", and "Mein Kampf is my favorite book".

Given how badly it is actually written, and the central theme is "Adolf Hitler: How I Became An Antisemite", I'd wager that the union of people who see it as a favorite book AND are not neonazi antisemites is almost infinitesimally small.

If the books are banned in school, if teachers are forbidden from mentioning them, do you think the number of kids who know of their existence to go up, or down?

That's not to mention that, emboldened by their success in school libraries in some areas, these same people are now going after public libraries, too.

there's probably reasons to ban these books. Banned because of bigotry doesn't really go deep there and it's trying to prime my opinion is what I believe.

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