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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

They're coming for the libraries, too.

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