Not Censorship?

Many on the left are in an uproar because parents in Florida now have a right to know what books are being used in schools, and can have inappropriate books removed from the school library.

When I was a high school biology teacher, my school had selected and used the Glencoe Biology textbook. Did that mean my school district was censoring and violating the free speech of other publishers? Of course not.

So the fact that the state has rejected large numbers of textbooks because they are inappropriate doesn’t mean that the publishers are being silenced. They are free to print all of the books they want. Florida schools just aren’t buying them, and that isn’t censorship.

So back to the complaints of censorship from the left. They complain that books like The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison are being “banned.” Read this passage from the book, and you will know why. The following passage describes a father raping his daughter:

The confused mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him, and a bolt of desire ran down his genitals, giving it length, and softening the lips of his anus. Surrounding all of this lust was a border of politeness. He wanted to fuck her – tenderly. But the tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her vagina was more than he could bear. His soul seemed to slip down to his guts and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made – a hollow suck of air in the back of her throat. Like the rapid loss of air from a circus balloon. Following the disintegration – the falling away – of sexual desire, he was conscious of her wet, soapy hands on his wrists, the fingers clenching, but whether her grip was from a hopeless but stubborn struggle to be free, or from some other emotion, he could not tell. Removing himself from her was so painful to him he cut it short and snatched his genitals out of the dry harbor of her vagina.

Like the last “banned” book I reviewed, “Lawn Boy,” this book is not appropriate for any school to have in its library. I’m not saying that the book should be outlawed. I’m saying that schools shouldn’t use tax dollars to make it available for children. I don’t care how many Nobel literature prizes the author has gotten.