People Who Can’t Get Books Banned From Libraries Are Now Hiding Them Or Throwing Them In The Trash

Free Speech

from the just-for-the-sheer-assholery-of-it dept

The “rule of law” folks (who also have a sizable overlap with the “party of free speech“) are at it again. Around the nation, legislators emboldened by the Republican party’s embrace of bigotry have been passing bills banning books (or, worse, subjecting librarians to criminal charges). Almost as often as a law gets passed, it gets sued out of existence, because most courts are more inclined to protect constitutional rights than throw their support behind close-minded people who think everyone should only have access to content they think is acceptable.

So, when the laws fail to survive constitutional challenges and/or fail to gather governors’ signatures, the “rule of law” people decide it’s time to take matters into their own hands. The sheer amount of pettiness on display here is astounding. Rather than respect the viewpoints and content preferences of others, stupid people are doing extremely shitty things to prevent others from accessing the content they’re seeking.

Here’s how that’s going, according to librarians interviewed by Maya Wilkins of the Chicago Tribune:

When the Crown Point Community Library underwent a building project at its Winfield branch, workers had to move the branch’s bookshelves. After they’d been moved, staff found books that had been hidden.

All books that were found had been challenged, said Julie Wendorf, the library’s director and president of the Indiana Library Federation.

“They’re mostly LGBTQ materials that are found under the shelves,” Wendorf said. “It’s quite suspicious that they would only be of that topic matter.”

Yeah, it’s super-weird that the only books being hidden by “patrons” are those they failed to get removed from the shelves lawfully. According to Wendorf, another popular tactic deployed by these terrible people is much less subtle: throwing the books into library trash cans.

And it’s not isolated to Indiana. Librarians are reporting the same activities in other states that have aggressively pursued book bans of LGBTQ+ content (along with historical depictions of US racist activities and policies), such as Texas, Florida, and Iowa.

It goes further than books that have been unsuccessfully challenged. In one library, an ill-willed individual decided to clear the “religion” section of books that didn’t agree with their preferred religion.

In 2023, a patron asked about Christian books, found them near Islamic books and moved more than 30 books throughout the library, either in between or behind shelves.

Yep, that’s the mentality we’re dealing with here in the US. And that’s why people who loudly support Trump and his sycophants scattered around the nation should never have their bad-faith arguments entertained, much less debated. These people have already decided your views don’t matter and that they’re willing to do whatever it takes to ensure no one stumbles across content they don’t like, no matter what age they are. These are ridiculous people that are, despite their mental, moral, and emotional limitations, capable of carrying out the harms the nation’s courts are doing their level best (in most cases) to prevent local governments from committing.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, book bans, censorship, free speech, indiana, libraries