Suzette Baker, Amanda Jones - Time - Imagine that you decided to go to your local library to check out a book but you couldn’t find it on the shelf. You ask the librarian for help locating it, but they inform you it’s not available—not because someone else has checked it out, but because the government has physically removed it after deciding they don’t want you to read it.
This isn’t the plot of a dystopian novel, it’s the reality that the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed in its recent decision to not hear arguments in the book ban case: Leila Green Little et al. v. Llano County. In leaving the Fifth Circuit ruling in place, SCOTUS effectively granted state and local governments in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas the authority to determine what materials you can and cannot read. This means people in these states do not have the same First Amendment rights as the rest of the country. And that should raise alarm for everyone.
In the U.S., efforts to remove books from school and public libraries have existed for many decades, but in the past few years the intensity has escalated. PEN America counted 6,870 instances of book bans last school year, up from 156 challenges to library, school, and university materials just five years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment