Why do we ban books?

I have been a person who reads my whole life. I love to read books with 30-plus chapters, even if I have to find the time to read because it is what I enjoy.

By now, many news outlets, such as the New York Times and CNN, have reported about the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” (Pantheon, 1986), by Art Spiegelman, being banned Jan. 10 by the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee.

The novel depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, with Jewish people portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats. It was banned due to “inappropriate language” and an illustration of a nude woman.

This is becoming a common theme in schools, in which school boards ban books that cover themes such as the Holocaust, LGBTQ+ people, sexual education and race under the guise of “inappropriateness.”

This censorship even occurs in the Lone Star State.

House Bill 3979, an anti-critical race theory bill that was signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on June 15, 2021, bans teaching materials that cause “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex,” and prohibits from teaching about pivotal historic moments because it makes people uncomfortable. The bill went into effect Sept. 1, 2021.

U.S. history is not pretty.

It is gross, even, to me. However, it is important to learn about how our country came to be so we can refrain from repeating those ugly moments again.

On Oct. 25, 2021, state Rep. Matt Krause (R-Fort Worth) asked the Texas House General Investigating Committee and the Texas Education Agency to review all books in the state’s public schools to stop children from seeing “pornography or other inappropriate content.”

Krause published a list of 850 titles for school board officials to confirm if they carry them. If they did, he demanded to know where the books were and how much money was spent on them, according to an NPR article.

Nearly two-thirds of the titles mention LGBTQ+ people and about 15% provide sexual education information, according to Book Riot.

Krause’s list includes “The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel” (Nan A. Talese, 2019) by Margaret Atwood,  “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2014) by Benjamin Alire Sáenz and even the graphic novel version of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (Hill and Wang, 2016) by Miles Hyman. Other books are about African American and Latinx history.

I understand parents wanting to keep children innocent. I even understand them not wanting children to read graphic material that may be too mature for their age.

But a good way to prevent your children from learning things you believe they are too young for is to actively take an interest in their lives and explain things to them.

I see iPad kids all the time watching things that are way more inappropriate than things discussed in the 850 books on Krause’s list. You let your child watch “Squid Games” and “Big Mouth” but draw the line at a young adult fiction book that involves a gay couple?

If you do not want to read something, do not read it. If you want to stop your child from reading something, help them find something for their age group instead. Do not be a metiche in other kids’ reading habits.