How should we think about content moderation at public and school libraries? James LaRue’s book, “On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US,” offers a great springboard to examine the issue within the Colorado context. LaRue previously served as director of Douglas County libraries and currently serves as director of Garfield County libraries, so he peppers his book with regional examples. And book restrictions have become a hot topic in Colorado, as two of my articles over the past year attest.
Let’s start with the title. I like how LaRue turns the tables on the right, members of which usually accuse leftists of “cancel culture.” I see problems on both left and right between unjust firings and attempts to pull LGBTQ-friendly books from library shelves.
Censorship defined
But LaRue immediately gets into trouble with his main title, “On Censorship.” Censorship refers to use of government force to stop people from speaking. So, for example, if a government bans “hate speech” (as the government defines it), on pains of criminal penalties, that’s censorship. The archetypal example is government outlawing a book or newspaper.
Book bans at public libraries can bear similarities to censorship, as such bans attempt to limit the materials to which people have access, but they are not formally examples of censorship. Morally, government is required to not forcibly interfere with people’s speech and indeed to protect people’s rights; it is not required to subsidize and promote speech. Still, generally it is bad to hassle a library to remove content that it has already paid for, just because someone finds the work offensive. What is actually morally offensive is trying to control what other people read and think.
Some crazy libertarians hold that government should not run libraries, because that inherently gets government into the business of deciding which sorts of speech to subsidize and promote. Further, because public libraries depend on tax financing, they require government to force people to finance the promotion of speech that they might find abhorrent. (It’s possible for a library to be open to the public and yet be privately financed.) To force a person to finance the propagation of speech of which the person disapproves pretty straightforwardly violates the person’s First Amendment rights of freedom of speech. But hardly anyone holds the libertarian position on public libraries, and indeed the position widely is regarded as ridiculous if not positively un-American. So let’s move along.
Challenging books
LaRue reports that, between 1990 and 2014 in Douglas County, he “responded to about 250 challenges,” or “public attempts to remove or restrict access to various library resources.” After LaRue started working in Garfield County in 2022, he “faced five challenges” in the first eight months. “Rather than being individual complaints,” he writes, “these were coordinated campaigns—often with an overtly partisan, Republican bias—likely designed to rouse the conservative base in time for the 2022 midterm elections.”
LaRue recounts an incident in Douglas County: “‘Daddy’s Roommate’ (about a man who leaves his wife and child to live with another man) made one patron so upset that they tore up the pages of the book into thirds and threw it on the library floor.” LaRue explains, “We had bought the book because a local patron, whose husband had left her for another man, was trying to find a way to talk about this with her young son. We bought the book at her request to help her.” In response to the vandalism, the library bought six more copies of the book.
LaRue also “once experienced two challenges to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ on the same day.” Both challenged versions, like the original, featured some disturbing content. But, as LaRue points out, although “the parent wants woods without wolves,” “the child needs to know about how to deal with wolves.” Tragically, LaRue adds, some parents “believe that if they just don’t talk about life’s complexities, those complexities will never surface.”
Another challenge came for “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” about a gay wedding. LaRue points out that the focus of the book is on the niece’s “fear that she would lose her special relationship with a beloved family member.” LaRue sensibly disagreed with the claim that the book was somehow inappropriate; had the book involved the wedding of a man and a woman it would have been equally appropriate. LaRue writes that some “library users . . . were grateful to find” the book. He writes, “The library, paid by the whole community, also has to serve the whole community.” LaRue points out that people do not have a right not to be offended.
In the aftermath of the surrounding discussion, one person noted, “We can’t childproof the world. We have to worldproof the child.” And exposure to diverse books, even ones that can be upsetting or that can offend some people’s sensibilities, is a great way to help prepare our children for the world.
Recently the Elizabeth School District placed Toni Morrison’s book “Beloved” on its list of “temporarily suspended books.” LaRue saw challenges to this book, which he defends: “‘Beloved’ isn’t about gratuitous sex, or prurient frolicking. It’s about the very real horrors of slavery, socially sanctioned rape, and systemic dehumanization based on race. The attempt of parents to prevent the teaching of such topics to ‘children’ in their last year of high school—a year before they can serve in the military, marry, or vote—is also a diminishment, an attempt to re-infantilize the young adult. Withholding or canceling these books won’t resolve the legacy of slavery . . . but it might well dump minors at the door of adulthood less well-equipped to make sense of the world around them.”
A ban on bans
Among the interesting stories that LaRue relates is that of the Wellington Board of Trustees (in the town north of Fort Collins) that, in LaRue’s words, “voted to ban banning” in response to efforts to get various books pulled from the library. The Coloradoan has details.
Larue sometimes is sloppy with the facts, as when he discusses the firing of Ward Churchill without mentioning that the former professor plausibly was accused of fraud and plagiarism. Overall, though, the book is solid: short, easy to read, clear-eyed regarding suppression efforts by both left and right, and full of sentences worth pondering. I’ll leave you with another set of these: “There are many problems in America. Here’s something that is not a problem: children reading too much.”
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
