MRC Keeps Pretending Right-Wing-Promoted Book Bans Aren’t Really Book Bans

The Media Research Center has long been in denial that right-wingers seeking to ban a book from a library are book-banners, insisting that any book ban pushed by a right-winger is automatically justified. Tim Graham kept up that narrative in his March 29 column:

The Left is in an uproar. Parents opposed to their indoctrinating ways are forming a resistance movement. One uproar is over books – assigned books in the classroom and available books in the school library. Disagree with the content of the books? You’re for “book bans.”

Technically, this is accurate inside the school, but the leftist press makes it sound like you’re banning books entirely from public view. They get to pose as the defenders of books and “book learning” and as compassionate defenders of the book-reading needs of the “marginalized.”

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This is how the leftist media operate. They are all about channeling outrage about “book bans,” and spend no time explaining the pornographic passages and images that stoke the controversy. It’s all posing, and no disclosing.  

Curtis Houck whined the same day when it was pointed out that conservatives care more about guns than books:

On Wednesday’s CBS Mornings, co-host, Democratic donor, and Obama family friend Gayle King used the normally light-hearted “Talk of the Table” segment to lambaste Americans (and especially gun rights supporters) for “valu[ing] guns over children” and “the lives of fellow human beings” in light of the Nashville school shooting, adding in another veiled shot at conservatives and Republicans that they should stop “banning books” and work to ban “assault rifles”.

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“Guys, they’re banning books in schools,” King bemoaned, ruling “books can’t kill your children,” but “they” are nonetheless “banning some books in schools, but yet, the rules are very different when it comes to guns.”

And there it is. Conservatives are fine with children being slaughtered, but are over their skis in wanting graphic sexual material kept out of schools for young children.

A May 5 post by Clay Waters complained that the “library lobby” was pointing out book bans:

The PBS show Amanpour & Co. went on an aggrieved rant Monday evening over the supposed threat of book banning. Host Christiane Amanpour set up the interview with the president of the notoriously liberal American Library Association, a group always eager to see dangerous book bans coming from the right, while ignoring squelching of both fiction and non-fiction from the left via Amazon, “sensitivity readers,” and posthumous editing.

The library lobby has put out yet another misleading report on “book bans” in America and Amanpour & Co. were ready to spread hysteria:

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Yet peer behind the rhetoric and it’s clear that most book challenges involve parents being concerned about the age-appropriateness of sexually explicit material, often in picture form.

Waters offered no evidence to back up that claim.

Alex Christy issued a similar complaint in a May 17 post:

The cast of CNN Tonight was all in agreement on Tuesday that conservative attempts to “ban books” are “fascist,” similar to Nazism, and worse than the current trend of leftists re-writing books they did not write. At no point could anyone point to a book that was actually banned.

The genesis of the conversation was Salman Rushdie condemning both the attempts to control school library content on the right and revisionism on the left. For, The Atlantic’s James Surowiecki, the revisionism is wrong, but “But I think the bigger thing is the bans on books in school libraries and in schools that– places like Florida, Tennessee, Texas, where some libraries, they’ve talked about shutting down libraries. I think that’s far more consequential and far, far grimmer. So I’m glad he was, went after that.”

Re-writing books is actually “far, far grimmer,” because the original book disappears and sometimes for the dumbest reasons, such as the promotion of gender neutralism. Any book that is removed from a school library can still be accessed elsewhere and in its original state.

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Another reason why lefties re-writing books is far worse is that these conversations rarely touch on the kind sexually explicit books that are being removed while ignoring all the fake news on books like Roberto Clemente biographies.

The link Christy supplied to support his claim of “fake news” about a Roberto Clemente bio being removed actually admitted that the book (along with many others) was removed from one school district’s library pending approval by a “certified media specialist.”