Freedom to Read
Versus the M4L Movement
Happy Leap Day. I didn’t realize this was Leap Year until it was Monday, February 26, and I knew I had an appointment on Friday, March 1, and I couldn’t make the timeline make sense in my brain. When I finally looked at the calendar for an explanation and spotted an unlooked-for February 29 in there, I said out loud “oh, it’s Leap Year.” And my partner said, “Well, yes, it’s a presidential election year so of course it’s Leap Year.” Somehow I have lived more than four decades on this planet and never realized these things were related. This is what people mean when they say they learn something new every day.
By a show of hands: How many of us never thought of our right to read what we want as assailable? Well, it is. And that’s not new. In fact, Americans have been banning books since before there was an America. The first “banned book” in the United States is generally considered to be Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, published 1637, a criticism of the Puritan colonial government. Take a look at this beautiful copy sold at Christie’s in 2019. Old books are cool.
Americans specifically have the right to criticize our government, but the Bill of Rights didn’t come along until the eighteenth century, which was too late for Morton who died in 1647 following his imprisonment for sedition.
In 1873, Congress passed a set of laws called the Comstock laws, principle among them being the Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use. This act criminalized using the US Postal Service to transmit any items considered “obscene,” which included contraception, personal letters containing sexual sentiments, and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The problem with Ulysses, specifically, was this. In 1920, The Little Review (a literary magazine) began publishing parts of the novel Ulysses serially. This is a normal thing that people did back then; you can ask Charles Dickens about it. You can’t actually because he’s dead. You will have to take my word for it. Anyway, if you’ve never read Ulysses (don’t), it chronicles the lives of three Dubliners during the course of a single day—June 16, now known as “Bloomsday” after this fact—in a dreadful amount of detail. Ulysses is the Latinized version of the name Odysseus, The Odyssey guy. The idea is that the three Dubliners were like on an odyssey as well but it was their daily lives. The daily lives included using the toilet. Using the toilet is, apparently, obscene. I mean there is also some sexual content, but it’s just funnier to imply Ulysses got banned over the bathroom scene.
So the editors of The Little Review were found criminally liable for distributing obscene material through the mail. Later—in 1933—Random House imported a copy of Ulysses with the intent of having it seized by US Customs, so that they would have grounds to bring a case to the courts for the right to publish works of literary merit even if they contained material considered obscene under the Comstock laws. Hilariously, Customs declined to seize the book at the border and Random House had to send somebody back to the Customs Service with a copy of the book to demand they seize the obscene material.
All of this resulted in the cases United States v One Book Called Ulysses, which Random House won. The ruling did not overturn the Comstock laws, but rather found that Ulysses was not obscene and set the precedent that a literary work must be considered in full, against contemporary standards of obscenity, and in consideration of whether an average person would find it obscene.
This is important because the Comstock laws remain in effect today; it’s still illegal to mail “obscene or crime-inciting matter.” It’s only the definitions of “obscene” and “crime-inciting” that have changed.
But this is not a Shelf Life about mailing reading material via the USPS. I actually love the USPS. Everyone knows this about me.
Today, it’s pretty much accepted that most adults can read whatever we want. There are very few restrictions on what you can read. However, there are movements picking up steam attempting to prevent certain populations from free access to reading material. Children are one of the biggest targeted populations, because frankly they’re the easiest to target. “Won’t someone please think of the children?” Incarcerated adults are another.
The group you’re most likely to have heard of is Moms for Liberty (M4L), a conservative political organization that advocates against any of the following in schools:
Any curricula that mention LGBTQ+ rights or race and ethnicity.
Books that include any mentions of gender and sexuality.
Mask and vaccine mandates.
Books on their chopping block include:
A book about Galileo Galilei, because of its “anti church” message.
Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” because it is “hateful.”
A book about male seahorses because apparently the scientific fact that male seahorses gestate that species’ young simply cannot be tolerated.
Moms for Liberty are quick to point out that they don’t want to ban books. They don’t want to criminalize the publication of these books, or to remove them from bookstores. Instead, they “only” (those are bigtime scare quotes around only) want to remove these books from venues like school libraries, where delicate child eyes could fall upon them.
The tricky thing about kids is this. Parents cannot control what kids read. This is not because of a failure of “parental rights.” It’s not because there are other adults like teachers or school librarians (evil people that they are) whose rights to indoctrinate children exceed the parents’ own. It is rather because
(now this part is important so please pay close attention)
children are people. They are smaller than most other types of people, but they are, nonetheless, people. As a happily childfree person I’m the last lady you’d expect to be advocating for the personhood of children. I don’t especially like spending a lot of time around them but even I cannot deny that children are people.
If there’s one thing I know about people, it’s that people are going to do what they want to do regardless of what anyone does to try and stop them.
For this reason, I suppose, Moms for Liberty—not the organization but the individual moms who buy into this ideology—are not satisfied with merely telling their children not to read these books, or with keeping track of and controlling what their own children read. They want to make sure these books aren’t available to any children in a setting where the parent isn’t present to snatch the offending material away. After all, the best way to ensure kids never question what you tell them is to prevent them receiving information from any source other than you. That means libraries, right, because libraries are where anyone can go to read a book for free, where you don’t need to show an ID or credit card, and where minor children are welcome to govern their own reading choices.
And this is why not only school libraries but also public libraries are targets of M4L’s book bans. They don’t want these books to be available where a child could access them, and the public library is one of those places.
Who pays for the public libraries to operate? The taxpayers. Who pays for the public schools—and the libraries therein—to operate? The taxpayers. These are government funded institutions. When reading material is banned from one of these places, it’s not as simple as a parent saying, “I won’t have this book in my home.” Your home is your castle and you can refuse to admit whatever you want into your home. It’s a different thing when the government says “We won’t make this book available in our institution.”
It’s not really about controlling what their own kids read, obviously. It’s about controlling what everyone else’s kids can read. What all kids can read.
Another population, as I mentioned above, who are vulnerable to book bans limiting their reading material, are incarcerated adults. Like kids—and this should go without saying—incarcerated adults are people. Furthermore, they’re adults. As we already established, adults are pretty much allowed to read whatever they want. Well, not if they’re incarcerated. According to this Axios article from last year,
Prison book bans far exceed school and library book bans, per the report from PEN America, which found "single state prison systems censor more books than all schools and libraries combined."
I can understand how there could be some books out there that prison administrators may consider inappropriate for incarcerated populations. For instance, “How to Build a Shiv to Kill Your CO” or Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. In case that went over your head, the joke is funny because Shawshank Redemption is about sourcing books for a prison library.
But that’s not the books that are being banned from prison libraries. PEN America’s full report, “Reading Between the Bars,” is fascinating and I recommend reading the whole thing if you have time. But the important facet, for the purpose of today’s Shelf Life anyway, is that books are nominally censored from prisons for two reasons—sexual content, or “security”—but many of the books that are censored for those reasons are “scientific, creative, historical, and other forms of literature.” That does not sound like How to Make Toilet Wine or Smuggling Drugs for Dummies to me.
As we learned from watching the charming prison library film The Shawshank Redemption, access to reading material in prison is a way that incarcerated people prepare for their life after incarceration and education during incarceration is an effective way to reduce recidivism.
That starts to make sense when you realize incarceration is profitable for the State and reducing recidivism is, therefore, disincentivized—a financially unsound move for the incarcerator.
Everyone reads for good reasons. There are no bad reasons to read. People read to learn, they read for pleasure and entertainment, they read as a part of their communication with other people, and they read to understand the world around them. These are all good reasons. If anyone can think of a bad reason to read please let me know because I can’t think of one.
Obviously the argument that M4L and others who wish to censor reading material make is not that people read for wrong or bad reasons, but that they might get access to reading material that is wrong or bad for them. That readers might pick up information or ideas from their reading material that their keepers don’t approve.
In a perverse way, it gives me a sense of relief. The Moms for Liberty know that their indoctrination won’t withstand the slightest breeze of contradiction. I think they know that if their kids get access to sources of scientific, social, or historical fact, then all the conditioning they have put their kids through to achieve this narrow, closed-minded worldview is in jeopardy.
And I do love it when a narrow, closed-minded worldview is in jeopardy.
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