[Craving even more FPM content? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more. Click here to sign up.]

September 22-28 is Banned Books Week, an annual event organized by the American Library Association (ALA) to bring together “the entire book community – librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types – in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.” That sounds perfectly unobjectionable until you realize that Banned Books Week 2024 is actually about the Progressive “book community” uniting to push the normalization of gender ideology and the breakdown of any community standard for obscenity.

Launched in 1982, the event ostensibly is designed to bring national attention to the ongoing threat of censorship, but in fact the focus behind it today is to demonize parents and Right-wing politicians as fascists and book burners for expressing concern about schoolchildren being exposed to shockingly pornographic books available in school libraries. The truth is that not one of those parents or politicians is calling for a book ban – all of the challenged books are merely a click away on Amazon or stocked in local bookstores – but merely to keep this unsuitably adult material out of the hands of children.

But the woke Left does not want parents to have any say in the indoctrination – er, education – of their children, because the Marxist way is to target impressionable young generations with propaganda that drives a wedge between them and their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Cultural Marxist activists posing as educators and librarians are currently engaged in an unprecedented campaign to instill a sexual consciousness in children as young as pre-schoolers, and to confuse them about the nature of masculinity and femininity, as part of the Marxist assault on the nuclear family.

The books featured during Banned Books Week have all been targeted with bans or challenges in libraries and schools. As the ALA explains, “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials.” Revealingly, the ALA considers “any reduction in access to library materials based on an individual or group’s believe [sic] that they are harmful or offensive” to be “an act of censorship.” [Emphasis added]

Last year, the ALA documented a record 4,240 challenged book titles—a 65% surge over 2022 numbers. What might account for that surge? Well, those of you who keep up with the accelerated rise of queer theory, drag queen culture, and the transgender movement will not be surprised to learn that nearly half – 47% – of those titles “represent[ed] the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals.”

In fact, of the Top Ten challenged book titles, seven were challenged for “LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit”: Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Flamer by Mike Curato, Tricks by Ellen Hopkins, and Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan. Let it be noted that these books are not merely “claimed to be sexually explicit” but are sexually explicit.

Of the remaining three – The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews, and Sold by Patricia McCormick – all were also challenged for sexual explicitness. So it seems that all ten were challenged not over some ideological or political objection but because of their inappropriateness for young readers. In fact, it is the Left’s push to make these books available for schoolchildren that is ideologically and politically driven.

The ALA, of course, is yet another cultural institution captured by the far Left and steered toward a Marxist political agenda. It is currently run by President Carolyn Hohl, whose “vision” for ALA is brimming with woke blather like “sustainable,” “welcoming,” and “equitable,” but doesn’t actually offer a specific vision for libraries except to promise that they will “move towards garnering a deep understanding of intersectionality as introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw.” Crenshaw is the Critical Race Theorist known for introducing and developing “intersectional theory,” the study of overlapping social identities under systems of oppression.

So Hohl’s “vision” for the nation’s library system is that it will function as a neo-Marxist, identity politics institution set in opposition to what is perceived to be America’s bigoted, oppressive power structures. Got it.

Hohl’s presidency follows on the heels of last year’s ALA president, avowed radical Emily Drabinski, who crowed after her election, “I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of the ALA. I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity!” So it’s no surprise that the ALA would use Banned Books Week to push a transgressive agenda to dismantle America’s Judeo-Christian morality and bourgeois sensibilities.

President Hohl has stated, “We know people don’t like being told what they are allowed to read, and we’ve seen communities come together to fight back and protect their libraries and schools from the censors.” On the contrary, what people don’t like is having their children exposed to literal pornography – heterosexual or otherwise – in school libraries, but when those people raise their concerns at school board meetings, they are deemed domestic terrorists by the Department of Homeland Security, a law enforcement branch which, under the far Left Biden-Harris administration, targets its political enemies instead of addressing real world terrorist threats like the potential ones streaming over our open southern border.

Americans have a reflexive resistance to the idea of censorship – we are the only country with the First Amendment, after all. But make no mistake: Banned Books Week 2024 is not about protecting important literature like To Kill a Mockingbird or The Grapes of Wrath from government suppression. It is about promoting the divisive, corrosive agenda of gender ideology among children – against the will of their parents – who are far too immature and malleable to be exposed to sexually explicit material.

Again, contrary to the shrill accusations from Democrat leaders and their complicit media allies, no parent or politician is calling for these pornographic books to be removed from bookstores or Amazon. Challenging the placement of obscenity in school libraries is not censorship or banning, much less book burning – it is simply a reasonable demand to keep such books age-appropriate. The only reason one could be against such a commonsense community standard is if one has sinister designs – sexual or ideological or both – on other people’s kids. That’s called grooming.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.