The truth about book banning
Conn Carroll
“Books have held a special joy for me from the time I was a child,” Grammy Award-winning artist Pink said when explaining why she was giving away 2,000 books at a concert in Miami, “and that’s why I am unwilling to stand by and watch while books are banned by schools.”
In a later post, Pink, whose 2012 The Truth About Love became a Billboard 200 No. 1 album, elaborated, “The following are some titles of books that have been banned from schools in Florida…. To Kill A Mockingbird, The Hate You Give, Forrest Gump, A Catcher In The Rye, The Hill We Climb, Girls Who Code, Atlas Shrugged, 1984, The Kite Runner, The Bluest Eye, A Wrinkle In Time, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Fault In Our Stars, etc etc.”
These are some good books. Many of them are still must-reads in most high schools today. In fact, both To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank are on Florida’s “Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking English Language Arts” standards.
But wait, how could Florida both ban To Kill a Mockingbird and include it on their best standards list? Something is not right here.
And that something is Pink’s bad facts. It appears the popular singer has been hoodwinked by a far-left activist group called PEN America. That is the group Pink is working with to distribute books on her latest tour.
The reality is that Florida has not banned a single book. Any bookstore is perfectly free to sell any of the books Pink lists above, and many dirtier ones too like Fifty Shades of Grey. What did happen was that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed HB 1069 which does require school boards to establish an open and transparent process to ensure that school libraries do not contain “materials alleged to contain pornography or obscene depictions of sexual conduct.”
So in other words, adults, and even children for that matter, are free to buy Fifty Shades of Grey at their local Barnes & Noble bookstore, but an elementary school library is not allowed to stock it.
Some school boards, particularly Democratic-controlled ones, immediately overreacted, pulling books before any parent actually objected. Collier County Public Schools near Naples, Florida, for example, pulled hundreds of books from their libraries including titles like Forrest Gump, Atlas Shrugged, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. But no parent objected to any of these books. The list was created by “media specialists” employed by the school district intent on generating headlines, not educating children.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The list of books Pink plans to distribute at her concert also exposes her efforts as a total farce. The Family Book by Todd Parr is an illustrated children’s book that has been banned by one school district in Illinois, not Florida. And Amanda Gorman’s claim that her poem “The Hill We Climb” was banned by a Florida school district has been fact-checked as false.
The reality is that some books are inappropriate for school libraries. In addition to the aforementioned Fifty Shades of Grey series, graphically pornographic books like Gender Queer and All Boys Aren’t Blue shouldn’t be in school libraries either. These books have actually been targets for removal from school libraries by parents. But Pink isn’t giving out these titles. Wonder why?